A credibility crisis rocking President Donald
Trump's Justice Department significantly deepened over the long holiday weekend
amid rising calls for Attorney General Bill Barr to quit over claims he has
politicized highly sensitive cases.
Latest developments suggest that the President's
destruction of the invisible wall between the White House and the department
and the obliging behavior of Barr may already mean that the question of
possible political interference will haunt almost every large-scale Washington
case for the rest of the current administration.
The drama escalated Monday as a letter demanding
Barr's resignation by a bipartisan group of former Justice officials gathered
its 2,000th signature. The officials are dismayed by the attorney general's
decisions to tone down sentencing guidelines in the case of Roger Stone -- the
President's long-time confidant and political trickster. The White House,
however, said Monday that Trump still has full confidence in Barr.
That's perhaps not surprising since the furor
follows a string of moves by the attorney general that have appeared designed
to shield the President and have pulled the department into the political fray,
notwithstanding Barr's warning last week that Trump's tweets make it impossible
for him to do his job.
The prosecutor statement and recent developments
reflect how Trump's relentless pressure on the Justice Department has at the
very least left the impression of politicization -- almost as damaging to
confidence in the law's independence as actual interference.
Such an outcome is why many previous Presidents
have sought to avoid the impression of interfering in the Justice Department.
Trump, by contrast, has often given the impression that the law enforcement
instruments of the US government should be pressed into service to help him.
Barr is under fire not just for the Stone case,
but for fulfilling Trump's demands to probe the roots of the Russia
investigation and for accepting so-called evidence on Joe Biden from the President's
personal attorney Rudy Giuliani from the caper in Ukraine that triggered
Trump's impeachment.
The White House is meanwhile taking new efforts to
discredit the Mueller investigation, and to tarnish the department's top career
leaders as partisans who sought to thwart his election.
Trump, along with his political media complex, is
making a case that the problem is that the traditions and personnel of the
department itself are rotten rather than the political pressure he and his
acolytes are heaping upon the entire department. The President issued a flurry
of tweets Tuesday morning in which he suggested that "everything"
having to do with the Mueller case is "badly tainted," even though
multiple courts have upheld Mueller's appointment, his authority and the
decisions he made.
"The whole deal was a total SCAM. If I wasn't
President, I'd be suing everyone all over the place ... BUT MAYBE I STILL
WILL," Trump tweeted.
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