US Attorney General William Barr Undermines Donald Trump in Biden and Election Probes

Undermining President Donald Trump on multiple fronts, Attorney General William Barr said Monday (US time) that he saw no reason to appoint a special counsel to investigate the president’s claims about the 2020 election or about Hunter Biden, the son of President-elect Joe Biden.

Barr will leave the Justice Department this week, having transformed from one of Trump’s most loyal allies to one of the few cabinet members willing to openly contradict the president. That has been particularly true since the election, with Barr stating that he had seen no evidence of widespread voter fraud, even as Trump continued to make false claims about the integrity of the race.

The president is also particularly angry that Barr did not announce the existence of a two-year investigation into Hunter Biden before the election. On Monday, Barr said the investigation “is being handled in a responsible and professional manner.”

“I have not seen a reason to appoint a special attorney and I have no plan to do so before I leave,” he said, adding that there was also no need for a special attorney to investigate the elections.

A special counsel would make it difficult for Biden and his attorney general, who has not yet been named, to close investigations launched under Trump. Such an appointment could also add false legitimacy to unfounded claims, particularly to the crowd of Trump supporters who believe the election was stolen because Trump continues to wrongly claim that it was.

Barr’s comments came at a press conference to announce additional criminal charges in the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, which killed 190 Americans, an issue he had worked on in his previous tenure as attorney general earlier. from the 1990s. He will retire Wednesday and will be replaced by Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen.

Barr’s statements about the special counsel may make it easier for Rosen to resist pressure from the White House to open a special counsel investigation.

At his 2019 confirmation hearing for the deputy attorney general, Rosen said he was willing to reject political pressure from the White House if necessary. He told lawmakers that criminal investigations should “proceed on facts and law” and that prosecutions should be “free from undue political influence.”

Trump and his allies have filed roughly 50 lawsuits challenging the election results, and nearly all of them have been dismissed or dropped. He also lost twice in the United States Supreme Court.

With no more sustainable legal recourse, Trump has been fuming and peppering allies for options while refusing to accept his loss.

Among those allies is Rudy Giuliani, who during a meeting on Friday pressured Trump to seize the voting machines in his search for evidence of fraud. However, the Department of Homeland Security made it clear that it had no authority to do so. It is also unclear what that would accomplish.

For his part, Barr said he saw no reason to get hold of them. Earlier this month, Barr also said that the Department of Justice and Homeland Security had examined claims “that the machines were essentially programmed to skew the election results” and eventually concluded that “we have not seen anything corroborating. that”.

Trump has shown interest in appointing a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden’s tax dealings and a second to investigate voter fraud. He even raised the idea of ​​appointing attorney Sidney Powell as a counselor, though Powell was ousted from Trump’s legal team after she made a series of increasingly insane conspiratorial claims about the election.

Even if Trump tried to appoint Powell as special counsel, federal law requires an attorney general to appoint special attorneys.

Barr also said Monday that the hack of US government agencies “certainly appears to be from the Russians,” contradicting Trump’s earlier statements.

On social media, the president wrote that “Cyber ​​Hack is much higher on fake news media than it is today.” He also said that China could be responsible even though no credible evidence has emerged to suggest that anyone other than Russia could be the culprit.

Monday was also the 32nd anniversary of the Pan Am explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 259 people in the air and 11 on the ground.

The Justice Department announced its case against the accused bomb maker, Abu Agela Masud Kheir Al-Marimi, who admitted in an interview with Libyan officials several years ago that he had built the bomb and worked with two other defendants to carry out the attack, Barr said. .

Calling the press conference to announce the charges underscored Barr’s attachment to that case. He had announced a series of previous charges against two other Libyan intelligence officials in his capacity as acting attorney general nearly 30 years ago, and promised that the investigation would continue.