Rush says Barr should be disbarred
Congressman seeks AG’s resignation, calls him Trump’s ‘glorified gofer’
President Trump and Attorney General William Barr (right) attend a conference of police chiefs in Chicago in October. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
By Ted Cox
A prominent Chicago congressman is seeking to force the resignation of U.S. Attorney General William Barr, calling him a “glorified gofer to the president.”
U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush sponsored a congressional resolution Tuesday calling for Barr’s resignation and disbarment. “Since his swearing in earlier this year, it has become painfully clear that Mr. Barr is more interested in being the glorified gofer to the president of the United States rather than the chief law-enforcement officer to the American people,” Rush said in a statement.
Rush charged that Barr “has undermined the public’s faith in the Department of Justice and likely diminished the morale of the career public servants that he oversees,” adding, “Mr. Barr has become a comely repulsive caricature of an oath taker in the government of our nation. As such, he should resign immediately, and subsequently be disbarred for his flagrant disregard for the Constitution of the United States.”
U.S. House Resolution 757 runs down a list of incidents in which Barr sided with the president in opposition to national laws and the Constitution. It charges he “deliberately mischaracterized” the report submitted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller with a synopsis whitewashing his findings that was issued before the report’s release.
It criticizes Barr for failing to defend the Affordable Care Act as the top federal law officer. It cites how Barr defied a House subpoena on an investigation into the 2020 U.S. Census and “deliberately mischaracterized the legal reasoning behind the Trump administration’s desire to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.” It mentions how Barr was subsequently held in “criminal contempt of Congress for his refusal to comply with a duly issued subpoena and deliberate obstruction of congressional oversight authority.”
More recently, it charged, Barr “threatened the withholding of police protection from communities that do not show ‘support and respect’ to law enforcement, a statement that has been interpreted as being directed at communities of color that protest police violence.” Barr “has perpetuated and promulgated conspiracy theories that have been repeatedly debunked by United States law enforcement and intelligence agencies,” and went on to “undermine the Department of Justice inspector general’s report” on the origins of the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian agents meddling in the 2016 election.
The resolution points to how, in his congressional confirmation hearings, Barr referred to that legitimate investigation as “spying.” Just this week, Barr dismissed a report that debunked a Trump conspiracy theory that the FBI had spied on his campaign. He instead repeated claims that “the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken.”
The resolution condemns Barr and calls for him to resign, adding that state bar associations should move to disbar him.