How William Barr Has Changed the Justice Department

stepped down over his decision in the Stone case. He's also faced criticism in recent days over other matters, for example, creating a special process for Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to submit information to the Department about Ukraine related matters, and appointing a senior prosecutor to examine cases being handled by the U. S. Attorney's Office in d C, including the sentencing of Michael Flynn. Joining me is Neil Kincough, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law. He

was formerly special assistant to the Attorney General. We're about one year into the tenure of William Bar as Attorney General. What strikes you most about the last year, Well, what's most striking to me is just how thoroughly Bill Barr has undermined and politicized the Justice Department. Um I testified at his confirmation hearing, and I testified in opposition because I thought his view of presidential power was so extreme

as to be disqualifying. I think he's shown that that's true, but that's only the tip of the iceberg of reasons to be concerned about him and his tenure as Attorney General. UM I did not anticipate that he would turn the

Department into a vehicle for President Trump's political ambitions. Um I worked in the Justice Department back in the ninet nineties, and what I observed was that the chief function of the political layer at the Justice Department and principally the Attorney General, was to insulate the department from political pressure. And that was true not just in the nineties. It was true in the eighties. It was true in Republican

administrations and democratic administrations. UM and it's what made the Justice Department a credible institution and an institution with real integrity in upholding our criminal justice system. But Bill Barr has inverted that. He is instead of acting as an insulation against political pressure, he's turned into the conduit for political pressure. The way that the president can exert his

political influence over every aspect of the Justice Department. And that's a threat that is far graver than anything I anticipated even when I was testifying against him a year ago. President Trump seems to be testing his relationship with Bar, demanding a clean house at the Justice Department and target those involved in the Russia investigation. Do you see this as real or as something for for Trump space. My concern is that that's what it is, right, that this

is a show for his base. That Bill bar when he says, um, Trump's tweets make it difficult or impossible for him to do his job. That what Bar means is I'm already doing your bidding. It makes it look bad when you start telling me what to do because I already know what to do, and it's better if you just keep quiet about it. Um. And if that's

the situation, then the Justice Department is far gone. Um. If that's not the situation, which is my hope, is that President Trump thinks he needs to instruct Bill Barr because behind the scenes, somehow Bill Barr is standing up to him. Um. Well, that would be encouraging. The problem is I don't really see any evidence of that. We hear a lot about well, there are career prosecutors there

and they're still doing their job. Is this just in the DC office that where that we're hearing these stories, or are their problems throughout the Justice Department perhaps and concerns that career prosecutors won't want to stay there anymore. So I I have not heard anything that gives me pause about what's going on in other U S. Attorney's offices, but I think that that may be coming. Right. So I think back to UM the administration of George W. Bush and the way that Karl Rove got involved with

more local but still political prosecutions. So, for example, he saw to the firing of the U S attorney who brought charges against Republican Congressman Randy Duke Cunningham, if you remember that scandal UM and other prosecutions against Republican figures. He also had fired um U S attorneys who refused to bring unwarranted prosecutions against Democratic opponents UM and you know there it was a real problem the way Karl

Rove got involved. And and it's hard for me to imagine Donald Trump not at some point getting around to that, or Bill Bard doing that for him. Right one year in Bill Bard doesn't seem to have done that yet, but there are signs, right. So if you look at the way he's curbing the Southern District of New York's UM inquiry into Leve Parnis and Rudy Giuliani, UM, you know that's another district besides the District of Columbia district

that could start moving into other districts throughout the country. Right, So there's there's every reason to watch it, although I don't know that it's happening yet. I've been talking to Neil Kinkoff, a professor at the Georgia State University College of Law, about William Barr's first year as Attorney General

for President Donald Trump. You know, we always hear the Southern District of New York is the sovereign district and it's almost into Hendant from d C. Which doesn't make sense to me because the Attorney General is also the Attorney General over the Southern District. What is he doing there with Parnis and Frewman. So he has given UM the Eastern District of New York the ability to define the jurisdiction of the Southern District with respect to those investigations.

So these two districts are our rivals with one another. It'd be a little bit like letting the head coach of the unit of Clemson do the recruiting for Alabama, right, you know, there their rivals, you know. So putting that kind of power over the Southern District into the Eastern District is itself a questionable thing. And the Eastern District I can't imagine Bill bar shows it at random. Not only are they going to be inclined to reign in the Southern district, but the U. S. Attorney in the

Eastern District is much more closely aligned with Bar. So while the Southern District has this reputation for independence, Bill Barr is setting up mechanisms that will allow him to

work around or overcome that independence. Looking back, does it seemed to you as he as if he had a grand plan, because if you look at what people often call his you know, his sort of resume for the job of a g he does have some very odd ideas about the president's power that even state that the Framers didn't worry so much about presidential power, right, And he's expressed that since that memo. He's expressed it in speeches. His notorious speech at the federalist society, last fault being

one of them. Yeah, he has this idea that in fact, the presidency is modeled on on the monarchy. It is completely revisionist history. There is no actual support for that in the historical record, and if you go back and read documents from that era, it's impossible not to see just how committed everyone in the Founding generation was to avoiding having another king, and so political opponents would charge the other with acting like a king. It was a

commonplace in in the Founding era. And so this idea that bar has that the real concern of the Constitution was with a two powerful legislature and that they meant to establish a sort of American imperial presidency as a counterbalance to that is simply contrary to everything we know about the Founding era. But you're right to ask about whether he had some kind of grand plan when he came into office. I think he did. He sees himself as trying to restore the what he regards as the

original vision of the presidency, and he's completely wrong. In his original vision is a day injuriously wrong one, and we see that over and over as he enables Trump in exceeding any kind of realistic view of the president's proper role in our constitutional system. Well, I also wonder about his view of the courts, and it seems to be a strange view for the Attorney General of the United States, in that he seems to think that the

courts shouldn't get involved in separation of powers issues. He said exactly that in his Federalist Society speech, and it's it's a completely bizarre view I suppose he has in mind when he says that executive privilege fights between Congress and the president, and if the courts don't get involved, what he knows full well is that the president will win because Congress has no way of forcing the president to turn over papers. In the memo that you referred to,

he suggested that Congress could impeach the president. But now we've seen that in fact, Congress can't impeach the president for refusing to turn over documents. The House impeached him and the Senate refused to convict. So there's no other way of getting the president to act in a manner

that's accountable and transparent. But it's also I think not in the long run interests of the executive branch, because there are a lot of situations where the president needs to go to court to vindicate what he views as his authority. Right. So, a lot of the separation of powers cases that have gone to the court are cases where the president has been the one complaining about statutory limits on his power. Let's talk a little bit about

the clemency process. As President Trump just granted clemency to a group of eleven people, including several very high profile political cases. First of all, did you see a pattern in his grant of clemency. Well, the pattern seemed to be that, um, he approves of corruption. I just don't

know any other way, any other way to look at it. Um. And so during the impeachment, we kept hearing his defenders say, you know, his actions in the Ukraine were all grounded on his deep concern about corruption, and I think he's just given the lie to that claim. Right. So the people that the prominent people in the group that were pardoned were each and every one of them deeply corrupt. Right ed. De Bartelow was paying off the governor of of Louisiana in order to get a license to open

a casino there. Um. Michael Milken engaged in securities, fraud and insider trading and amassed great wealth not based on his value added, not based on anything that is um allege at a market reason for amassing wealth, but rather based on schemes, corrupt schemes. Um Every one of those prominent people pardon fall into that category. And Rod Blagoyevitch just takes the cake, right And and now Rod Blagoyevich is out there saying he was a political prisoner. It's

just preposterous. This guy was shaking down children's hospitals for extortion payments. And in Donald Trump's world, this is all okay. He's normalizing corruption, and it I suppose makes sense if you're Donald Trump to do that, since he is so deeply corrupt himself. Describe what the normal channel is for a pardon. Sure, the normal channel is to go through

the Justice Department. There is within the Justice Department and office of Pardon Attorney, and the pardon attorney reviews all applications for pardons and clemency and assesses them on the basis of sort of a uniform set of criteria and then forwards recommendations to the President. And the whole point of this process is to make it open so that it's available to anybody who wants to petition. It's also

open and available to victims of crime and to prosecutors. Right, because it's not just the person seeking the pardoner clemency that's interested in the result of that application, the person who prosecuted that that person is also deeply interested. Um. The victims of their crimes are deeply interested and ought to be heard from. And the other The other reason to run the process that way is that it shouldn't be that pardons are available only to those who are

well connected and can get the president's ear right. It ought to be something that is fairly available to everybody, regardless of whether or not they have wealth or power. Um. But in Donald Trump's world, what matters is whether you can get onto Fox News and plead your case in a way that he will personally hear it and then

be moved or not. And so it's only those who have the kinds of connections that can get them onto Fox News or the kinds of connections that can get them in front of the president, because he is not respecting the independent, nonpartisan process that the Justice Department runs well.

Apparently The Washington Post is reporting that there have been discussions within the White House about ways to revamp the clemency process and to diminish the role of the Justice Department, and apparently Trump's son in law, Jared Kushner, is central to these discussions. Does that concern you? It concerns me on many levels. First of all, on the level of the independence of the Justice Department. Right, this is another way for the White House to undermine the independent, nonpartisan

administration of our justice system. Right. It is a fundamental threat to the rule of law. Um and it is one in a long litany of threats that this administration has posed to the rule of law with respect to pardons themselves. It undermines the integrity of the pardon process, It undermines the fairness of the pardon process. And so

it's a terrible idea from from that perspective. And then lastly, the people who would be running this process feel like Jared Kushner and Donald Trump himself are people who seem to have a real interest in undermining the integrity of

the criminal justice system. Right. It seems like Donald Trump's reason for that is that so many of his associates are themselves caught up in criminal investigations right his campaign managers, his close advisors, his political advisors, so many of them are under indictment, are under conviction, or are in prison. And so in order to sort of prop up the sense of his own integrity, he's undermining the integrity of

the criminal justice system. And of course, Jared Kushner's father was also convicted of white collar crime, and so he himself is apt to be an only too willing participant in this idea of undermining the integrity of the criminal justice system. Thanks deal. That's Neil Kinkoff, a professor at the Georgia State University College of Law. And remember the tunity to the Bloomberg Law Show weeknights at ten pm right here on Bloomberg Radio.