THE DECK HAS BECOME STACKED AGAINST THE PRESIDENT

Barr accuses Democrats of 'using every tool' to 'sabotage' Trump

by Caitlin Yilek

Washington Examiner
November 16, 2019

Attorney General William Barr accused Democrats of waging a “scorched earth, no-holds-barred war” against President Trump to “sabotage” his presidency.

Democrats’ investigations into Trump and the subpoenas related to them are meant to “incapacitate” his presidency, the top Justice Department official said Friday in a scathing address to the conservative Federalist Society.

“I am concerned that the deck has become stacked against [the president],” Barr said. “In recent years, both the legislative and judicial branches have been responsible for encroaching on the presidency’s constitutional authority.”

The remarks came on the second day of public testimony in the impeachment process over allegations that Trump abused his power by pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while his father was still vice president.

“Immediately after President Trump won the election, opponents inaugurated what they called ‘The Resistance,’ and they rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver available to sabotage the functioning of his administration,” Barr said.

“Now, ‘resistance’ is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power. It obviously connotes that the government is not legitimate. This is a very dangerous — indeed incendiary — notion to import into the politics of a democratic republic. What it means is that, instead of viewing themselves as the ‘loyal opposition,’ as opposing parties have done in the past, they essentially see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government,” he continued.

Barr added the Democrats’ tactics are a “systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law.”