President Donald Trump seems to be at his wits’ end with Attorney General Bill Barr.
In his first interview since the election, Trump questioned why Barr’s Justice Department has been “missing in action” as the president’s legal team pursues claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, Fox News reported.
Trump: The DOJ is MIA
Barr has long been a vocal defender of Trump, and he has been vilified like few Trump staffers as a lackey of the president, which makes his recent silence rather difficult to square with the caricature of an attorney general who “weaponized” the Department of Justice (DOJ) to serve Trump’s personal ends.
Besides issuing a memo to U.S. attorneys to investigate “substantial fraud” claims, Barr has remained mum as Trump alleges that Joe Biden and the Democrats stole the election, Fox notes.
Trump, for his part, sounded exasperated Sunday in an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo as he wondered why Barr and his DOJ were not doing more to investigate fraud.
“You would think if you’re in the FBI or Department of Justice, this is the biggest thing you could be looking at,” Trump said, according to Fox. “Where are they? I’ve not seen anything.”
He went on: “They just keep moving along and they go on to the next president.”
“An embarrassment to our country”
The president also expressed frustration Sunday over an apparent lack of progress in U.S. Attorney John Durham’s ongoing probe of the so-called Trump–Russia hoax, which Barr has overseen and which Trump and his base have hoped would conclude with some kind of reckoning for James Comey and other Trump foes who they say conspired to spy on the president and pursue him with baseless claims during his presidency.
“They lied to Congress, they lied, they leaked, they spied on our campaign,” Trump told Bartiromo, according to Fox. “Where are they with all of this stuff? And what happened to Durham? Where’s Durham?”
If Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20, it is likely that Durham’s probe will fizzle out, and with it, any hope of accountability for a spying scandal that Barr has called “one of the greatest travesties in American history.”
It is a scenario that Trump and his allies feared, and hoped to avoid, with increasing urgency leading up to the election.
“Why isn’t the FBI all over the place? They’re not, they’re not, it’s an incredible thing,” Trump said Sunday, according to Fox. “They’re not and it’s an embarrassment to our country.”
The post 'Where are they?': Trump questions why Barr's DOJ isn't looking into claims of voter fraud first appeared on Conservative Institute.
No comments: