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US Attorney General William Barr has retired from the Trump administration, despite long being seen as a loyalist to the president and facing accusations during his tenure that he had turned the Justice Department over. (DoJ) on a compliant government server. White House.
Donald Trump tweeted Monday: “I just had a very nice meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr at the White House. Our relationship has been very good, he has done an excellent job! According to the letter, Bill will be leaving just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family …
“Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen, a prominent person, will become Acting Attorney General. The highly respected Richard Donoghue will take over as Deputy Attorney General. Thank you all!”
Barr, whose loyalty to the president had seemed almost unfathomable, had surprised many observers by telling the Associated Press in an interview published Dec. 1 that he questioned the idea, promulgated by the president and his re-election campaign, that it had been widespread. fraud in the 2020 elections.
Trump has tried to undermine the victory of his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, by pointing to routine small-scale problems in an election (questions about signatures, envelopes and postage stamps) as evidence of widespread election fraud across the country that cost him money. . choice.
Trump and some of his allies have also endorsed more bizarre sources of alleged fraud, such as linking Biden’s victory to electoral software created in Venezuela “under the leadership of Hugo Chávez,” the former Venezuelan president who died in 2013.
“There has been a claim that it would be a systemic fraud and it would be the claim that the machines were essentially programmed to skew the election results. And the DHS and the DoJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to corroborate that, “Barr said in the AP interview.
Barr said some people were confusing the role of the federal criminal justice system and asking it to intervene in allegations that should be made in civil trials and reviewed by state or local officials, not the justice department.
Barr added: “There is a growing trend to use the criminal justice system as a kind of default solution to everything, and people don’t like one thing: they want the Justice Department to come in and ‘investigate.
Those comments likely infuriated Trump and his supporters as they tried, and failed, to find a meaningful way, through the courts, requesting recounts or pressuring officials, to reverse their loss to Biden.
Speculation about Barr’s future abounded from the moment his interview with the AP was published, as the most prominent member of the administration to flatly contradict the president’s continuing arguments that he is the rightful winner and that the election was fraudulent.
Trump announced in December 2018 that he was nominating Barr to become his next attorney general, replacing Jeff Sessions, who the president had fired not long before.
He came into office as Russia’s investigation into allegations of collusion between the 2016 Trump election campaign and Russian operatives was nearing its denouement in early 2019 under the direction of special counsel Robert Mueller, and Barr was initially anticipated to he would be an independent voice in the Justice Department and take a nonpartisan position on the investigation.
But in the most prominent early incident among many in which critics’ loyalty to the president seemed to exceed his loyalty to the nation, Barr called a press conference last April and offered a misleading preview of the Mueller report. It omitted the report’s detailed description of Trump’s possible obstruction of justice and falsely claimed that the White House had fully cooperated.
This set the tone for Trump’s inaccurate trumpeting when the report came out, in a restricted form, that he and his team had enjoyed a “total exoneration” from Mueller, a flagrant misinterpretation.
And Barr’s partisan, protocol-breaking path continued from there, as he intervened in criminal cases brought against prominent individuals in Trump’s circle, such as Roger Stone and Michael Flynn.
He also launched an investigation into the origins of Russia’s own investigation, seen as a fundamental undermining of the work of Mueller and his team, an effort that continues.
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