William Barr - A Study in Corruption

Attorneys - including those in government positions - are supposed to adhere to ethical norms and recuse themselves from cases where they have a conflict of interest.  As Attorney General Attorney Barr has demonstrated over and over again, ethical conduct means nothing to him.  Instead of upholding the law, his sole focus is on serving as Donald Trump's consigliere and protecting crime boss like behavior from bearing legal consequences.  Efforts to obstruct justice and to protect Trump from by hiding evidence of Trump's impeachable acts on Barr's part is breath taking.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Barr's disturbing and likely unlawful behavior.  Here are excerpts:

[T]he whistle-blower’s stark, straightforward account of stupefying treachery deserves to be repeated as often as possible.

“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. government officials that the president of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistle-blower wrote. “This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the president’s main domestic political rivals. The president’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.”

Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well. The whistle-blower’s complaint was deemed credible and urgent by Michael Atkinson, Trump’s own intelligence community inspector general, but Bill Barr’s Justice Department suppressed it. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion saying that the complaint needn’t be turned over to Congress, as the whistle-blower statute instructs. When Atkinson made a criminal referral to the Justice Department, it reportedly didn’t even open an investigation. And all the time, Barr was named in the complaint that his office was covering up.

Under any conceivable ethical standard, Barr should have recused himself. But ethical standards, perhaps needless to say, mean nothing in this administration. In the Ukraine scandal, evidence of comprehensive corruption goes far beyond Trump. Former prosecutors have said that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, may have been part of a criminal conspiracy when he pressed Ukrainian officials to open an investigation into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

Vice President Mike Pence is also tied to the shakedown of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, having met with him this month to talk about “corruption” and American financial aid. When this administration complains about Ukrainian “corruption,” it almost inevitably means a failure to corruptly pursue investigations that would bolster conspiracy theories benefiting Trump.

The whistle-blower wrote that White House officials moved a word-for-word transcript of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky from the computer system where such transcripts were typically kept into a separate system for the most highly classified information. “According to White House officials I spoke with, this was ‘not the first time’ under this administration that a presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive — rather than national security sensitive — information,” the whistle-blower said.

[A]ny lawyers involved in hiding these transcripts might have done something illegal. “The rule is it is both unethical and a crime for a lawyer to participate in altering, destroying or concealing a document, and here the allegation is that the word-for-word transcript was moved from the place where people ordinarily would think to look for it, to a place where it would not likely be found,” said Gillers. “That’s concealing.”

Then there’s Barr’s personal involvement in the Ukraine plot. In the reconstruction of Trump’s call with Zelensky that was released by the White House, Trump repeatedly said that he wanted Ukraine’s government to work with Barr on investigating the Bidens.

[S]aid Representative Jamie Raskin, a former constitutional law professor who now sits on the House Judiciary Committee, “the effort to suppress the existence of the phone conversation itself is an obvious obstruction of justice.”

But Barr’s refusal to recuse creates a sort of legal cul-de-sac. It’s only the Justice Department, ultimately, that can prosecute potential federal crimes arising from this scandal. Barr’s ethical nihilism, his utter indifference to ordinary norms of professional behavior, means that he’s retaining the authority to stop investigations into crimes he may have participated in.

“The administration of justice is cornered because the ultimate executive authority for that government role includes the people whose behavior is suspect,” said Gillers.

That makes the impeachment proceedings in the House, where Barr will likely be called as a witness, the last defense against complete administration lawlessness. “Just as the president is not above the law, the attorney general is not above the law,” said Raskin. “The president’s betrayal of his oath of office and the Constitution is the primary offense here, and we need to stay focused on that, but the attorney general’s prostitution of the Department of Justice for the president’s political agenda has been necessary to the president’s schemes and he will face his own reckoning.”

I hope Raskin is right. But until that day comes, people who care about the rule of law in this country should be screaming for Barr’s recusal, even if he won’t listen. He is now wrapped up in one of the gravest scandals in American political history. Can America’s chief law enforcement officer really be allowed to decide whether to criminally investigate misdeeds he might have helped to commit or to conceal? The answer will tell us just how crooked the justice system under Trump has become.

Barr is despicable and embodies the worse characteristics of an unethical lawyer.

Judge Denies Trump DOJ Request to Replace Census Case Legal Team

Trump and fellow liar, Wilbur Ross.

In the legal realm, attorneys on a litigation case can withdraw and be replaced only under limited situations and such withdrawal requires court approval.  Among these situations are (i) a private party litigant elects to hire new legal counsel, (ii) the client has failed and refused to pay legitimate legal fees of its legal counsel, and (iii) legal counsel believes the client is attempting to perpetrate a fraud on the court.  In the case of the lawsuit brought by the Trump DOJ seeking to force a citizenship question on the 2020 census - which the U.S. Supreme Court remanded back to the lower court while noting the alleged need for the question was contrived - the first two situations do not apply.  Now, with a federal judge refusing to allow the Trump DOJ to replace it legal team without explanation, some are conjecturing that the third situation may be what is really going on.  Stated another way, some commentators suspect the original DOJ legal team may be seeking to withdraw because the Trump regime is pressuring the lawyers to lie and defraud the court. In addition to seeking to under count non-whites in the census, Trump appears to be playing to his racist base. As prior post noted, the language directly from the U.S. Constitution mandating the census says NOTHING about citizenship.  It mandates a count of ALL people within the boundaries of the nation. Numerous news outlets are reporting on the court's refusal to grant the request to replace the entire original legal team.  Here is are highlights from the Washington Post: 

A federal judge in New York on Tuesday denied a bid from the Justice Department to replace the team of lawyers on the case about the census citizenship question, writing that its request to do so was “patently deficient.”

The department had earlier this week announced its intention to swap out the legal team on the case, without saying exactly why.

A person familiar with the matter said the decision was driven in part by frustration among some of the career lawyers who had been assigned to the case about how it was being handled, though the department wanted to replace those in both career and political positions.

But U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman denied the formal, legal bid to do so.

“Defendants provide no reasons, let alone ‘satisfactory reasons,’ for the substitution of counsel,” Furman wrote. He also noted that a filing in the case was due from the department in just three days, and that the department had previously pushed for the matter to be moved along quickly.

“If anything, that urgency — and the need for efficient judicial proceedings — has only grown since that time,” Furman wrote.

He said the department could refile its request, if it gave “satisfactory reasons” for the attorneys’ withdrawal and promises that the attorneys who had worked the case previously would be available upon request. The judge also asked the department to “file an affidavit providing unequivocal assurances that the substitution of counsel will not delay further litigation of this case (or any future related case).”

The judge’s decision was the latest development in the continuing effort by the Trump administration to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.

The Justice and Commerce departments then effectively conceded defeat — but Trump soon ordered the lawyers to do an about-face and come up with ways to keep the fight alive.

Furman’s move could force the Justice Department to expose more of its messy, internal debates over the census case. Those attorneys who object to the handling of it might proceed without signing briefs, serving up a regular, public reminder of how fraught the case has become internally. The department might also choose to lay out more detailed reasons for wanting the attorneys off in a subsequent request.

New York Attorney General Letitia James took a tacit swipe at Trump in reacting to the ruling.  “Despite the president attempting to fire his lawyers, this is not an episode of ‘The Apprentice.’ Judge Furman denied his request and required the administration to comply with the rules regarding substitution of counsel, ” said James, in a reference to Trump’s onetime television show.

Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Law School who was a deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division from 2015 to 2017, said he had never seen the department swap out an entire team in the middle of litigating a case.

The move was particularly odd given that the previous team was composed of experts in administrative procedure who were steeped in the details of the census litigation, he said. The new team, pulled together from the department’s consumer protection, civil fraud, and office of immigration litigation components, is “a truly random assortment,” he said.

Intensifying the political battle, House Democrats threatened to block funding for government efforts to ask about citizenship status as the White House continued to ponder an executive order to force the issue. 

“I have no intention of allowing this flagrant waste of money,” Rep. José E. Serrano (D-N.Y.), who leads the House panel overseeing funding for the Commerce and Justice departments, said in a statement. “I once again urge the Trump administration to give up this fight and allow for a depoliticized and accurate census, as we always have.”

A spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee confirmed Democrats would seek to block taxpayer money from funding any efforts by the Trump administration to ask about citizenship in next year’s survey “if the issue has not been rendered moot by the courts.”