It started almost immediately, with the roll-out of the Russia investigation.
Before the results of special counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month inquiry into Russia’s …
It started almost immediately, with the roll-out of the Russia investigation.
Before the results of special counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month inquiry into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election were made public a year ago, Attorney General William Barr declared that there was insufficient evidence to charge President Donald Trump with obstruction of justice.
A month later, Barr announced the appointment of a federal prosecutor to review the origins of Mueller’s investigation, adding to a startling assertion that the FBI had spied on the Trump campaign.
When prosecutors in February recommended a stiff prison sentence for former Trump adviser Roger Stone – the last person charged in Mueller’s inquiry – Barr intervened again, prompting the dramatic withdraw of four department lawyers from case in protest.
Justice’s latest decision to abandon the prosecution of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, analysts said, adds yet a new chapter to the steady dismantling of Mueller’s work that had long threatened Trump’s presidency, while exposing Barr, yet again, to fresh recriminations of fueling a continuing politicization of Justice as a powerful annex of the White House.
“The Department of Justice under Attorney General Bill Barr will likely be remembered as the most political Department of Justice in history,” said Jimmy Gurule, who once worked under Barr during the attorney general’s first stint at the department during the George H. W. Bush administration. “It deeply saddens me to witness the severe damage inflicted… to the independence and integrity of the Department of Justice.”
David Weinstein, a longtime former federal prosecutor in Miami, said Justice’s repeated interventions in the Mueller cases is “setting a pattern that I have never seen before.”
“Brick by brick, Barr is taking apart the house that Mueller built,” Weinstein said. “And the only reasonable explanation for it is that the president wanted it to happen.”
On Friday,White House spokeswoman Kayeigh McEnany did not dispute that assertion, openly accusing the FBI of “manufacturing” a criminal case against the former national security adviser.
“If the top leaders of the FBI can target a three-star general with three decades of service, they can target you,” McEnany said in a scalding critique at the White House, before offering congratulations to the former administration official.
Flynn, the decorated retired Army lieutenant general, was perhaps the most prominent face of the half dozen former Trump aides who were prosecuted during Mueller’s nearly two-year investigation.
Paul Manafort, who served as Trump’s campaign chairman; Rick Gates, the one-time top Manafort deputy; Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney; George Papadopoulos, a former campaign adviser; and Stone were all swept up in Mueller investigations or in cases that grew out of the special counsel’s far-reaching inquiry.
