Mazie Hirono Blasts Barr

Mazie Hirono’s full comments to Barr are transcribed below:

 Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Barr, now the American people know that you are no different from Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway or any of the other people who sacrifice their once decent reputation for the liar who sits in the Oval Office.


[You] once turned down a job offer from Donald Trump to represent him as his private attorney. At your confirmation hearing, you told Sen. Feinstein that the job of attorney general is not the same as representing ... the president. So you know the difference. You’ve chosen to be the president’s lawyer and side with him over the interest of the American people.

To start with, you should never have been involved in supervising the Robert Mueller investigation. You wrote a 19-page unsolicited memo, which you admit was not based on any facts, attacking the premise of half of the investigation. And you also should have insisted that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein recuse himself. He wasn’t just a witness to some of the president’s obstructive behavior; we now know he was in frequent personal contact with the president, a subject of the investigation. You should have left it to career officials.

Then once the report was delivered by the special counsel, you delayed its release for more than two weeks and let the president’s personal lawyers look at it before you even deigned to let Congress or the public see it. During the time, you substituted your own political judgment for the special counsel legal conclusions and in a four-page letter to Congress — and now we know, thanks to a free press, that Mr. Mueller wrote you a letter objecting to your so-called summary.

 When you called Mueller to discuss his letter, the reports are that he thought your summary was giving the press, Congress, and the public a misleading impression of his work. He asked you to release the report summaries to correct the misimpression you created, but you refused.

When you finally did decide to release the report, over a congressional recess and on the eve of two major religious holidays, you called a press conference to once again try to clear Donald Trump before anyone had a chance to read the special counsel report and come to their own conclusions.

But when we read the report, we knew Robert Mueller’s concerns were valid and that your version of events was false. You used every advantage of your office to create the impression that the president was cleared of misconduct. You selectively quoted fragments from the special counsel report, taking some of the most important statements out of context and ignoring the rest. You put the power and authority of the office of the attorney general and the Department of Justice behind a public relations effort to help Donald Trump protect himself.

Finally, you lied to Congress. You told Rep. Charlie Crist that you didn’t know what objections Mueller’s team might have to the March 24 so-called summary. You told Sen. Chris Van Hollen you didn’t know if Robert Mueller supported your conclusions — but you knew you lied, and now we know.

A lot of officials were surprised by your efforts to protect [the president], but I was unsurprised. You did exactly what I thought you would do. It is why I voted against your confirmation. I expected you would try to protect the president, and, indeed, you did in 1989. This isn’t something you hadn’t done before. In 1989, when you refused to show Congress an OLC opinion that led to the arrest of [Panamanian leader] Manuel Noriega in 1992, when you recommended pardons for the subjects of the Iran-Contra scandal and last year when you wrote the 19-page memo telling Donald Trump that, as president, can’t be guilty of obstruction of justice and then didn’t recuse yourself from the matter.

From the beginning, you were addressing an audience of one, that person being Donald Trump. That is why before the bombshell news of yesterday evening, 11 of my Senate colleagues and I called on the Department of Justice Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate the way you have handled the Mueller report.

I wanted them to determine whether your actions complied with the department’s policies and practices and whether you have demonstrated sufficient impartiality to continue to oversee the 14 other criminal matters that the special counsel referred to other parts of the Department of Justice.

But now we know more about your deep involvement and trying to cover up for Donald Trump. Being attorney general of the United States is a sacred trust. You have betrayed that trust. America deserves better. You should resign.



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https://www.vox.com/2019/5/1/18525727/william-barr-testimony-mazie-hirono-senate