While we’re at it, impeach Barr too
The die is cast. After extensive investigation, leaders of the House of Representatives have decided that President Trump should be impeached on two counts: abuse of power and obstruction of congress.
The stage is set. Trump will be impeached by the House before Christmas. And should be. Nobody, not even Trump’s most suck-up Republican supporters in the House, can dispute the facts. President Trump abused his powers in the way the Founding Fathers feared most: inviting a foreign power to intervene in an American election in order to help his own political agenda, and then attempting to prevent Congress from fulfilling its constitutional obligation of impeachment.
Of course Democrats must impeach Trump. They can’t not impeach him. By not acting — or waiting until voters decide the issue themselves in November 2020 — Democrats would only be encouraging Trump to invite more foreign governments to meddle in our election process. China? Czechoslovakia? North Korea? No way.
The only problem with the impeachment process is: It doesn’t go far enough. Trump’s not the only one to abuse the powers of his office. So has, on multiple occasions, Attorney General William Barr, who’s turned the nonpartisan, independent Department of Justice into little more than an arm of the Trump reelection campaign.
Last week was the second time Barr has lied to the American people about an official Department of Justice report. For months, Trump crowed that a DOJ investigation would prove the FBI investigation into his dealings with Russia in 2016 was a political “witch hunt” launched by anti-Trump, proClinton operatives inside the FBI.
Oops! That long-awaited report by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded just the opposite. Even though the FBI made several errors along the way, Horowitz discovered there was more than enough evidence of suspected collusion between Trump campaign aides and Russian operatives to justify an investigation. Indeed, the FBI would not have been doing its job had it NOT launched an investigation. Directly repudiating Trump, Horowitz found zero evidence of political bias within the FBI.
But you’d never know that from the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Instead of standing up for his own agency, Barr denounced the report’s findings and joined Trump in smearing the FBI, the world’s premier law enforcement agency, as nothing but a Democratic Party front. Barr also repeated his claim that the FBI “spied” on the Trump campaign, even though Horowitz told the Senate Judiciary Committee he found no evidence of spying.
Barr, remember, earlier pulled the same trick upon the release of special counsel
Robert Mueller’s report, claiming Mueller found no evidence of obstruction of justice — when the report detailed 10 instances of possible obstruction of justice by Trump.
“The AG at that point made just a calculating decision to benefit Trump instead of looking at what would benefit justice and what is fair,” Ed Chung, vice president for criminal justice reform at the Center for American Progress, told me on The Bill Press Pod. “That is questionable and honestly disqualifying.”
And these are just two of many occasions in which Barr’s tried to out-Trump Trump.
In an Oct. 11 speech at the University of Notre Dame, Barr echoed Trump in accusing “secularists” of leading the “organized destruction” of religion. In a more recent speech to the Federalist Society, he asserted the absolute power of the executive branch and characterized any legitimate opposition to Trump as an effort to overturn the 2016 election.
But, of course, the most incriminating evidence that Barr is nothing but Trump’s top toady came from the president himself, when, in that infamous July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Trump suggested that Zelenskiy talk to Barr about digging up dirt on Joe Biden — thereby proving that Barr, whose job is to defend the Constitution, was instead “in the loop” with Trump, fully engaged in his campaign to undermine the Constitution.
Article 2, Section 4, of the Constitution states that the president, vice president and “all civil officers of the United States” shall be subject to impeachment for abuse of power. That clearly includes Cabinet members. Yes, the House should impeach Donald Trump. But it shouldn’t stop there. It must impeach Bill Barr too.
Tribune Content Agency