Gone rogue

Pelosi: Attorney General Barr has 'gone rogue'

By QUINT FORGEY

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday asserted that Attorney General William Barr had “gone rogue” in his handling of an explosive whistleblower complaint that allegedly implicates him in efforts by President Donald Trump to solicit foreign interference in the 2020 election.

“He’s gone rogue,” Pelosi said of the attorney general in an interview with MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

“I think where they're going is a cover-up of the cover-up, and that's really very sad for them,” she added.

The attorney general on Wednesday became ensnared in the rapidly escalating controversy surrounding Trump’s phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, when the White House made public a readout of the July conversation.

The call summary shows that Trump urged the newly elected leader to work with Barr to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company. An anonymous whistleblower complaint released Thursday reported that Barr “appears to be involved” in Trump’s push for a probe into the Bidens.

The complaint also alleges that White House officials were alarmed by Trump’s call with Zelensky, and later tried to "lock down" details of the conversation.

The Justice Department denied Wednesday that Barr had been asked to work with Ukraine on a Biden investigation, and a department spokeswoman told POLITICO the president never requested that the attorney general investigate Biden in a matter separate from the Ukraine scandal.

Though the intelligence community’s inspector general deemed the complaint’s allegations credible and “urgent,” acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire initially refused to turn over the document to Congress.

Maguire acknowledged Thursday that he first discussed the complaint with the White House counsel’s office before consulting with the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which determined the complaint did not meet the legal definition of “urgent” because Trump is not an employee of the intelligence community.

“To have a Justice Department go so rogue — well, they had been for a while — and now it just makes matters worse that the attorney general was mentioned, that the president was mentioned, and yet the Justice Department directed the director of national intelligence to take this to the White House,” Pelosi said Friday.

Maguire has defended his management of the complaint, telling lawmakers Thursday: “This has never happened before. This is a unique situation.”

Pelosi said Friday she “felt sorry” for Maguire, but insisted he “broke the law” by refusing to immediately provide the complaint to members of Congress. His decision to instead approach White House and Justice Department lawyers, she said, was “not highly unusual,” but “unique. Wrong.”

Pelosi on Tuesday threw her support behind an impeachment inquiry into the president, declaring that Trump had perpetrated a “betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections.”