It's Sunday

Bill Barr gave a speech.

Holy shit!

No, I mean it.  That is some holy shit.  And some serious projection.

The Trump appointee described a “war” against a “duly elected government” at a conference of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group that has played a key role in the administration’s efforts to seat record numbers of right-leaning federal judges.

“The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of resistance against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law,” Barr told his audience of lawyers at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel.

  WaPo

What? They didn't hold it at a Trump hotel?

To critics, the speech was overly partisan and even “authoritarian.” It prompted some calls for Barr’s impeachment from lawyers and legal scholars, many of whom believe his views of presidential power are too expansive.

[...]

The speech drew praise, however, from Trump supporters who have long said the administration has been unfairly attacked. And inside the Mayflower Hotel, Barr got enthusiastic applause.

[...]

Barr recently declined Trump’s request that he hold a news conference defending Trump in the [impeachment] inquiry by saying the president broke no laws in a call to Ukraine’s president, sources familiar with the situation told The Washington Post.

Barr must be on an apology tour.

But the attorney general was vociferous Friday in his defense of Trump’s actions in office, saying legislators are the ones who have overstepped their bounds. Judges, too, have interfered with the president’s authority in recent years, he said.

“I don’t deny that Congress has some implied authority,” he said. “But the sheer volume of what we see today, the pursuit of scores of parallel investigations through an avalanche of subpoenas, is plainly designed to incapacitate the executive branch and indeed is touted as such.”

Touted as such by Republicans!

Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics attorney in the George W. Bush administration, called the attorney general’s statements “authoritarian,” comparing the Federalist Society talk to another Barr speech that criticized “radical secularists.”

Barr’s talk was “an attack on our Constitution and on the rule of law,” the University of Minnesota law professor tweeted.

[...]

His “vision of presidential power is contrary to the constitutional system of checks and balances that lies at the heart of our Constitution,” Neil Kinkopf, a law professor at Georgia State University, testified at hearings on Barr’s nomination.

The remarks about Democrats ignoring the rule of law were especially ironic because they came a mere hours after Roger Stone, one of Trump’s previous advisers, was convicted on all counts for lying to Congress during its probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

[...]

“Yesterday AG Barr addressed a radical political group and gave one of the most vicious partisan screeds ever uttered by a US cabinet officer,” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) tweeted Saturday morning. “Barr says trump should have king-like powers. Barr is a liar and a fanatic and should be impeached and stripped of his law licenses.”

  Mother Jones