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-----Herewith is a third resolution submitted to the Virginia 8th District Convention Resolutions Committee which, unlike the previous two was REJECTED for no stated reason. Unimpressive in my home commonwealth which is supposed to represent Jeffersonian Democracy's rule of law........... May 2020
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Given that: Congress has the power to impeach the "president, the vice president and all civil officers of the United States" for treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors, according to Article 2 of the Constitution. That includes Cabinet members like the attorney general.
And that William Barr has faced impeachment calls from National Democrats over his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller's report on the Russia investigation, although removing an attorney general has never been done before and that with whereas with a president, elections can serve as checks on abuse of power, unfortunately there is no analogue for a Cabinet member - according to Michael Gerhardt, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina. (1)
Given that calls for Barr's removal resounded after it was revealed that Mueller disagreed with his handling of the highly anticipated report. In late March of 2019, the special counsel wrote a letter to Barr in which he expressed frustration over how the attorney general had presented the key findings of the nearly two-year probe in a mere four-page summary. He also appears to have misled Congress during appearances on Capitol Hill in early April last year, a week after he received Mueller's letter.
According to Gerhardt, lying to or misleading Congress during testimony is "sufficiently serious" enough to warrant impeachment proceedings for an attorney general. Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Newsweek that "Barr's manifestly misleading and obfuscatory testimony, whether or not impeachable, is certainly disqualifying for any attorney general. He really needs to resign”
In this regard Adam Schiff (Chair of the House Intelligence Committee) said during an appearance on CBS This Morning that "Look, there's no sugarcoating this: I think he should step down. It's hard, I think, for the country to have confidence in the top law enforcement official in the country if he's asked a direct question, as he was, and he gives a directly false answer.”
The events since Barr’s letter have incinerated whatever remains of his credibility(2). The famously tight-lipped Mueller team told several news outlets the letter had minimized Trump’s culpability and evaded questions as to whether he had shared the Mueller report with the White House; and, it turns out, he’s “had numerous conversations with White House lawyers which aided the president’s legal team,” the New York Times reports. Where Mueller intended to leave the job of judging Trump’s obstruction of Justice conduct to Congress, Barr interposed his own judgment that Trump’s behavior was excusable. Next to the president himself, the attorney general is the most crucial actor in the safeguarding of the rule of law. The Justice Department is an awesome force that holds the power to enable the ruling party to commit crimes with impunity, or to intimidate and smear the opposing party with the taint of criminality.
Also(3), given the analysis of highly respected public figures such as former Attorney General Eric Holder (who had served under President Obama), writing in an op-ed on December 11, 2019 in The Washington Post who claimed William Barr is "unfit to be attorney general”(4) for his "naked partisan[ship]", "attempts to vilify the president's critics", his attacks on the inspector general and his comments on ongoing investigations. - and former FBI director, CIA director and federal judge William Webster who wrote in a December 2019 opinion piece of "a dire threat to the rule of law in the country I love." Webster asserted that "the integrity of the institutions that protect our civil order are, tragically, under assault," writing that "aspersions cast upon [FBI employees] by the president and my longtime friend, Attorney General William P. Barr, are troubling in the extreme.”(5) Since 2005, Webster had served as the chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council.
In contravariance to its constitutional duties; under Barr, the DOJ (Department of Justice) has defended Trump's refusal to comply with congressional subpoenas into his personal finances. It has even intervened on behalf of his former campaign chairman, convicted felon Paul Manafort, lobbying for him to receive special privileges behind bars (6).
Barr, who's proved himself to be a defender of extreme interpretations of presidential power (and has even drawn comparisons to Roy Cohn, Trump's former personal attorney and fixer) has a history of preventing prosecution of Presidential abuses of power. In the same office of Attorney General in 1992, he supported mass pardons of senior officials that enabled a cover-up of the Iran–Contra(7) scandal on the very eve of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's trial.
Therefore, be it resolved that the 8th District Democratic Convention calls on Senators Warner and Kaine as well as the Virginia Democratic Representatives to support efforts to impeach or censure the Attorney General William Barr for his dereliction of duty and collusion with the Impeached Trump administration to obstruct Justice and prosecution in the Muller Report Indictments and refusal to investigate the Ukrainian Bribery Case.
(1) Newsweek; May 1, 2019
(2) Intelligencer's National Interest webpage of April 18, 2019
(3) Wikipedia article on William Barr
(4) Washington Post; retrieved December 12, 2019
(5) New York Times; December 16, 2019
(6) Slate website; September 25, 2019
(7) Leslie Cockburn's Out of Control