Donald Trump clearly thinks very highly of his presidential power. This week, in response to a viral Bill Barr interview with ABC News in which the attorney general insisted that Trump had never directly asked him to intervene in any criminal case, Trump rushed to Twitter to pompously insist that while supposedly true, he could supposedly request case intervention if he wanted to. In other words, the president has again resorted to the, uh, “defense” of “I didn’t do it! But if I did, there’d be nothing wrong with that!” Presumably, if Hillary Clinton did it, there’d be everything wrong with presidential intervention in a criminal case, though.
Trump tweeted:
‘“The President has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case.” A.G. Barr This doesn’t mean that I do not have, as President, the legal right to do so, I do, but I have so far chosen not to!’
“The President has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case.” A.G. Barr This doesn’t mean that I do not have, as President, the legal right to do so, I do, but I have so far chosen not to!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 14, 2020
Did Trump even attempt to consult with any actual legal expert of any sort before making this proclamation? Probably not. He’s already repeatedly publicly insisted that Article 2 of the Constitution supposedly gives him the power to do whatever he wants; why should anyone believe that he’s going to give up that claim now?
The funny thing is that apparently Trump stopped reading and/or watching that Barr interview mid-sentence. In ABC’s online coverage of the Attorney General’s remarks, literally the end of the sentence in which Barr claims that Trump has never asked for intervention features the attorney general insisting that Trump should stop tweeting about the Justice Department. Barr claimed that the tweets, which often contain clear attempts at judicial interference, “make it impossible for me to do my job.” Yet here’s Trump, tweeting about the Justice Department.
Check out Twitter’s response below…
