New reports
reveal wider role for Barr and Pompeo in impeachment scandal
Attorney
general and secretary of state both reportedly took part in contacts between
Trump and foreign leaders
Tom
McCarthyin New York
@TeeMcSee Email
Tue 1 Oct
2019 03.01 BSTLast modified on Tue 1 Oct 2019 03.29 BST
Barr was
previously reported to be ‘surprised and angry’ to find his name mentioned in a
summary of a call between Trump and the Ukrainian president.
An effort
in recent months by Donald Trump to rewrite the history of the 2016 US
presidential election and set up a 2020 re-election victory was both more
geographically sprawling and reliant on the day-to-day participation of top
cabinet members than previously reported, it emerged on Monday.
Both
William Barr, the attorney general, and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state,
collectively participated in contacts between Trump and leaders of at least four
foreign countries, according to multiple reports.
Those
contacts were variously aimed at producing stories that could damage Joe Biden,
Trump’s potential 2020 opponent, or at producing stories that could undermine
the US intelligence community assessment from 2017 of Russian election
tampering in the last election, the reports said.
An
impeachment inquiry launched last week in the House of Representatives was
sparked by known Trump administration contacts with one country, Ukraine. But
the picture of Trump’s outreach to additional potential foreign partners, and
the scope of involvement of top government officials in the effort, was quickly
changing.
Barr and
Pompeo – whose vast portfolios nominally run from administering criminal
justice in the United States to securing international alliances and combating
threats abroad – have separately tried to distance themselves from the
avalanching revelation that Trump’s conduct of the matters of state has
apparently, in significant proportion, been devoted to the pursuit of the
president’s personal bugbears and ambitions.
Barr was
previously reported to be “surprised and angry” to find his name mentioned in a
summary of a call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, while Pompeo, when
asked what he knew about that phone call, replied that he had not seen a copy
of the whistleblower document that flagged it: “I haven’t seen the complaint,”
he told ABC News.
In fact,
Pompeo reportedly took part in the call, according to the Wall Street Journal,
citing a senior state department official. For his part, Barr flew to Italy and
to London to ask for help in “investigating” the roots of the Russia
investigation, the Washington Post reported. Trump also asked the Australian
prime Scott Morrison for help, and Morrison agreed to assist, something first
reported by the New York Times, and confirmed by the Australian government.
“It should trouble all of us that the attorney
general is flying overseas and spending his time focused on discrediting the
origins of the Mueller probe instead of combating crime here in the US,”
tweeted the former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti. “His personal
involvement reinforces the view that he does Trump’s bidding.”
“Pretty
clear that Barr is working feverishly [with] Trump to produce some kind of
anti-Mueller report,” tweeted the MSNBC host Chris Hayes.
The justice
department defied that characterization, issuing a statement Monday describing
Barr’s work as business-as-usual to support the US attorney John Durham’s
ongoing investigation of the FBI’s former investigation of Russian election
tampering. The justice department opened the counter-investigation following
Trump’s repeated claims that his campaign, which had serial secret contacts
with Russian operatives, had been unfairly targeted for scrutiny.
“At
attorney general Barr’s request, the president has contacted other countries to
ask them to introduce the attorney general and Mr Durham to appropriate
officials,” the spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said.
Mike Pompeo
reportedly took part in a phone call between Trump and the president of
Ukraine.
Foreign
officials could have information useful to Durham because the investigation of
Trump’s campaign began with a tip to the FBI from an Australian diplomat that a
Trump aide had drunkenly told him about a Russian offer of “dirt” on Hillary
Clinton.
But it was
very unusual for the attorney general, much less the president, to be
personally involved at such lengths in an internal investigation, even where
foreign contacts are required, former federal prosecutors said.
“In a real
investigation, all that is needed is a request from a line prosecutor to the
foreign country, made through the [justice department] Office of International
Affairs, and pursuant to the terms of a mutual legal assistance treaty,”
tweeted Harry Sandick, a former prosecutor in the southern district of New
York. “No calls from the president are involved.”
Trump’s
exertions to rewrite the history of the 2016 election and win re-election next
year are the focus on an impeachment inquiry, which he appears to want to beat
by exploiting the powers of his office to tar his political opponents as
corrupt.
After the
impeachment inquiry was announced last week, the Trump administration
intensified an investigation of communications between career public servants
and Clinton, who found scandal by setting up a private server to host her
correspondence as secretary of state.
Pompeo
oversees the internal state department investigation – but has refused questions
about it.
“I tried to
ask [Pompeo] today why he is targeting veteran diplomats for routine emails
when they had nothing to do with that private server,” the NBC News anchor
Andrea Mitchell tweeted Monday. “He turned his back and walked away.”
When a
summary appeared last week of the July phone call between Trump and the
Ukrainian president, the scope of involvement by the Trump administration
seemed at first to be limited. Trump had mostly used his personal lawyer, Rudy
Giuliani, to pursue his project, it seemed.
But that
picture has quickly changed. The release of a whistleblower report Thursday
suggested an active role by Barr, and said that a dozen US officials had
listened to the Trump-Ukraine phone call, and that summaries of the call had been
distributed more widely – raising the question of what proportion of Trump
administration energies in recent months have been devoted to Trump’s pet
projects.
“The
America First crowd is jeopardizing our national security,” tweeted Barack
Obama’s former speechwriter Jon Favreau, “by pressuring foreign governments to
help them discredit our intelligence officials and rig our elections.”
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