Barr takes swipe at Trump over tweets, influence
President’s intervention make it ‘impossible’ to do job, attorney general says
WASHINGTON— In an extraordinary rebuke of U.S. President Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr said Thursday that Trump’s attacks on the Justice Department had made it “impossible for me to do my job” and asserted that “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody.”
Barr has been among the president’s most loyal allies and denigrated by Democrats as his personal lawyer, but he publicly challenged Trump in a way that no other sitting cabinet member has.
“I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody,” Barr told ABC News. “And I said, whether it’s Congress, newspaper editorial board or the president, I’m going to do what I think is right. I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.”
Barr’s remarks were aimed at containing the fallout from the department’s botched handling of its sentencing recommendation for Trump’s longtime friend Roger Stone, who was convicted of seven felonies in a bid to obstruct a congressional investigation that threatened the president.
Trump’s criticisms “make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we’re doing our work with integrity,” Barr said.
He added, “It’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases.”
People close to the president said they were caught off guard by the interview.
Monday, hours after prosecutors recommended a judge sentence Stone to seven to nine years in prison, Trump attacked their request as “horrible and very unfair” and a “miscarriage of justice.” The next day, Barr and other senior department officials intervened to lower the recommendation.
The episode ignited a firestorm among rank-and-file lawyers at the Justice Department. While the officials blamed the original filing on a miscommunication and said they had intended to correct it even before Trump assailed it, four of the prosecutors working on the case withdrew. Career prosecutors began to express worry that their work could be used to settle political scores.
Trump’s opponents escalated their accusations of inappropriate influence when Trump congratulated Barr for his decision to step in and ease the sentencing recommendation for Stone. “Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought,” Trump tweeted.
The president also accused the prosecutors who had secured a conviction against Stone of engaging in an “illegal” investigation. He incorrectly accused Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is presiding over the Stone trial, of placing his former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, in solitary confinement. Manafort, who was convicted of monetary fraud in a case that grew out of the special counsel’s investigation, at one point had a jail cell to himself, but he was not in solitary confinement, and Jackson was not involved in his placement. And Trump compared the Stone case to the Russia investigation led by the special counsel, Robert Mueller. “Even Bob Mueller lied to Congress,”
Trump said, without evidence.
Trump reiterated his complaints Thursday morning, claiming in a tweet that the Stone jury forewoman had “significant bias,” his first rhetorical assault on a juror. He was responding to a Fox News report that the forewoman was an anti-Trump Democratic activist.
“What they did to Roger Stone was a disgrace in terms of everything, right from the beginning,” Trump later said in a radio interview with Geraldo Rivera.
Barr quickly became one of Trump’s trusted advisers after becoming attorney general last February — a reversal of the tense relationship that Trump had with Barr’s predecessor, Jeff Sessions.
Trump soured on Sessions after he recused himself from oversight of the Russia investigation. Their toxic relationship cast a political shadow over the department and strained dealings between the department and the White House.
Tensions eased when Barr arrived and embraced some of the most divisive aspects of Trump’s agenda, often serving as a polished and articulate defender of the president against accusations of abuse of power.