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- Bill Barr texted Trump’s impeachment lawyer saying, “You are a STAR.”
- He sent the text while Trump’s defense team settled arguments for his first impeachment.
- Barr repeatedly fought for Trump throughout his presidency before being forced to resign.
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As President Donald Trump’s first Senate impeachment trial neared completion, Attorney General William Barr texted Trump’s attorney congratulating him on his performance.
“You are a STAR,” Barr wrote to Pat Cipollone, who was also Trump’s White House attorney at the time. That’s according to a mine of text messages the Justice Department released this week.
Barr sent the text to Cipollone on January 30, 2020, as Trump’s defense team reached the end of its argument against Trump’s conviction and impeachment.
At the time, the House of Representatives indicted Trump for abuse of power and obstructing Congress. The charges were linked to his months-long efforts to force the Ukrainian government to launch politically motivated investigations targeting Joe and Hunter Biden in an attempt to undermine Biden’s viability as a Democratic presidential candidate.
While demanding investigations, Trump also ordered the suspension of nearly $ 400 million in vital military aid to Ukraine and suspended a White House meeting that Volodymyr Zelensky, the newly-appointed Ukrainian president, was desperately seeking.
During Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, the president’s defense team argued that the charges against him were unconstitutional and should be dismissed. Although Barr praised Cipollone on his performance, most observers pointed out that the defense team’s arguments were light on the facts and heavy on hyperbole and misinformation.
Among other things, they falsely claimed:
- That Trump did not make security assistance or a White House meeting conditional on Zelensky launching the investigations;
- There was no quid pro quo;
- Zelensky and other senior Ukrainian officials were not aware of the security assistance hiatus until late August 2019, more than a month after a July 25 phone call in which Trump pressured Zelensky to let him launch the Biden probes;
- That no witness has testified to being aware of “any link” between military aid and political investigations;
- That Trump was a better friend and a bigger supporter of Ukraine than his predecessor, Barack Obama.
Cipollone, for his part, claimed that Trump’s impeachment was an “effort to reverse” the 2016 impeachment results and to “interfere” in the 2020 election. And Ken Starr, the former Whitewater special prosecutor who was also on Trump’s impeachment defense team, said impeachment should not replace the ballot box.
Throughout the trial, Cipollone and other Trump defense attorneys repeatedly equated impeachment with an attempt to overthrow a legitimately elected president. But the Constitution gives the House of Representatives the “exclusive power to remove” the president for treason, corruption and other serious crimes and misdemeanors.
Barr, meanwhile, has gained a reputation for defending Trump and functioning more as his personal defense attorney than the country’s chief law enforcement officer since being confirmed as attorney general in early 2019.
Trump has often praised him in public and called Barr “my attorney general.” But Barr’s fortunes worsened in 2020, when he couldn’t find sufficient evidence to support Trump’s claim that the FBI launched the investigation into Russia in an attempt to sink his presidency.
Trump’s anger at Barr reached a boiling point towards the end of the year, when the attorney general refused to publicly endorse his conspiracy theory that the presidential election had been “rigged” and he was. stolen. The straw came when, contrary to Trump’s claims, Barr told reporters in December 2020 that the Justice Department found no evidence of widespread election fraud nationwide.
He resigned less than two weeks later, although Trump continued to pressure the department to support his allegations of electoral malfeasance and has repeatedly called on senior department officials to force states off the battlefield. not to certify Biden’s victory.
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