A Special Counsel Must Investigate Rudy Giuliani and Bill Barr
The whistle-blower’s complaint raises serious allegations about the president’s personal lawyer and his attorney general.
Believe it or not, it’s time for a new special counsel investigation.
Not targeting Donald Trump himself: Congress can and will investigate the president in the course of its impeachment inquiry.
But as a result of the whistle-blower complaint, a separate investigation does need to get underway immediately. The Department of Justice must investigate Rudy Giuliani’s potential crimes in trying to get Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 U.S. election. It also needs to investigate whether White House officials criminally covered up evidence of Trump’s call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
And because the whistle-blower complaint alleges that the top law enforcement official in the federal government, Attorney General William Barr, “appears to be involved” in these events, a special counsel must be appointed. Barr obviously must recuse himself: He has a conflict of interest and, more to the point, he is a potential target of the criminal investigation. (A Justice Department spokeswoman has said Barr was unaware of Trump’s call with Zelenskiy until a whistle-blower’s complaint about it was forwarded to the agency in late August, and that Barr never discussed with Trump investigating former Vice President Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine.)
To be clear, Congress should not wait on the results of this special counsel investigation to continue its own inquiries. That’s unnecessary, because Congress is appropriately focused on whether Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors, not on whether anyone else may have committed a federal crime. It would also obviously be absurd to put a hold on the congressional inquiry to wait for a Department of Justice investigation to conclude.
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