Attorney General William Barr excoriated how former President Barack Obama’s Department of Education handled accusations of sexual misconduct on college campuses.
NBC News resurfaced an endorsement Barr wrote for the 2017 book Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities by K.C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor. The book argues that the process of adjudicating campus sexual misconduct accusations created by the Obama administration disadvantaged the accused.
The Department of Education, under the Obama administration, “created a regime of kangaroo justice” against those accused of sexual misconduct by “promulgating rules beyond its statutory authority, invoking erroneous data, and fanning the false narrative of ‘rape culture’ on college campuses,” Barr wrote.
“Male students accused of sexual misconduct are found guilty, their lives destroyed, by campus panels operating without any semblance of due process and all too frequently on the basis of grossly inadequate information,” Barr said.
Barr’s comments echo conservative critiques of the Obama administration’s Title IX regulations that outlined how universities should handle sexual misconduct and rape accusations.
The authors had asked Barr to write a review of the book, and Barr had agreed to the request, not expecting ever to serve as attorney general of the Justice Department again, according to Taylor.
