Bill Barr’s Wild Month
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT NORMS are under siege. This month, when Attorney General William Barr committed the latest in a succession of aggressively political acts, he touched off a firestorm. The crisis began on February 11, when he intervened in the prosecution of Roger Stone, a longtime Trump associate, to ask for a lighter sentence than the one recommended by career prosecutors. Four prosecutors quit the case, with one resigning from the office. A few days later, it emerged that Barr had also quietly installed his own team of lawyers to re-examine a series of politically sensitive prosecutions, including that of Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. By February 19, close to 2,500 former Justice Department officials had signed an online petition calling for Barr’s resignation. The same day—after President Trump persisted in tweeting criticisms of judges and prosecutors despite Barr’s requests he stop—numerous newspapers reported Barr was weighing resigning. Within hours, a department spokesperson tweeted he had no such plans. (A day later, Stone was sentenced to 40 months, less than the original prosecutors sought. Trump continued his criticisms, hinting a commutation or pardon might be forthcoming.)
asked legal historian Jed Shugerman, an expert on the Justice Department, to put Barr’s conduct in a historical context. In
