Barr Is Said to Be Weighing Whether to Leave
Before Trump’s Term Ends
The attorney general’s future came into doubt after he
acknowledged that the Justice Department had not found evidence of widespread
voter fraud in the president’s election loss.
Attorney General William P. Barr is said to be
considering whether to leave office before the end of President Trump’s term.
By Katie
Benner, Michael S. Schmidt and Peter Baker
Dec. 6,
2020, 6:08 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON
— Attorney General William P. Barr is considering stepping down before
President Trump’s term ends next month, according to three people familiar with
this thinking. One said Mr. Barr could announce his departure before the end of
the year.
It was not
clear whether the attorney general’s deliberations were influenced by Mr.
Trump’s refusal to concede his election loss or his fury over Mr. Barr’s
acknowledgment last week that the Justice Department uncovered no widespread
voting fraud. In the ensuing days, the president refused to say whether he
still had confidence in his attorney general.
One of the
people insisted that Mr. Barr had been weighing his departure since before last
week and that Mr. Trump had not affected the attorney general’s thinking.
Another said Mr. Barr had concluded that he had completed the work that he set
out to accomplish at the Justice Department.
But the
president’s public complaints about the election, including a baseless
allegation earlier last week that federal law enforcement had rigged the
election against him, are certain to cast a cloud over any early departure by
Mr. Barr. By leaving early, Mr. Barr could avoid a confrontation with the
president over his refusal to advance Mr. Trump’s efforts to rewrite the election
results.
Mr. Barr’s
departure would also deprive the president of a cabinet officer who has wielded
the power of the Justice Department more deeply in service of a president’s
political agenda than any attorney general in a half-century. Conversely, it
would please some Trump allies, who have called for Mr. Barr to step down over
his refusal to wade further into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election
outcome.
Mr. Barr
has not made a final decision, and the prospect of him staying on through Jan.
20 remains a possibility, the people familiar with his thinking cautioned.
Should Mr. Barr step down before the end of the Trump administration, the
deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, would be expected to lead the
Justice Department until President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is sworn in.
A Justice
Department spokeswoman declined to comment. The White House had no comment.
Mr. Barr,
70, is the strongest proponent of presidential power to hold the office of
attorney general since Watergate. Soon after he was confirmed in February 2019,
he gained Mr. Trump’s trust and his ear. He managed to heal fissures between
the White House and the Justice Department that broke open when the president
learned that his campaign was under investigation related to Russia’s
interference in the 2016 election.
Like Mr.
Trump, Mr. Barr believed that the F.B.I. had abused its power in investigating
the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. An independent inspector general has found
that the bureau had sufficient reason to open the inquiry and that senior
officials there acted without political bias in doing so.
But weeks
after taking office, Mr. Barr released a summary of the report by the special
counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that a judge later called distorted and
misleading. He presented it in the best possible light for Mr. Trump before the
public could read it.
Mr. Barr
soon asked John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to open an
investigation into the Russia inquiry itself to seek out any wrongdoing under
the Obama administration.
While that
investigation has not yet produced the kind of results that Mr. Trump has
explicitly said he would like to see — including criminal charges against
former President Barack Obama and Mr. Biden, as well as the former F.B.I.
director James B. Comey — Mr. Barr has ensured that Mr. Durham’s work will
continue into the next administration. In October, he secretly appointed Mr.
Durham a special counsel assigned to seek out any wrongdoing in the course of
the Russia investigation.
Mr. Barr
revealed that appointment last week at the same time that he said he had not
seen evidence that voter fraud had affected the results of the election.
Pairing the Durham announcement with that revelation was widely seen as an
effort to placate Mr. Trump, who was said to be enraged that Mr. Barr had
publicly contradicted him.
Throughout
the presidential campaign, Mr. Barr was among the loudest voices warning that
mail-in ballots would result in mass election fraud. He routinely claimed in
speeches and interviews that the potential for widespread voter fraud was high
and posed a grave danger. Mr. Barr’s claims were sometimes false or exaggerated
and were widely refuted.
“I don’t
have empirical evidence other than the fact that we’ve always had voting fraud.
And there always will be people who attempt to do that,” Mr. Barr said in
September. He called his conclusions “common sense.”
And after
the election, Mr. Barr opened the door to politically charged election fraud
investigations, authorizing federal prosecutors to investigate “specific
allegations” of voter fraud before results were certified. Typically, the
Justice Department waits until after vote totals are certified to investigate
such suspicions in order to avoid shaking public confidence in elections.
At the same
time, Mr. Barr’s public appearances dwindled, and he did not comment on the
results or Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the outcome. But as the president’s
legal challenges hit a dead end, the pressure on Mr. Barr to speak out
increased when Mr. Trump suggested in an interview on Nov. 29 that the Justice
Department and the F.B.I. might have been “involved” in some sort of election
fraud.
“This is
total fraud. And how the F.B.I. and Department of Justice — I don’t know, maybe
they’re involved — but how people are allowed to get away with this stuff is
unbelievable,” Mr. Trump told the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.
Mr. Barr
broke his silence a few days later, telling The Associated Press that he had
not seen evidence of election fraud on a scale that would have changed the fact
that Mr. Biden won.
“To date,
we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome
in the election,” he said.
With Mr.
Barr’s departure, Mr. Trump would lose the cabinet official who has carried out
his agenda on policing, racial unrest, affirmative action and immigration.
Unlike officials who have privately denigrated Mr. Trump, department officials
and friends say that Mr. Barr agrees with most, if not all, of the president’s
positions, as well as his view that he was wronged by the Obama administration.
Mr. Barr
himself has taken umbrage at the notion that his actions that helped Mr.
Trump’s allies — reducing a sentencing recommendation for the president’s
longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr. on seven felony convictions and seeking to
withdraw the prosecution of Michael T. Flynn on a charge of lying to
investigators — were done at the president’s behest. He has publicly and
privately insisted that he would have made those moves no matter what because
he felt they were right.
When Mr.
Barr left the Justice Department in 1993 after serving as attorney general
under President George Bush, he became the general counsel of the
telecommunications company GTE Corp., which eventually became Verizon. That
stint at the company ended with a $10.4 million payout and made him a
millionaire many times over, making it unlikely that he will take another
full-time job after he leaves the department.
Michael S.
Schmidt is a Washington correspondent covering national security and federal
investigations. He was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 — one
for reporting on workplace sexual harassment and the other for coverage of
President Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia. @NYTMike
Peter Baker
is the chief White House correspondent and has covered the last four presidents
for The Times and The Washington Post. He also is the author of six books, most
recently "The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker
III." @peterbakernyt • Facebook
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