He served as Chief Judge from February 12, 2013 until February 11, 2020 and remained on the bench until his confirmation as Attorney General. In addition to being a published author in the Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal, Attorney General Garland has taught as a professor at Harvard Law School, served as the president of the Board ...
Before becoming a federal judge, Attorney General Garland spent a substantial part of his professional life at the Department of Justice. He served in both career and non-career positions under five Attorneys General, including as Special Assistant to the Attorney General, Assistant United States Attorney, Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Criminal Division, and Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General. In those roles, his responsibilities spanned the work of the Department, including criminal, civil, and national security matters. They also included direct supervision of investigations and prosecutions of national importance , including the Oklahoma City bombing, Unabomber, and Montana Freemen cases.
He returned to the Department of Justice as Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia from 1989 to 1992. After briefly returning to Arnold & Porter in 1992, Attorney General Garland continued his career in public service as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Criminal Division.
Durham was appointed by Barr last year to investigate the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe, shortly after special counsel Robert Mueller completed his yearlong investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to influence the 2016 presidential election.
attorneys and FBI officials have been working to follow up on specific complaints and information they have received, but have not uncovered enough evidence that would change the outcome of the election.
For Trump’s defenders, Barr’s summary is a godsend, a vindication of the president’s assertion that he committed “no collusion.” For staunch supporters of the “ unitary executive ,” it is a satisfying affirmation of Trump’s sweeping powers to manipulate his subordinates to protect his own skin. For the rest of us, the summary is a riddle, opaque in its reasoning and premature in its conclusions. Barr has provided Trump with a partisan victory, ably discharging the duties he was likely chosen to perform. But he has also provided one more reason why the public must see the full Mueller report as soon as possible.
That conclusion will come as a great relief to the president and his supporters, if Mueller’s report is as clear-cut as Barr indicates. But the attorney general’s summary includes a second finding that is confusing and equivocal. Mueller, Barr wrote, left “unresolved” the question of whether Trump obstructed justice. He instead laid out “evidence of both sides” and allowed Barr, along with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, to use those findings to determine whether the president committed obstruction. On the basis of this evidence and analysis—which we cannot yet evaluate—Barr and Rosenstein decided that Trump did not commit such an offense.
First, Barr wrote an op-ed defending Trump’s decision on the grounds that Comey’s “controversial actions” concerning Hillary Clinton’s email controversy gave “the impression that the FBI was enmeshed in politics” and that the president was right to “make a fresh start.”. Trump quickly obliterated this pretext when he admitted ...
But Barr provided a clue to his reasoning, by suggesting that he did not see evidence Trump hampered the Russia probe with “corrupt intent.” As former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal has noted, it is hard to understand how Barr, or Mueller, or anyone, could gauge Trump’s intent, because the president has not been interviewed about his intentions. Why not? We know at least one person vigorously opposed to compelling Trump to submit to an interview: Bill Barr, whose 2018 memo declared that Mueller could not legally do so.