BARR: VIRUS LOCKDOWNS ‘GREATEST INTRUSION ON CIVIL LIBERTIES’ SINCE SLAVERY

On Wednesday evening, U.S. Attorney General William Barr said the coronavirus lockdowns were the “greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history,” prefacing his statement with “other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint.”

The comments were made while speaking at a Constitution Day event at Hillsdale College, which commemorates the day in 1789 the Constitution was signed in Philadelphia. Hillsdale College is a private, conservative school in Hillsdale, Michigan about two hours southwest of Detroit. 

Barr has been a longstanding critic of many lockdown measures that resulted from the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

In April, his Department of Justice issued a memorandum to all U.S. attorneys to “be on the lookout for state and local directives that could be violating the constitutional rights and civil liberties of individual citizens,” reports Breitbart News, explaining that while there might be “reasonable and temporary restrictions” on some First Amendment rights for the sake of public health, they should not become an “overbearing infringement.”

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division subsequently took a stand against state and local governments that were severely restricting religious services. The division’s interventions often prompted a relaxation of the rules, according to Breitbart. 

Barr’s comments also immediately caused a stir across social media, as he blasted his own department and career staff for too often injecting themselves into politics and “headhunting” for high-profile targets. 

Barr said prosecutors always have sought to “amass glory” by prosecuting prominent people and the Justice Department was no exception. 

“I’d like to be able to say that we don’t see head hunting in the Department of Justice,” Barr said. “That would not be truthful. I see it every day.”

He did not cite any specific cases, but his comments appeared to defend his recent interventions into the prosecutions of both Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, two allies of President Trump who were convicted of lying to lawmakers and the FBI, respectively, during the Democrats’ failed Russia probe into 2016 election interference. 

During the speech, Barr also criticized the “criminalization of politics,” railing against television pundits for speculating whether an official’s action “constitutes some esoteric crime.”

“Now you have to call your adversary a criminal, and instead of beating them politically, you try to put them in jail,” Barr said, saying that America was becoming akin to an Eastern European country.

“If you’re not in power, you’re in jail – or you’re a member of the press,” he remarked. 

Barr went on to say (as prepared for delivery):

The most basic check on prosecutorial power is politics. It is counter-intuitive to say that, as we rightly strive to maintain an apolitical system of criminal justice. But political accountability—politics—is what ultimately ensures our system does its work fairly and with proper recognition of the many interests and values at stake. Government power completely divorced from politics is tyranny.

…

Line prosecutors, by contrast, are generally part of the permanent bureaucracy. They do not have the political legitimacy to be the public face of tough decisions and they lack the political buy-in necessary to publicly defend those decisions. Nor can the public and its representatives hold civil servants accountable in the same way as appointed officials. Indeed, the public’s only tool to hold the government accountable is an election — and the bureaucracy is neither elected nor easily replaced by those who are.

…

Name one successful organization where the lowest level employees’ decisions are deemed sacrosanct. 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. Good leaders at the Justice Department—as at any organization—need to trust and support their subordinates. But that does not mean blindly deferring to whatever those subordinates want to do.

…

Active engagement in our cases by senior officials is also essential to the rule of law. The essence of the rule of law is that whatever rule you apply in one case must be the same rule you would apply to similar cases. Treating each person equally before the law includes how the Department enforces the law.

We should not prosecute for wire fraud in Manhattan using a legal theory we would not equally pursue in Madison or in Montgomery, or allow prosecutors in one division to bring charges using a theory that a group of prosecutors in the division down the hall would not deploy against someone who engaged in indistinguishable conduct.

…

Taking a capacious approach to criminal law is not only unfair to criminal defendants and bad for the Justice Department’s track record at the Supreme Court, it is corrosive to our political system. If criminal statutes are endlessly manipulable, then everything becomes a potential crime.

…

This criminalization of politics is not healthy.  The criminal law is supposed to be reserved for the most egregious misconduct — conduct so bad that our society has decided it requires serious punishment, up to and including being locked away in a cage.  These tools are not built to resolve political disputes and it would be a decidedly bad development for us to go the way of third world nations where new administrations routinely prosecute their predecessors for various ill-defined crimes against the state.  The political winners ritually prosecuting the political losers is not the stuff of a mature democracy.

The remarks by the nation’s top cop sent liberal heads spinning. CNN’s Don Lemon was absolutely dumbfounded. “I don’t know what to say,” he said.