Attorney General William Barr said claims that he is “punishing the president’s enemies” are false.
“I am supposedly punishing the president’s enemies and helping his friends. What enemies have I indicted? … Could you point to one indictment that has been under the department that you feel is unmerited? That you feel violates the rule of law? One indictment,” Barr said Tuesday morning in response to questions from Republican Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson during a House Judiciary Committee hearing.
“Because actually, what I’ve been trying to do is restore the rule of law. And the rule of law is, in essence, one rule for everybody. … I felt we didn’t have that previously at the department,” he said.
Barr oversees U.S. Attorney John Durham’s criminal inquiry into the Russia investigation. That effort, in which Barr expects “developments” by the end of the summer, could lead to indictments.
The attorney general then addressed the cases of Trump associate Roger Stone, whose prison sentence was commuted, and Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, whose case the Justice Department is trying to dismiss. Both cases were spinoffs from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
“Now, you say I helped the president’s friends. The cases that are cited, the Stone case and the Flynn case, both cases where I determined that some intervention was necessary to rectify the rule of law, to make sure people are treated the same. I said — Stone was prosecuted under me, and I said all along I thought that was a righteous prosecution. I thought he should go to jail, and I thought the judge’s sentence was correct. But the line prosecutors were trying to advocate for a sentence that was more than twice what anyone else in a similar position had ever served, and this is a 67-year-old man, first-time offender, no violence, and they were trying to put him in jail for seven to nine years. And I wasn’t going to advocate that. Because that is not the rule of law,” he said.
