5 Ways William Barr is Turning America into a Dictatorship

William Barr was installed as Attorney General specifically to turn the Department of Justice into an arm of the Trump Coverup. And we’ve seen him do exactly that. Barr has corrupted and politicized the Department of Justice, working hand in hand with Donald Trump to bend federal law enforcement to the president’s will. Here are some of the ways Barr is helping Trump turn our democracy into a dictatorship:

1. He intervened in the sentencing of Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime confidant and advisor, who faced a prison sentence for obstructing Congress and witness tampering in connection with the Russia investigation. The day prosecutors announced they were seeking seven to nine years for Stone’s sentencing, Trump called the sentence “a horrible aberration,” and said that the prosecutors “ought to be ashamed of themselves” and were “an insult to our country.”  A mere 24 hours later, after Trump’s public tantrum, the Department of Justice announced it would change its sentencing recommendation for Stone [CUT TO NEWS CLIP]. Showing more backbone than Barr, four career prosecutors then withdrew from the case, and one resigned.

The incident caused such an uproar that Barr was forced to declare that he wouldn’t be “bullied” and that Trump’s tweets “make it impossible to do my job.” But anyone who has watched Barr repeatedly roll over for Trump saw this as a minimal face-saving gesture. For example:

2. Barr has green-lit an “intake process” for any information that Trump stooge Rudy Giuliani may dig up about Ukraine and the elections. That’s right. Barr has given Trump’s personal lawyer, who is under a Justice Department investigation that has led to charges against two of his associates, a direct line to the Justice Department to funnel dirt about Trump’s political rivals.

3. Barr misled the public about the contents of the Mueller report. Before the report was released, Barr sent a memo to Congress “summarizing” its findings. In his memo, Barr claimed there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction of justice case and supported Trump’s claims of “total exoneration”. Robert Mueller was so infuriated by Barr’s misrepresentation of his findings that he wrote a letter complaining that Barr’s summary “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s investigation. Barr nonetheless held a press conference reiterating his own claims, bolstering Trump’s narrative of “total exoneration,” and shifting the media coverage of the report.  

4. Barr refused to accept the findings of the Inspector General report investigating the origins of the Russia probe. In December, Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his report, finding that while the Russia probe was flawed in some aspects, there was no evidence of political bias and it was justified. This, of course, contradicts Trump’s narrative that the Russia probe was launched by deep-state partisan hacks determined to take him down. The day the report was released, Barr called the Russia investigation a “travesty” and claimed that there were “gross abuses …and inexplicable behavior that is intolerable in the FBI” and that he thought “there was bad faith" in the investigation. It’s unprecedented for the Attorney General to so vehemently disagree with the findings of an impartial Inspector General.

5. Barr buried the whistleblower complaint that kick-started the impeachment inquiry and tried to keep it from reaching Congress. His Justice Department investigated the contents of the complaint within a narrow scope and wrapped up its investigation within a mere three weeks, finding no evidence of wrongdoing. Yet again, Barr was running interference to shield Trump from accountability.

Trump says he has the “legal right” to meddle in cases handled by the Justice Department.

That’s wrong. If a president can punish enemies and reward friends through the administration of justice, there can be no justice. Justice requires impartial and equal treatment under the law. Partiality or inequality in deciding whom to prosecute and how to punish is tyranny. Plain and simple.

A half-century ago I witnessed the near dissolution of justice under President Nixon. I served in the Justice Department when a bipartisan Congress resolved that what had occurred would never happen again. But what occurred under Nixon is happening again. Like Nixon, Trump has usurped the independence of the Department of Justice for his own ends.

But unlike Nixon, Trump won’t resign. He has too many enablers – not just a shameful Attorney General but also shameless congressional Republicans – who place a lower priority on justice than on satisfying the most vindictive and paranoid occupant of the White House in modern American history.

One ABC News interview, conducted only to give the appearance of impartiality, doesn’t make up for the myriad ways Attorney General Bill Barr has corrupted the Justice Department and willfully abetted Trump’s lawlessness. For the sake of our democracy, he must resign immediately.

Today General Motors announced that it has fired 15 employees and disciplined five others in the wake of an internal investigation into the company’s handling of defective ignition switches, which lead to at least 13 fatalities.

But who’s legally responsible when a big corporation breaks the law? The government thinks it’s the corporation itself.

Wrong.

“What GM did was break the law … They failed to meet their public safety obligations,” scolded Sec of Transportation Anthony Foxx a few weeks ago after imposing the largest possible penalty on the giant automaker.

Attorney General Eric Holder was even more adamant recently when he announced the guilty plea of giant bank Credit Suisse to criminal charges for aiding rich Americans avoid paying taxes. “This case shows that no financial institution, no matter its size or global reach, is above the law.” 

Tough words. But they rest on a bizarre premise. GM didn’t break the law, and Credit Suisse never acted above it. Corporations don’t do things. People do.

For a decade GM had been receiving complaints about the ignition switch but chose to do nothing. Who was at fault? Look toward the top. David Friedman, acting head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, says those aware of the problem had ranged from engineers "all the way up through executives.”

Credit Suisse employees followed a carefully-crafted plan, even sending private bankers to visit their American clients on tourist visas to avoid detection. According to the head of New York State’s Department of Financial Services, Credit Suisse’s crime was “decidedly not the result of the conduct of just a few bad apples.”

Yet in neither of these cases have any executives been charged with violating the law. No top guns are going to jail. No one is even being fired.

Instead, the government is imposing corporate fines. The logic is that since the corporation as whole benefited from these illegal acts, the corporation as a whole should pay.

But the logic is flawed. Such fines are often treated by corporations as costs of doing business. GM was fined $35 million. That’s peanuts to a hundred-billion-dollar corporation.

Credit Suisse was fined considerably more – $2.8 billion. But even this amount was shrugged off by financial markets. In fact, the bank’s shares rose the day the plea was announced – the only big financial institution to show gains that day. Its CEO even sounded upbeat: “Our discussions with clients have been very reassuring and we haven’t seen very many issues at all.” (Credit Suisse wasn’t even required to turn over its list of tax-avoiding clients.)

Fines have no deterrent value unless the amount of the penalty multiplied by the risk of being caught is greater than the profits earned by the illegal behavior. In reality, the penalty-risk calculus rarely comes close.

Even when it does, the people hurt aren’t the shareholders who profited years before when the crimes were committed. Most current shareholders weren’t even around then.

Calling a corporation a criminal is even more absurd. Credit Suisse pleaded guilty to criminal conduct. GM may also face a criminal indictment. But what does this mean? A corporation can’t be put behind bars.

To be sure, corporations can effectively be executed. In 2002, the giant accounting firm Arthur Andersen was found guilty of obstructing justice when certain partners destroyed records of the auditing work they did for Enron. As a result, Andersen’s clients abandoned it and the firm collapsed. (Andersen’s conviction was later overturned on appeal). 

But here again, the wrong people are harmed. The vast majority of Andersen’s 28,000 employees had nothing to do with the wrongdoing yet they lost their jobs, while most of its senior partners slid easily into other accounting or consulting work.

The truth is, corporations aren’t people – despite what the Supreme Court says. Corporations don’t break laws; specific people do. In the cases of GM and Credit Suisse, the evidence points to executives at or near the top.

Conservatives are fond of talking about personal responsibility. But when it comes to white-collar crime, I haven’t heard them demand that individuals be prosecuted.

Yet the only way to deter giant corporations from harming the public is to go after people who cause the harm.