Oh, sh**. Oh, dear. Whatever shall we do? Surely, Attorney General Bill Barr must resign when faced with such disapproval. Where is my fainting couch?

Nearly 2000 former Justice Department officials have signed onto a letter calling for Attorney General William Barr to resign over what they describe as his improper intervention in the criminal case of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Last week, the DOJ moved to drop charges against Flynn who had pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the former Russian ambassador during the presidential transition.

The letter, signed mostly by former career officials in the department, accuses Barr of joining with President Trump in “political interference in the Department’s law enforcement decisions.”

“Attorney General Barr’s repeated actions to use the Department as a tool to further President Trump’s personal and political interests have undermined any claim to the deference that courts usually apply to the Department’s decisions about whether or not to prosecute a case,” reads the letter, which was organized by the group ‘Protect Democracy’.

Protect Democracy is run by former Obama administration goons who have spent the last four years fluffing anyone who seemed like they could advance the Russia hoax. (Sadly, there is a former RedState front page writer on the list of Board Members…but these are truly weird times). If the name of the group and the “noble prosecutors offended by it all” schtick seems familiar that is because it is. In May 2019, shortly after Robert Mueller delivered the report that it was pretty obvious he’d never read and had only been briefed on it in a cursory fashion, this same group demanded, this time a mere 1027 former Justice Department officials, demanded that Trump be prosecuted for obstruction (funny how no one has talked about this word since the Mueller Report fizzled out, isn’t it?):

We are former federal prosecutors. We served under both Republican and Democratic administrations at different levels of the federal system: as line attorneys, supervisors, special prosecutors, United States Attorneys, and senior officials at the Department of Justice. The offices in which we served were small, medium, and large; urban, suburban, and rural; and located in all parts of our country.

Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.

The Mueller report describes several acts that satisfy all of the elements for an obstruction charge: conduct that obstructed or attempted to obstruct the truth-finding process, as to which the evidence of corrupt intent and connection to pending proceedings is overwhelming. 

The letter is going to have zero impact on anything that Barr does. The very fact that you can claim upholding a basic sense of fairness and obedience to judges’s orders and Supreme Court decisions in the conduct of prosecutions is inimical to the mission of the Justice Department, or, conversely, that justice and fair play are ideas that exist only in the political realm, shows the deep level of rot an corruption with that agency. It gives the impression that these people are ruled totally by their won-lost ratios and that any admission that a miscarriage of justice has taken place is an affront to their tribal honor. The fact that his group of miscreants can find 2000 such sociopaths who were actually capable of putting people in prison is terrifying. Barr should immediately start a probe of every case  handled by everyone who signed this petition and, where warranted, recommend executive clemency and initiate disciplinary proceedings.

It also shows the degree to which Justice, at the career level, has become a private fiefdom of the Democrat party. You can’t read the arguments put forth by US Attorney Jeffrey Jensen for dismissal of the case…and the mindboggling stupid defense of the Flynn procedure (read these posts from my colleague shipwreckedcrew)…without realizing that what is going on here is simply partisan Democrats who used to work a Justice showing that they are perfectly happy defending a grotesque mockery of our legal system so long as they perceive that the outcome, that would be an innocent man bullied into pleading guilty to a crime he did not commit, damages Trump.

While this letter will have no impact on Barr he should not ignore it. He should use these 2,000 names as a point of departure to carve out the rot in his agency. Those people left footprints. There are people who hired them, who mentored them, who championed their careers still in the Department of Justice. Surely some of those people were well aware that they were supporting, if not an outright sociopath, someone who was 100% in favor of using the power of the Justice Department to further partisan goals. You can bet that if they did it for one passionate leftist, they did it for many. Antonio Gramsci’s ‘Long March Through the Instituions’ is not a solo activity. Now is the time to find them and send them packing so they can sign the next letter demanding Barr’s resignation.