(Photo by: Shane T. McCoy / US Marshals)
An attorney who has served in the United States Department of Justice for the past 36 years is now resigning in protest over what he calls Attorney General Bill Barr's "slavish obedience" to President Donald Trump.
Phillip Halpern, who until recently spent decades working at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego, writes in the San Diego Union-Tribune that he's now "fleeing" the DOJ after having served "19 different attorneys general and six different presidents."
The chief reason, he says, is the way that Barr has turned the DOJ into the president's personal law firm that gives preferential treatment to his allies.
"Over the last year, Barr’s resentment toward rule-of-law prosecutors became increasingly difficult to ignore, as did his slavish obedience to Donald Trump’s will in his selective meddling with the criminal justice system in the Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and Roger Stone cases," he writes. "In each of these cases, Barr overruled career prosecutors in order to assist the president’s associates and/or friends, who potentially harbor incriminating information."
He also hammered Barr for parroting the president's baseless conspiracy theories about mail-in voting.
"This career bureaucrat seems determined to turn our democracy into an autocracy," he writes. "There is no other honest explanation for Barr’s parroting of the president’s wild and unsupported conspiracy theories regarding mail-in ballots."
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