Attorney General William Barr will testify before Congress on Tuesday for the first time in more than a year.
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesAttorney General William Barr will issue a vigorous defense of the Trump administration’s deployment of federal agents in response to nationwide protests over racial injustice and of his leadership of the Justice Department more broadly when he testifies before Congress on Tuesday for the first time in more than a year.
According to prepared remarks released late Monday, Mr. Barr will dispute accusations that he has repositioned the Justice Department to favor President Trump, setting the stage for a showdown with Democrats who plan to press him on a number of controversial steps, including his personal intervention in criminal cases involving Mr. Trump’s allies. Republicans will seek to portray Mr. Barr as a defender of the rule-of-law seeking to restore order both on the streets and inside the Justice Department after investigations consumed much of Mr. Trump’s first two years in office.
“My decisions on criminal matters before the department have been my own, and they have been made because I believed they were right under the law and principles of justice,” Mr. Barr plans to say in opening remarks.
He also intends to condemn demonstrators for inciting violent clashes with federal agents in Portland, Ore., and other cities and blame antipolice rhetoric for spikes in urban crime.
Trump administration officials say federal agents were sent to Oregon to protect federal property, but local officials have demanded they leave, questioning their authority to make arrests and detain protesters, sometimes while heavily camouflaged and hard to identify.
State leaders have also said the tactics of federal agents have energized the protests rather than calm them. The protests were sparked by the May killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
Democrats also plan to press Mr. Barr on a wide range of issues during his first appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, which had been planned for March but was rescheduled due to concerns about the coronavirus.
Since his last appearance before lawmakers, Mr. Barr has been the force behind a number of high-profile actions that have drawn scrutiny, as he moves to put his personal stamp on the Justice Department.
“There is so much to cover,” said Rep. Madeleine Dean, (D., Pa.), a member of the committee, where Mr. Barr is appearing for the first time. “Under his watch, I am gravely worried about the rule of law and our precious constitution … so there’s an awful lot to ask.”
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The Justice Department’s inspector general last week said his office is investigating the actions of federal agents responding to protests near the White House, where officers used smoke bombs and other munitions after Mr. Barr ordered them to clear protesters before an appearance by Mr. Trump in June.
Mr. Barr plans to decry Mr. Floyd’s death while defending American policing more broadly, reiterating his belief that law enforcement agencies aren’t plagued by systemic racism. The Justice Department is conducting a federal civil-rights investigation into Mr. Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis police custody.
“Largely absent from these scenes of destruction are even superficial attempts by the rioters to connect their actions to George Floyd’s death or any legitimate call for reform,” Mr. Barr plans to say.
Lawmakers also will likely inquire about his leadership more broadly, including his personnel changes that paved the way for him to install close allies in key posts and his involvement in multiple cases against the president’s former advisers, which isn’t unheard of but very rare, current and former department officials have said.
Without citing specific cases in his opening statement, Mr. Barr plans to say that his decisions haven’t been influenced or directed by the White House or anyone else.
“Ever since I made it clear that I was going to do everything I could to get to the bottom of the grave abuses involved in the bogus ‘Russiagate’ scandal, many of the Democrats on this Committee have attempted to discredit me by conjuring up a narrative that I am simply the president’s factotum who disposes of criminal cases according to his instructions,” Mr. Barr plans to say.
He was referencing special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation that Mr. Barr has long criticized, which led to the convictions of five Trump advisers and the indictment of two dozen Russians, including Russian intelligence officers. A Senate bipartisan report also found that Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 investigation.
Democrats plan to ask him about Mr. Trump’s decision this month to commute the sentence of his longtime informal adviser Roger Stone. Mr. Barr intervened to seek a lesser sentence for Mr. Stone, after prosecutors had filed a request that aligned with sentencing guidelines for Mr. Stone’s conviction for lying to Congress and witness tampering. But people close to him have said that in earlier conversations he recommended against granting him clemency.
Mr. Trump stopped short of pardoning Mr. Stone, which would have cleared his record of felony convictions.
Lawmakers will also likely ask about the Justice Department’s move to drop the case against Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but later accused agents of trying to set him up. The department said it wasn’t convinced prosecutors could prove the case against Mr. Flynn.
Democrats have said Mr. Barr’s actions are politicizing the department. Last month, they called to testify a pair of career Justice Department officials who described flagging morale and how political appointees had intervened in criminal and antitrust cases to advance the interests of the president and Mr. Barr.
Republicans counter that his forcefulness is necessary, and want details of his inquiry into the origins of the FBI’s Russia investigation, for example. The Justice Department’s inspector general found a number of errors in the agency’s pursuit of a wiretap of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, and Mr. Barr has suggested without elaborating that his own investigation has found other missteps.
“Bill Barr is doing the Lord’s work trying to clean it up so that it doesn’t happen again,” Rep. Jim Jordan, the committee’s ranking Republican, said during the earlier hearing.
Mr. Barr’s abrupt June firing of former Manhattan U.S. attorney Geoffrey Berman, whose office has led investigations into many of Mr. Trump’s allies, including Rudy Giuliani, will also be on the Democrats’ agenda. Mr. Berman told the panel earlier this month that the attorney general’s “irregular and unexplained actions” made him concerned for the future of continuing investigations. Mr. Barr has denied anything improper about Mr. Berman’s dismissal.
Mr. Berman’s former deputy, Audrey Strauss, is now heading the office of the Southern District of New York on an acting basis, and officials have said the investigations would continue uninterrupted.
Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com
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