BYROGER PARLOFF
@rparloffquit the case, with one resigning
from the office. A few days later, it
emerged that Barr had also quietly
installed his own team of lawyers
to re-examine a series of politically
sensitive prosecutions, including
that of Trump’s for-
mer National Security
Adviser Michael Flynn.
By February 19, close
to 2,500 former Justice
Department officialshad signed an online petition call-
ing for Barr’s resignation. The
same day—after President Trump
persisted in tweeting criticisms
of judges and prosecutors despite
Barr’s requests he stop—numer-
ous newspapers reported Barr was
weighing resigning. Within hours, a
department spokesperson tweeted
he had no such plans. (A day later,
Stone was sentenced to 40 months,
less than the original prosecutors
sought. Trump continued his crit-
icisms, hinting a commutation or
pardon might be forthcoming.)
Newsweek asked legal historian Jed
Shugerman, an expert on the Justice
Department, to put Barr’s conduct in
a historical context. In this interview,
Shugerman faults Barr for refusing
to use special counsels, and calls for
structural reforms to ensure greater
Justice Department independence
in the future. Barr’s intervention in
Stone’s case, he says, was “yet another
breach of norms in a pattern with
Trump and Barr.” He adds that Barr’s
“aggressively partisan” speeches at
Notre Dame in October and before
the Federalist Society in November,
both of which Barr has posted on
the Justice Department website, are
“remarkably not normal” and “affect
the legitimacy of everything the
attorney general does.”
As for Barr’s complaint, in a recent
ABC News interview, that Trump’s
tweets “make it impossible for me to
do my job,” Shugerman says the plea
only “begs the question of what Barr
thinks his job is. To do justice impar-
tially? Or to keep protecting Trump
behind the scenes without losing
more Justice Department lawyers to
rebuking resignations?”
A professor at Fordham Law
School, Shugerman obtained his B.A.
(1996), law degree (2002), and Ph.D.
in history (2008) from Yale.justice department norms
are under siege. This month,
when Attorney General William
Barr committed the latest in a suc-
cession of aggressively political
acts, he touched off a firestorm. The
crisis began on February 11, when
he intervened in the prosecution
of Roger Stone, a longtime Trump
associate, to ask for a lighter sen-
tence than the one recommended by
career prosecutors. Four prosecutors14 NEWSWEEK.COM MARCH 06, 2020
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION%Y GLUEKIT;%ARR%Y MANDEL NGANʔAFPʔGETTYBill Barr’s Wild Month
We asked a legal historian for his take on Attorney General Barr’s
recent ʀurry of actions. +is verdict: ţ5emarkedly not normalŤ