For the third time this year, hundreds of former Justice Department workers are publicly denouncing Trump attorney general William Barr.
In a letter to Michael Horowitz, the department’s inspector general, more than 1,250 former Justice officials and staffers say they are “deeply concerned” about Barr’s actions and those of the department against “lawful gatherings to protest the systemic racism that has plagued this country throughout its history.”
The group asked Horowitz to “immediately open and conduct an investigation of the full scope of the Attorney General’s and the DOJ’s role” in that and other events relating to the nationwide protests and marches, the Washington Post reports.
The protests were triggered by the death of George Floyd while he was in police custody late last month in Minneapolis.
Wednesday’s letter, published on line by medium.com, emphasized that the writers were “disturbed” by Barr’s role “ordering law enforcement personnel to suppress a peaceful domestic protest in Lafayette Square” on Monday, June 1, to let Trump “walk across the street from the White House and stage a photo op at St. John’s Church….”
The letter called that “a politically motivated event in which Attorney General Barr participated.”
Barr has said he stands by his decision, sees nothing wrong with the president walking to the church, and defends the actions of park police and other law enforcement officers in and around Lafayette Park.
Earlier this year, on two occasions, former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials have called for Barr to resign.
In February, more than 1,100 ex-Justice workers denounced Barr for intervening to lower sentencing recommendations for Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone.
And in May, upwards of 2,000 former Justice employees called on Barr to step down after Barr sought to drop the case against Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.
In a Post opinion piece on Wednesday, columnist Dana Milbank asks a pointed question:
“Get the feeling law enforcement in this country is being run by a middle-school bully?”
Milbank goes on to highlight an article in a little-known Florida newspaper back in 1991, in which a former classmate, Jimmy Lohman, calls Barr “a classic bully” and a “power abuser” in school in the 1960s.
Milbank spoke by phone with Lohman, who said Barr “lived to make me miserable,” with a “vicious fixation on my little Jewish ‘commie’ ass,” because, Lohman said, he wore peace-sign and racial-equality pins.
“The 1991 description of 1963 Barr’s harassment sounds eerily like the 2020 Barr,” Milbank says.
