Slate "William Barr Thinks Donald Trump Is Above the Law"

[NRaleighLiberal]

In his testimony before Congress, the attorney general is again repeating the line that the president’s frustration justifies all his actions.
By DAHLIA LITHWICK

MAY 01, 20192:30 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/william-barr-donald-trump-media-defense-obstruction-of-justice.html

When Attorney General Bill Barr gave a press conference in advance of his release of the Mueller report on April 18, the most shocking moment came when he claimed that the president’s attempts to curtail the Mueller investigation were justified because the investigation had annoyed him. “The president was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” Barr said.

At the time, it was stunning how deliberately Barr seemed to be very specifically appropriating President Donald Trump’s extralegal talking point about blaming the press and the president’s enemies for the president’s conduct. As my colleague Mark Joseph Stern noted that day, this wasn’t a legal defense. It was nothing short of the claim that if the president feels harassed, it isn’t illegal to stop an investigation. As Stern put it:

Barr’s message here is simple: Trump is the real victim. The victim of the media and leaks. The victim of excess scrutiny and oversight. The victim of what Barr appears to believe was an overly intrusive investigation conducted by overzealous “federal agents and prosecutors.” All of Trump’s lying, his interference, his efforts to publicly discredit the probe, his public assault on Mueller—all of it is excusable, Barr implied, because the probe found “no collusion.” Indeed, Barr writes off Trump’s campaign against the investigation as a perfectly understandable effort to maintain his innocence. His acts were not obstructionary; they were noble.

That defense was shocking not simply because it had nothing to do with the legal questions of conspiracy and obstruction before Mueller and Barr, but also because it seemed to have explicitly adopted and accepted the Trumpist worldview that holds any attempt at oversight or investigation deemed by the president to be unjustified harassment is illegitimate. This is, by the way, pretty much the same legal theory being invoked this week to reject the authority of congressional oversight and subpoenas. As Steve Vladek observed this past weekend, the defense that absolutely everything is a witch hunt and thus not legitimate is not a specific constitutional claim. It is, however, a recipe for a constitutional crisis.

This now appears to be a central tenet of the legal strategy Trump and his surrogates are pushing forward, though. At his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday morning, Barr seems to have again blamed the existence of a witch hunt against Trump for virtually everything Trump later did to put a stop to it. The press was again cited as the reason he rushed out his initial, erroneous summary of the report, as was the public’s “high state of agitation.” Barr even claimed that it was the press coverage of the initial Mueller report summary that troubled Mueller, rather than Barr’s own letter downplaying the report’s findings. Barr testified that Mueller told him “the press reporting had been inaccurate.” And yet, in Mueller’s March 27 letter objecting to Barr’s characterization of the report (which just became public on Tuesday) there is NOTHING to suggest that Mueller thought it was the press that got it wrong.

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last paragraph

We know that Donald Trump hates the media, and he hates being criticized, and he believes that his own suffering justifies all of his actions. We’ve known that for a long time. But for the attorney general to expressly adopt the view that the president can’t obstruct justice if he’s doing it because the press is annoying him is an appalling next step in the descent into establishing an imperial presidency, unchecked by either Congress or a free media. Every president believes the media gives him a raw deal. Barr just put the Justice Department’s imprimatur on the claim that such feelings put the president above the law.


whole thing is worth reading - see the link above

[Chin music]

1. Dahlia really knows her stuff.

Great article. Never a waste of time w her.