Bill Barr Would Like to Undermine Your Faith in the Election – By Dahlia Lithwick (Slate) / Sept 16 2020
The attorney general cannot stop making evidence-free claims about threats to the election.
Bill Barr is on yet another one of his charm offenses. Well, you can’t really call it charming—but it is most certainly offensive.
All is not well at the Justice Department, for a change. Last week, we learned that Nora Dannehy had resigned suddenly and unexpectedly as No. 2 to Connecticut’s U.S. attorney, John Durham—the man helming the Barr-endorsed investigation of the FBI’s probe into the connections between Russia and the 2016 elections. According to Dannehy’s colleagues, the resignation was at least partly motivated “out of concern that the investigative team is being pressed for political reasons to produce a report before its work is done.” Last week also saw Deputy Assistant AG David Morrell—one of the DOJ lawyers handling the investigation into whether John Bolton released classified information in his book, among other things—announcing that he too was leaving the Justice Department and withdrawing from all his cases. And this week we also learned that the DOJ’s inspector general’s office has begun investigating the extremely hinky circumstances surrounding the final sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, a sentence lighter than recommended by career prosecutors who ended up walking off the case in protest.
But even as his dedicated employees race for the exits, Bill Barr trundles on, offering up a coy new interview with the Washington Post this week that characterized him as “lumbering and generously jowled,” a sort of Yogi Bear for the unitary executive set. He also did a friendly sit-down with the Chicago Tribune on Friday, in which he chuckled with John Kass about steakhouses, Chicago crime bosses, and re-upped his entirely imaginary claims about the perils of mail-in voting. And then there was this barnstormer appearance on CNN, when he assured Americans that their votes would be stolen. America’s lawyer is hard at work at the critical task of freaking out the electorate.
Continue to article: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/09/bill-barr-undermining-election-mail-voting.html
