In scathing remarks against his own staff, AG Barr says the US Justice Dept. has recently acted “more like a trade association for federal prosecutors than the administrator of a fair system of justice,' and equated them to preschoolers and 'headhunters.'
“In case after case, we have advanced and defended hyper-aggressive extensions of the criminal law. This is wrong and we must stop doing it,” he said in a speech during Constitution Day events at Hillsdale College, a conservative and privately funded university in Michigan.
Barr said he is annoyed to hear the claim that political officials interfere in criminal prosecutions, given that all prosecutorial power is vested by law in the attorney general.Some career attorneys are not partisan, he said, but they are often less experienced than their supervisors. "Name one successful organization where the lowest level employees’ decisions are deemed sacrosanct," he said."There aren’t any. 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."in his prepared remarks.
“Obama had some of the people who were in Mueller’s office writing their briefs in the Supreme Court, so maybe that explains something.” The Obama record of wins at the Supreme Court was the worst in six decades, but President Trump has fared even worse, according to an analysis by legal scholars Lee Epstein and Eric Posner. But they note that the court has been steadily less deferential to each successive administration since President Ronald Reagan's two terms.Pete Williams is an NBC News correspondent who covers the Justice Department and the Supreme Court, based in Washington.
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