Not sure if everyone saw Attorney General Bill Barr’s comments at Hillside College. They seemed, to me at least, to be really historic. I know there are a lot of lawyers here... does this happen very often?
Attorney General Bill Barr...castigated career Justice Department staff in a Wednesday speech.
“What exactly am I interfering with? Under the law, all prosecutorial power is invested in the attorney general,” Barr said... The attorney general mocked the idea that such decisions should be at the discretion of less-senior DOJ attorneys, according to The Washington Post.
“Letting the most junior members set the agenda might be a good philosophy for a Montessori preschool, but it is no way to run a federal agency,” he said.
The attorney general also attacked state shutdown measures during the coronavirus pandemic (from another article: “You know, putting a national lockdown, stay at home orders, is like house arrest. Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history." Barr said )
In his remarks, the attorney general also took aim at “the criminalization of politics” in the form of media figures speculating that elected officials had committed “some esoteric crime.”
“Now you have to call your adversary a criminal, and instead of beating them politically, you try to put them in jail,” Barr said. “If you’re not in power, you’re in jail — or you’re a member of the press,” he added.
Barr also attacked unnamed Justice Department officials who he said had sought to boost their own profiles with high-profile prosecutions. “I’d like to be able to say that we don’t see head hunting in the Department of Justice,” Barr said. “That would not be truthful. I see it every day.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/adminis...er-is-invested
”These people (FBI agents) are agents of the attorney general. As I say, FBI agents, whose agent do you think you are?" Barr asked on Tuesday, adding that career lawyers, too, might be influenced by politics. "And I say, 'What exactly am I interfering with?' When you boil it right down, it's the will of the most junior member of the organization who has some idea he wants to do something. What makes that sacrosanct?"
"They do not have the political legitimacy to be the public face for tough decisions and they lack the political buy-in necessary to publicly defend those decisions," Barr also said.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/16/polit...ech/index.html
This all seems really unusual, and to my layman’s eye, some of it even seems incorrect. Any lawyers with thoughts on this?
