Barr's contentious congressional hearing

Five takeaways from Attorney General Barr's contentious congressional hearing

Amber Phillips

Attorney General William Barr testified for the first time in his tenure in front of a critical congressional audience - a House Judiciary Committee with a Democratic majority - as the Justice Department faces questions from critics who say it is helping President Donald Trump politically in ways ranging from policing and protests to intervening in criminal investigations of Trump allies.

"In your time at the department," Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said in his opening statement, "you have aided and abetted the worst failings of this president."

Barr came ready to defend himself from such accusations, an opportunity Republicans on the committee repeatedly gave him.

Here are five takeaways from Barr's testimony.

1. He is all in as a partisan player

By now, Barr has established himself as a loyal defender of Trump, willing to make decisions that at the very least give the appearance that Barr is doing Trump's personal bidding. Barr denies politics play a role in his decisions while leading the Justice Department.

But on Tuesday, he did little to dissuade the criticism that Trump's personal desires influence him. In his efforts to defend himself, Barr painted Trump as the consummate professional president, giving Barr "complete freedom" to do what he needs. "From my experience, the president has played a role properly and traditionally played by presidents," Barr testified.

We don't know what happens behind closed doors between Trump and Barr, but Barr's projection of the president is just not consistent with the president's public comments on law enforcement, which he regularly attacks when investigations don't go his way.

In his written opening statement, Barr accused Democrats in Congress of trying to "discredit" him. And he echoed Trump's words about the nationwide protests against racial injustice. He downplayed the central theme of Black Lives Matter - police brutality. "The threat to black lives posed by crime on the streets is massively greater than any threat posed by police misconduct," his statement read.

And Barr asserted that his repeated efforts to change the direction of investigations of Trump allies were influenced only by the rule of law.

"I am supposedly punishing the president's enemies and helping his friends," Barr said. He challenged his critics to point to one enemy he has unfairly indicted.

On the friends front, Barr said, "The president's friends don't deserve special breaks, but they also don't deserve to be treated more harshly than other people."

He referred to two recent controversies:

- Reducing Roger Stone's prison sentence, an act that led all four federal prosecutors on the case to resign from the case in protest. One testified to Congress last month that the Justice Department reduced the sentence for "political reasons." (Stone got the lower sentence, then Trump commuted that sentence altogether. Barr has implied he doesn't agree with the commutation.) "Do you think it's fair for a 67-year-old man to be sentenced to prison for seven to nine years?" Barr said.

- Doing an about-face on former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, dropping charges that Flynn had previously pleaded guilty to. "There was no basis to investigate Flynn," Barr said of the FBI. (Justice Department officials involved in the investigation at the time disagree.)

But his opening statement moved neither side. "Your opening statement reads like it was written by Alex Jones or Roger Stone," Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., told Barr, referring to two combative Trump allies.

2. Under increased scrutiny, Barr is not backing down from sending federal agents into cities

There is a chasm between how Barr, Trump and their Republican defenders in Congress view federal police presence in U.S. cities and how Democrats and many protesters see it.

Barr is arguing that Portland, Ore., officials abdicated their duty to keep the peace and that federal officials had to take over to protect the federal courthouse.

"What unfolds nightly around the courthouse cannot reasonably be called a protest; it is, by any objective measure, an assault on the government of the United States," Barr said in his opening statement.

Democrats argue that Trump is co-opting federal law enforcement for his political benefit, mainly to scare suburban voters into voting for him and to distract from his failure to keep the coronavirus in check. And they accuse Barr of being a willing ally.

"The president wants footage for his campaign ads, and you appear to be serving it up to him as ordered," Nadler said. (One of the Trump campaign's most recent ads was filled with fiery scenes of urban unrest and contained this warning: "You won't be safe in Joe Biden's America.")

The protests across the country in the wake of George Floyd's killing in Minneapolis in May had been fizzling - until Barr sent federal agents to Portland, where there were still some nightly clashes between protesters and police. That has stirred up more protests across the nation.

Now the Justice Department inspector general's office is investigating federal police actions against protesters in Portland, where demonstrators report being clubbed and thrown into unmarked vans. The inspector general's office will also look at what happened in D.C., where in June federal agents fired chemical agents at peaceful protesters, clearing a park across from the White House before Trump stood for a photo opportunity in front of a damaged church.

Barr is also sending federal police to other cities as part of what he says is a separate project to help fight violent crime, not quell protests. Some mayors, including in Chicago and Kansas City, Mo., have said they'll cautiously welcome the help as long as it's not targeted at stirring up trouble on the streets.

"Understandably, Americans are very suspicious of your motives here," Nadler said.

3. Barr doesn't think police have a racism problem

On the major topic of the day - police brutality and what the Justice Department can do about it - Barr was willing to acknowledge some racial inequities in how police treat black Americans. But he referred to it as a past issue in his opening statement: "Given our history, it's understandable that among black Americans, there's some ambivalence and often distrust toward the police. Until just the last 50 years ago or so, our laws and our institutions were explicitly racist, explicitly discriminatory."

More often than not, under questioning, Barr was not willing to say there is systemic racism among police in the United States. He tried to cite statistics that show the opposite. Barr said he's seen studies that said "police are less likely to shoot at a black suspect, a little more likely to shoot at a white suspect."

He also cited Washington Post tallies of police shootings that show eight unarmed black men have been fatally shot by police in 2020, compared with 11 unarmed white people. What Barr did not mention was that white people make up much more of the U.S. population than black people, and when you look at the data in a more representative way, black people are unequivocally shot by police at a higher rate than white people.

Senate Republicans, seeing that even white Americans support the Black Lives Matter protests drawing attention to this cause, have been willing to acknowledge that police target black people at a higher rate. They quickly put together a police reform bill, which failed.

Barr and Trump have disagreed with them.

4. Barr doubled down on raising fears about voting by mail

Barr has said multiple times that he's worried about foreign actors manipulating voting by mail at a large scale in November. He repeated that Tuesday.

But Barr has no evidence to back up that concern, and election officials say what he's warning about is unlikely.

Here's the deal: Among the five states that vote by mail statewide and the thousands of absentee ballots cast every year, there is no evidence that voting by mail leads to substantial voter fraud.

A number of states have practices to confirm absentee ballots, making them difficult to impossible to duplicate on a massive scale. To do so, bad actors would have to know a person's personal signature and correct address. They would have to mail ballots in the same envelopes that the state is using in a way that doesn't attract election officials' attention by duplicating ballots among those who have voted. All of this from a foreign country.

What some election experts warn is more likely than widespread fraud is that Barr and Trump's comments lead to widespread suspicion about the outcome of the race.

If Trump were to clearly lose and not leave office, claiming fraud, there would be nothing clear in the rule book for what to do then.

At the least, Barr responded under questioning that if a president clearly loses an election, the president has no remedy with which to contest it.

5. Barr hesitates to say a president shouldn't accept foreign help to get elected

In probably one of the most stunning exchanges of the day, Barr at first did not denounce clearly illegal behavior. The question was prompted by Rep. David N. Cicilline, D-R.I..

Cicilline: Is it ever appropriate, sir, for the president to solicit or accept foreign assistance in an election?

Barr: It depends what kind of assistance.

Cicilline: Is it ever appropriate for the president or presidential candidate to accept or solicit foreign assistance of any kind in his or her election?

Barr: No, it's not appropriate.

Foreign help in an election is absolutely illegal, of any kind. Trump was impeached by the House in late 2019 for trying to get Ukraine to make former vice president Joe Biden, now his 2020 opponent, look bad.