Attorney General William Barr has agreed to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee.
The hearing, which Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec described as a “general oversight hearing,” will take place on July 28.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler said over the weekend that he was planning to subpoena the attorney general.
Barr previously agreed to testify in March, but the hearing was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The announcement of the hearing comes after President Trump fired the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, whose office has been investigating Trump associates.
The judiciary panel has also invited Berman to testify at some point.
It is likely that the Barr hearing next month will cover a range of issues, including the attorney general’s actions during the protests in Washington, D.C., the Justice Department’s handling of cases related to Trump associates, and the investigation of the Trump-Russia investigators being carried out by U.S. Attorney John Durham.
The Justice Department’s announcement happened the same day that Nadler held a hearing on DOJ oversight.
“Mr. Barr’s actions make clear that in his Department of Justice, the president’s allies get special treatment, and the president’s enemies — real and imagines — are targeted for extra scrutiny,” the New York Democrat said.
“There is injustice at the Justice Department, ladies and gentlemen,” and “the sickness we must address is Mr. Barr’s use of the Department of Justice as a weapon to serve the president’s petty private interests,” Nadler added.
Rep. Jim Jordan retorted that Eric Holder, an attorney general under former President Barack Obama, openly referred to himself as Obama’s “wingman” as the Ohio Republican listed Obama-era targeting of journalists, Operation Fast and Furious, and Operation Chokehold. He also said the “Obama-Biden Justice Department spied on four Americans.”
“The Barr Justice Department is about correcting injustice,” Jordan said, also pointing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ordering the D.C. district court to grant the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the case against retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn earlier in the day.
The hearing additionally featured testimony from Aaron Zelinsky, a member of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, who led the successful prosecution of the longtime Trump associate Roger Stone. Zelinsky withdrew from the case in February, along with three other prosecutors, following the Justice Department’s decision to walk back its sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years in prison.
Zelinsky, who now works for the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland, testified that he saw the Justice Department “exerting significant pressure on the line prosecutors in the case to obscure the correct Sentencing Guidelines calculation to which Roger Stone was subject” and claimed that he “repeatedly” heard was that Stone “was being treated differently from any other defendant because of his relationship to the president.” He also testified that the now-former acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Timothy Shea, was “receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice to cut Stone a break and that the U.S. Attorney’s sentencing instructions to us were based on political considerations.”
Kupec responded by saying Barr “determined the high sentence proposed by the line prosecutors in the Roger Stone case was excessive and inconsistent with similar cases. She also pointed out that Judge Amy Berman Jackson “ultimately sentenced Mr. Stone to half the time that the line prosecutors had originally proposed.” Kupec denied White House involvement in the DOJ’s sentencing recommendations and said that Zelinsky’s claims were “based on his own interpretation of events and hearsay (at best), not firsthand knowledge.”
