ATTORNEY GENERAL STAYS OUT OF FRAY, RESISTS PLEA TO GO BEFORE CAMERA
For a while at least, he seemed to have found his Roy Cohn, a lawyer to defend him against his accusers and go after his enemies. But the relationship between President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr may be growing more complicated with the rising threat of impeachment.
Rather than publicly join the fight against House Democrats pursuing the president, Barr has remained out of the fray, resisting requests by intermediaries from Trump to go before the cameras to say no crime had been committed. While Barr exonerated the president in the spring at the end of the Russia investigation, he has been more reticent in the current matter.
The reluctance hints at a new distance between the two men, according to people who have spoken with them. Trump, angry with his coverage, is aggravated with Barr for urging him to release a reconstructed transcript of the telephone call with Ukraine’s president at the centre of the impeachment drive. For his part, Barr was bothered that Trump on that call lumped him together with Rudy Giuliani, the president’s private lawyer, like
■ interchangeable parts of his personal defense team.
The two remain on much better terms than Trump was with his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, whom he repeatedly berated in public for not protecting him from the Russia investigation and eventually fired. The president has
United States President Donald Trump has said he’s considering releasing the transcript of an April call he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. He said if House investigators want to see a summary of the April 21 call, he’s “happy to give it to them.”
That call came three months before the July 25 call that sparked the impeachment inquiry into his efforts to push Zelenskiy to investigate his political rivals.
Trump on Friday also dismissed the significance of the impeachment inquiry testimony that has been released so far as he left the White House for a trip to Georgia.
He says, “No one seems to have any first-hand knowledge” and claims that, “Every one of those people canceled themselves out.”
Crimes and misdemeanours
But the impeachment debate seems to be testing those ties as House Democrats investigate whether Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanours by using his office to pressure Ukraine to provide incriminating information about former vicepresident Joe Biden and other Democrats. The Justice Department concluded there was no campaign finance violation, but Barr has not gone beyond that.
“The easiest read of this is, yes, there’s a limit,” said Harry Litman, who served as a deputy assistant attorney general under President Bill Clinton. “Yes, he will push the envelope, but if it’s not plausible to say there’s no crime, he won’t do it.”
Trump on Thursday angrily denied a report in The Washington Post, which was confirmed by the New York Times, that he wanted Barr to hold a news conference to say that the president had broken no laws, only to be rebuffed by the attorney general.
In a Twitter post, Trump called the Post’s article “pure fiction”, adding: “We both deny this story, which they knew before they wrote it. A garbage newspaper!”