The support of this man's opinion shows that republicans don't give a damn about the rule of law unless they can use it to hurt others. As you read this memo understand that when he did this he removed any impartiality he had pertaining to this matter and should have recused himself.
Read the memo from William Barr
So sane, fair Americans cannot consider Barrs opinion credible. If Barr refuses to provide congress what they need, then we must ask about the potential cover up.
Trump’s attorney-general nominee helped Mueller conclude his work within DOJ guidelines.
He has demonstrated the ability to reason through complex legal questions in a rigorously academic way. Thinking these issues through is what we expect of a properly functioning Justice Department does: considering them against jurisprudence, statutes, rules, regulations, and Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions, with a healthy respect for facts that we do not know or about which we could be wrong — facts that could alter the analysis.
That is precisely what Bill Barr did in June, when he penned a memorandum to top Justice Department officials on a matter of immense national significance: the obstruction aspect of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of President Trump.
Barr was not prejudging the facts. He was addressing the law and Justice Department policy. With great persuasive force, the 19-page memo posits two contentions. First, based on what is publicly known, the special counsel’s theory of obstruction is legally flawed. Second, if a Justice Department investigation is going to be used to take down a democratically elected president, the social cohesion of our body politic demands that it be over a clear, very serious crime, not a novel and aggressive theory of prosecution.
There is no meritorious disagreement with either point.
It was entirely proper for Barr to weigh in on these questions in the thoughtful manner he chose. As a former attorney general, he directed his views to Rod Rosenstein and Steve Engel, respectively the deputy attorney general and the head of the OLC, the lawyers’ lawyers at the Justice Department. Barr was not only attorney general in the Bush 41 administration; he also served in the weighty positions that Rosenstein and Engel now occupy. He is intimately familiar with the difficult decisions they have to make and the Justice Department guidelines and processes that are in place to guide decision-making.
Barr wrote not as an advocate representing someone in the investigation, but as a former high-ranking government official concerned about the institutions of the executive branch, particularly the Justice Department. Special Counsel Mueller’s apparent obstruction theory may have been conceived with the specific facts of President Trump’s situation in mind — Trump’s expression of hope that the FBI would drop any investigation of Michael Flynn, his decision to fire FBI director James Comey. But while a prosecutor may believe his application of a legal principle is narrow, once that application becomes a precedent, only the limits of logic curtail its further, potentially paralyzing extension.
As Barr elaborates, if a president may be prosecuted for obstruction based on carrying out the executive’s constitutional prerogatives — exercises of prosecutorial discretion, giving direction to the course of an investigation, making personnel and management decisions — then
every other official in the Justice Department is similarly vulnerable. The apprehension that proper and necessary acts could be construed as improperly motivated, and therefore as actionable obstruction, would profoundly undermine the administration of justice.
The suggestion that there was something untoward about Barr’s submission is absurd. That is why the ethics analysts at the Justice Department concluded that the memo raises no issues of disqualification or recusal in connection with Barr’s nomination to be attorney general. These are the same career lawyers who advised former attorney general Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from the Russia investigation that Mueller is now conducting, much to the president’s chagrin and the applause of his critics.
William Barr Memo: Obstruction of Justice Explained, Not Ruled Out | National Review