AG Bill Barr belittled the idea that lower level attorneys within his own DOJ have any power to make decisions on how the agency is run, equating that notion to toddlers running a preschool during scathing remarks given Wednesday as part of a speech at Hillsdale College event.
“Letting the most junior members set the agenda might be a good philosophy for a Montessori preschool, but it’s no way to run a federal agency,” AG Barr said during his speech, according to multiple reports. “The notion that line prosecutors should make the final decisions at the Department of Justice is completely crazy.”
AG Barr did not mention any prosecutors by name, but warned of what he called a “permanent bureaucracy” in Washington, D.C., that seeks to control and manipulate power.
“Now you have to call your adversary a criminal, and instead of beating them politically, you try to put them in jail,” Barr said, decrying what he said amounts to a “criminalization of politics.”
AG Barr has taken flak for his strong defense of President Trump’s executive authority.
“Unfortunately over the past several decades we have seen the steady encroachment on executive authority by the other branches of government,” Barr said during a speech late last year. “
I’m concerned that the deck has become stacked against the executive and that since the mid-’60s there’s been a steady grinding down of the executive branch’s authority that accelerated after Watergate.”
