Trump calls on Barr to ‘ act fast’ against Biden
President Trump on Tuesday called on Attorney General William Barr to take action before election day against his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, over his son’s foreign work, an extraordinary attempt to pressure the government’s chief law enforcer to help him politically.
The president made the remark during an interview with “Fox & Friends,” after days of caustic criticism of Biden, the moderators of the presidential debates, the news media and, increasingly, Barr. He recently said the attorney general would go down in history “as a very sad, sad situation” if he did not indict Democrats like Biden and former President Barack Obama.
“We’ve got to get the attorney general to act,” Trump said Tuesday when asked whether he wants to see investigations into unverified information about Biden and his son, Hunter, that the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, claims he recently obtained. Giuliani, who has made a range of outlandish and false assertions in an effort to damage the president’s rivals and critics, has refused to provide news outlets with the information he claims to have.
Trump called on Barr to appoint a special prosecutor or similar official, saying: “He’s got to act. And he’s got to act fast.”
“This is major corruption, and this has to be known about before the election. And, by the way, we’re doing very well. We’re going to win the election.”
A spokesman for Biden declined to comment.
Critics have accused Barr on a number of occasions of intervening on issues to help Trump politically. But for the president to publicly call on him to take action against a political opponent was remarkable, especially two weeks before a presidential election. On Monday, Trump repeatedly called Biden “a criminal.”
“He is sounding desperate,” said Charles Fried, a Harvard Law professor who was solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “He’s been urging the attorney general in several ways to investigate his political opponents and to somehow validate his preposterous charges of criminality.”
“And even as loyal a henchman as Barr seems to have been able to draw the line somewhere — and it’s driving Trump crazy,” Fried added.
Trump’s comments come less than a year after he was impeached over another effort to compel an investigation of
Biden and his son by the government of Ukraine in return for U. S. military aid. Asked after his February acquittal by the Republican Senate what lessons he had learned, Trump responded that Democrats were “crooked” and “vicious” and that he should not have been impeached.