The attorney general, while a political appointee, is bound first and foremost not to the whims and personal interests of the president, but to the law. An enduring lesson of the Watergate scandal, and the norm that attorneys general and presidents from Ford through Obama have upheld since, is that while presidents may set broad policy on law-enforcement priorities, the Justice Department should act independently from the White House when it comes to individual criminal cases.
Representative Thomas Jenckes, the Rhode Island congressman who led the charge to establish the Department of Justice in 1870, underscored the importance of federal lawyers who would act independently of politicians: “The humblest servant of the Government should not be at the mercy or the caprice of the most distinguished politician,” he said in an address in Boston in 1868. “Let every man who may receive a commission from the United States know that he holds it from the people, in service of the people.”
Barr never seems to have gotten that message. His tenure has been defined by dismantling the norm of the Justice Department’s independence from partisan politics and the president’s personal interests. His intervention in criminal proceedings against one of the president’s friends last week, a wildly inappropriate move that led to the resignation of four federal prosecutors from the case, was only the latest travesty on Barr’s watch.
The prosecutors had recommended a seven- to nine-year prison sentence for Roger Stone, a Trump confidant who was convicted of seven felonies, including threatening a witness with physical harm, lying under oath, forging documents, and interfering with a congressional investigation (the results of which, coincidentally, could have damaged the president’s reputation). Barr’s memo recommending a lighter sentence followed President Trump’s tweet on Feb. 11 that called the prosecutors’ recommendation “horrible and very unfair.”
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