Attorney General William Barr will face questions from lawmakers for the first time in more than a year Tuesday in what is expected to be a showdown over his interventions in the criminal cases of President Donald Trump’s allies and his role in deploying federal agents to confront protesters demanding racial justice in Washington and across the country.
For Barr, a seasoned attorney general who does not hesitate to speak his mind, the hearing before the House Judiciary Committee will offer the highest-profile platform to date to explain his rationale for the protest response and other issues, like voter fraud and the special counsel’s Russia investigation.
But lawmakers on both sides who have already made up their minds on his tenure plan to use the hearing to advance divergent arguments about the Trump administration aimed as much at voters in the presidential election in November as at Barr.
Democrats who run the House Judiciary Committee intend to advance a case against the Trump administration’s response to the nationwide protests that grew out of the killing of George Floyd while he was in police custody in Minneapolis.
They also plan to portray Barr as wielding his power as the nation’s top law enforcement officer to serve the president’s personal interests. Democrats will ask about his intervention to recommend a shorter prison sentence for Trump’s longtime friend Roger Stone on seven felony crimes — a sentence that Trump has since commuted — and to drop a charge against former national security adviser Michael Flynn even though he had pleaded guilty.
“Are you the AG for the country, or are you the AG for the president?” said Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., author of a sweeping policing overhaul bill that passed the House last month and that Barr opposes. “Do you represent the American people, or is it your job to protect, to cover up and to facilitate corruption?”
Republicans, echoing Trump’s own dire election-year messaging, will seek to celebrate Barr as a defender of the rule of law from those who they see as trying to use Floyd’s death as cover to attack the police and to endanger communities.
“You’ve got all this violence going on, and Democratic mayors in these cities across the country are just bowing to the mob, and yet they try to criticize the attorney general when his using federal law enforcement is protecting federal property and, more importantly, enforcing federal law,” said Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the panel.
“The attorney general is doing an outstanding job,” he added.
Republicans are also likely to press for details about the investigation of a criminal prosecutor, John H. Durham, appointed to scrutinize the Trump-Russia inquiry that could shape voters’ views of Trump this fall.
No Cabinet secretary relishes testifying before lawmakers conducting oversight, but Barr has been unusually successful in avoiding trips to Capitol Hill. He has never appeared before the House judiciary panel, which has oversight responsibility for the Justice Department, including during his first stint as attorney general under President George Bush. And he has not testified before Congress at all since May 2019, when he appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to answer questions about the report by the special counsel, Robert Mueller.
Long lists of topics for lawmakers to question him on have accumulated in the meantime. The committee has about 40 members, each of whom will get five minutes to question Barr, so the hearing is likely to last much of the day.
House Democrats have long wanted to question him on his handling of the Mueller report. A federal judge has said that in summarizing it himself before releasing it, Barr put forward a “distorted” and “misleading” account that torqued public understanding of it in a way that favored Trump.
The House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend holding Barr in contempt over his defiance of a subpoena for grand jury evidence gathered by the special counsel’s investigation shortly thereafter, although the full House later decided to instead fight him in court for those materials, and, more recently, some of its members have said he should be impeached.
But many other flashpoints have come and gone since then, and more recent fights may dominate the hearing. For example, Democrats are expected to try to press him on the Trump administration’s aggressive use of federal agents at protests after the police killings of Floyd and a Kentucky woman, Breonna Taylor.
The Justice Department’s independent inspector general has announced an investigation into the federal response, including the disputed and violent clearing of protesters from Lafayette Square near the White House last month before a photo opportunity for Trump in front of a church. The attorney general accompanied the president, and the White House initially said Barr had ordered the clearance, although he later said he had not given a “tactical” order.
Barr has since become the face of a Trump administration vow to send a surge of federal agents into cities to battle violent crime for an effort he is calling Operation Legend, which he has said would include 200 agents in Chicago and Kansas City, Missouri, as well as three dozen in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Against the backdrop of the disputed use of federal agents to confront protesters and protect federal buildings in Portland, Oregon, the announcement received major attention.
But pressed for details, a Justice Department spokesperson has refused to answer questions about specifics of the operation.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said she was prepared to challenge Barr on what she said was a double standard in supporting Americans protesting coronavirus-related stay-at-home orders while opposing those protesting police violence and racism.
“The ways Barr has undermined that and moved toward simply satisfying the president’s needs is quite stunning,” she said.
Democrats will also press Barr on accusations raised in a hearing last month that he has politicized high-profile criminal and antitrust cases, including the decisions to scrutinize California’s emissions deal with automakers after Trump attacked it and to harass marijuana sellers in states that have legalized the substance.
They may also ask about Trump’s firing last month of Geoffrey S. Berman as the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan. Berman has privately told congressional investigators that Barr unsuccessfully pressured him to resign.
Barr and Republicans may be more eager to talk about his appointment of Durham to investigate the law enforcement and intelligence officials who sought to understand Russia’s attempt to tilt the 2016 election in Trump’s favor and scrutinized links to the Trump campaign.
Breaking with Justice Department practices not to publicly discuss open investigations or hint ahead of time that charges may be brought, Barr has repeatedly hinted at possible indictments and could provide new details. He has also suggested that he does not think long-standing department policy against taking actions that could affect elections applies to Durham’s work in the run-up to the general election in November.
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