TWEET KING Does Bill Barr want Donald
Trump to tone it down so he can quietly
do the president’s bidding? Left: Trump
celebrates impeachment acquittal.How unusual was Barr’s
intervention in Roger Stone’s case?
I think you’d have to say that the clos-
est thing we have seen to this was
President [Richard] Nixon and the
Saturday Night Massacre. That was
more severe, because Nixon actu-
ally fired people to stop or obstruct
an investigation. Trump and Barr
could’ve shut down the Stone pros-
ecution before the jury came back,
and they didn’t do it. On the other
hand, it is yet another breach of
norms in a pattern with Trump and
Barr. And even though they didn’t
shut down this investigation, we
now have, reportedly and allegedly,
somewhere between a half dozen to
a dozen other criminal investigations
that Barr may have shut down.What are you referring to?
Connecting dots between what the
Mueller Report said it was spinning
off and other reported investiga-
tions. For example, Michael Cohen
pleads guilty to aiding and abettingan unindicted co-conspirator in cam-
paign finance violations. It’s kind of
surprising that you have the aider
and abetter sitting in jail, and while
we know the identity of the princi-
pal, that principal has still not been
indicted. Why is that?Isn’t the answer that he’s president
and we’re waiting till he leaves
ofɿce?
That might be true. But we also had
other alleged or potential co-conspira-
tors in that case, who were mentioned
in either the indictment or in Michael
Cohen’s recordings of his calls with
Trump. Then there’s the investiga-
tion of whether the Trump inaugural
committee misspent money from
donations. A lot of strong evidence of
felonies has led nowhere so far.
There was an unnamed foreign cor-
poration that unsuccessfully fought
a Mueller subpoena, behind closed
doors, all the way to the Supreme
Court last March. We’ve heard no
more about it. There’s also Erik Prince,
being investigated for whether he lied
to Congress and other matters. There
may be innocent explanations. But
it’s a lot of investigations that seem to
have just gone dark. So when you line
up this Roger Stone interference, you
have to put that in the larger context.In an interview with ABC News,
Barr pushed back against Trump,
saying he would not be “bullied or
inʀuenced by anybody.Ť What do
you make of that?
Barr said Trump’s tweets “make it
impossible for me to do my job.” That
begs the question of what Barr thinks
his job is. To be the nation’s top lawNewsweek: Let’s talk about
Barr installing his own team of
lawyers to re-evaluate the way
career prosecutors have handled
politically sensitive cases. Have we
seen this before, and what does it
mean for the country?
JED SHUGERMAN: On the one hand,
this process of bringing in prosecu-
tors from other offices is not unprec-
edented, and in fact, the DOJ should
be doing this more often. Prosecutors
generally have too much discretion
and power. We need more supervi-
sion and transparency in an era of
partisanship, mass incarceration and
prosecutorial overreach. But the risk
here, especially with Barr’s extensive
track record of bias and an agenda, is
that this outside supervision is being
cherry-picked to create a team of pros-
ecutors under Barr’s supervision and
Barr’s obvious partisan agenda.
This is precisely why we have inde-
pendent special counsels. But this is
also why the special counsel regula-
tions are insufficient. It is time to pass
legislation to re-enact a truly indepen-
dent counsel and, even more impor-
tantly, to adopt structures of formal
independence—like a long term of
years, protections from removal, and
a bipartisan commission structure—
for parts of the DOJ like the Office of
Legal Counsel, the Inspector General,
and perhaps the DOJ overall.“There may be
innocent e[planations.
But it’s a lot of
investigations that
seem to have
Must gone dark.ŤNEWSWEEK.COM 15
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