Three dozen members of the House of Representatives introduced a resolution on Tuesday calling for an inquiry into the possible impeachment of Attorney General William Barr because he “abused the power of his office” to improperly investigate marijuana businesses and allegedly engaged in other unlawful conduct.
The resolution, which is being led by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), states that the attorney general “has taken deliberate actions that violate the rights of the American people, assault the principle of impartial administration of justice, and undermine the constitutional structure of separation of powers across three co-equal branches of Government.”
It says that Barr “abused the power of his office to initiate pretextual antitrust investigations into ‘unpopular’ American corporations in the cannabis, automobile, and technology industries.”
That allegation comes from a Justice Department whistleblower who publicly revealed this month that 10 antitrust investigations targeting cannabis companies were launched at the direction of the attorney general, who was said to have made the decision based on his personal animus for the industry.
“He’s using antitrust not for the purpose of helping consumers and businesses that might be disadvantaged by monopoly, but doing it as a vehicle for his social policies, which is unheard of,” Cohen told Marijuana Moment in a phone interview, referring to the attorney general.
The whistleblower didn’t see “any practices that are antitrust in nature, but they said the problem was on the fifth floor, which is where Barr’s office resides and apparently he doesn’t like marijuana so he went after them,” the lawmaker said.
At a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week, the whistleblower argued that there wasn’t an appropriate basis for the investigations, which at one point accounted for one-third of Justice Department Antitrust Division cases.
The department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, to which the complaint was referred, ultimately concluded that no rules had been violated in ordering the investigations, regardless of the allegation about Barr’s prejudice. That said, the matter is also separately being looked into by the inspector general, according to a June memo.
“I think it’s just unfortunate what they’re doing,” Cohen said of the memo.
While the new resolution states that other unrelated “investigations misused the resources Congress appropriated for the Department of Justice to harass and intimidate companies based on President Donald J. Trump’s whims and without a proper legal predicate for such investigations,” the whistleblower specified that the marijuana-specific inquiries were connected to Barr’s alleged bias, not the president’s.
However, he did make clear that department resources were wasted and questioned the factual basis for the investigations. All told, across six of the 10 investigations for which data are available, 5,965,000 documents were produced by the cannabis companies under inquiry. A small fraction were actually reviewed by Justice Department personnel.
Published: June 30, 2020
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