GWU regrets giving Bill Barr an honorary degree

More than 80% of the faculty of George Washington University Law School, the alma mater of Attorney General William Barr, issued a scathing six-page letter this week condemning his conduct. “His actions have posed, and continue to create, a clear and present danger to the even-handed administration of justice, to civil liberties, and to the constitutional order,” it says.

  Forbes

Ouch.

Earlier this month, reports surfaced that faculty members were discussing the possibility of stripping Barr of the honorary degree he received from the law school in 1992 when he served his first term as Attorney General under President George H.W. Bush.

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Instead the discussion turned to the idea of writing a letter that would detail Barr’s misconduct. Faculty members circulated a draft and many agreed that the letter was the best way to take a stand.

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“We knew we were taking an extraordinary step,” says [Catherine Ross, who has been a professor of constitutional law at GW for 25 years]. “But he is our alumnus and we have honored him and we gave him a law degree. He is undermining the rule of law and corrupting the Department of Justice. If we don’t say anything it looks like we’re OK with it.”

The letter lays out four instances of Barr’s misconduct. They include his order to clear Lafayette Square, his misrepresentation of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Barr’s intervention in the sentencing of Robert Stone and his conduct in the Michael Flynn case.

The letter is strongly worded throughout. About Barr’s actions in the Stone case, it says, “This is not fidelity to the rule of law and to even-handed justice. It is fidelity to the whims of the President, the stuff of autocracies, not a constitutional republic.”

Some prominent members of the faculty declined to sign, including Jonathan Turley, who recently published an op ed in support of the Attorney General. “The letter makes a number of legal statements that I believe are contested, unestablished, or mistaken,” he wrote to Forbes in an email. Ross says she respects Turley’s decision but fundamentally disagrees.

While the letter was being circulated to faculty members, Barr fired Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, an action that was widely criticized as politically motivated. “The way the news was breaking, we decided we had to release the letter the way it was or it was going to become like the Oxford English Dictionary,” says Ross. “Every day we would have had to add a section.”

From the letter:

Sadly, in his current (second) term as Attorney General Mr. Barr has demonstrated repeated disregard of the principles for which our institution stands. Since 2019 Attorney General Barr has made the Department of Justice unrecognizable to those of us who prize its independence from politics and its commitment to the highest standards of the legal profession.

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William Barr’s actions as Attorney General since 2019 have undermined the rule of law, breached constitutional norms, and damaged the integrity and traditional independence of his office and of the Department of Justice.

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We regard Attorney General Barr’s purported summaries [of the Mueller report] as misleading and deceptive, and we must ask ourselves why he issued them. The only answer that seems plausible is that Attorney General Barr intended the result that Special Counsel Mueller warned about: i.e., to create public confusion about critical aspects of the Mueller investigation and to undermine full public confidence in the outcome of the investigation.

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[R]oughly 2,000 veterans of the Department of Justice (“DOJ Alumni”) joined in a Feb. 16, 2020 public letter criticizing the President and Attorney General Barr [for interfering in the sentencing of Roger Stone]. We borrow from that public statement in describing the significance of the Stone case. The letter explains:

[i]t is unheard of for the Department’s top leaders to overrule line prosecutors [who serve as civil servants without political appointments], who are following established policies, in order to give preferential treatment to a close associate of the President. That is what Attorney General Barr did in the Stone case. And, worse, he did so after the President publicly condemned the sentencing recommendation that line prosecutors had already filed in court.

We agree with the DOJ Alumni that the public could only conclude that the Attorney General believed that fulfilling the President’s personal wishes was more important than ensuring evenhanded justice for all federal criminal defendants.

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DOJ Alumni, including many who had protested the revised sentencing memorandum in the Stone case, also criticized the motion in the Flynn case. The Attorney General once again sought to do a favor for the President, despite Flynn’s lies to his superiors and to the FBI, and Flynn’s robust admission to criminal acts. As the DOJ Alumni put it in a public letter on May 11, 2020: “Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are autocracies, not constitutional republics.”

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Although Attorney General Barr has denied issuing any orders to the law enforcement officers [at Lafayette Square during a peaceful protest to violently clear the area], spokespersons for the Department of Justice and the White House have said he was in charge and gave the orders. We need not attempt to resolve those discrepancies here. It is undeniable that the Attorney General, who was on the scene, made no effort to assure that the First Amendment rights of lawful protestors were protected. He made matters worse by participating with President Trump in a photo opportunity in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, whose leaders had neither been asked for nor granted permission for partisan exploitation of their house of worship. At a critical moment in American history, Attorney General Barr could have been a leader in protecting Americans’ First Amendment right to express their outrage at our nation’s long history of institutional racism, and police brutality against people of color. Instead, Attorney General Barr stands on the wrong side of history.

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DOJ Alumni initially called upon Attorney General Barr to resign, though they conceded he was unlikely to do so. They requested that Congress exercise its oversight authority to review Barr’s official conduct and formally censure him. They further asked the Inspector General of the Department of Justice to initiate a formal inquiry into Barr’s conduct. We endorse all of those requests.

We express the most severe opprobrium for Barr’s actions as Attorney General. We are not motivated by political partisanship. We include members of both major political parties, and of none. We have different legal specialties and represent a broad spectrum of approaches to the law. Our diversity is a strength as we pull together to respond to a time of national crisis, exacerbated by an Attorney General who has fallen well below the minimal threshold his office requires.

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By this letter, we seek to demonstrate to our current and former students, our colleagues in the legal profession and legal academia, and the general public that we are deeply disturbed by Barr’s actions as Attorney General since 2019 and their implications for our democracy. Attorney General Barr has besmirched the basic values of our law school and the legal profession.

UPDATE: