Bill Barr Gets Served With Legal Papers At His Home In Virginia

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Ex-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen has sued Trump and ex-Attorney General Bill Barr over a particular aspect of his treatment while serving out a sentence on a range of charges, and now, Cohen’s legal team has revealed the news that Barr has been successfully served with a summons in the case. The proceedings hinge on the fact that Cohen was pressured to sign an agreement restricting his ability to freely speak in the media and elsewhere in order to obtain home confinement, and when his side questioned the measure, Cohen was sent back to jail. This, Cohen says, was a violation of his free speech rights. He was known to be prepping a book critical of Trump when the government unveiled these measures.

Andrew Laufer, a lawyer for Cohen, wrote on Twitter this Thursday that he could “confirm service of process was perfected personally upon the former attorney general William Barr this morning at his home in McLean, Virginia. At the time of service, Mr. Barr was wearing shorts and did not appear happy.”

Back when the initial situation was first unfolding, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein ordered Cohen to be sent back to home confinement, saying that he concluded that “the purpose of transferring Mr. Cohen from furlough and home confinement to jail is retaliatory, and it’s retaliatory because of his desire to exercise his First Amendment rights to publish a book and to discuss anything about the book or anything else he wants on social media and with others.” Before starting his sentence, which covered offenses including his role in a hush money scheme targeting women with whom Trump had affairs, Cohen testified to Congress, where he revealed details of the Trump company’s corruption. Information that Cohen shared helped spark investigations into Trump in New York, where the former president and his business continue to face serious inquiries.

Cohen has stated that he believes there to be further criminal exposure within the Trump Organization, meaning that others could face criminal charges. He told CNN host Alisyn Camerota that he wanted “to make this promise to you and to all of your viewers, that I may have been prosecuted, and right now I am the only one, but I will not be the only one at the end of the day… for this crime and for others.” Charges have already been unveiled against the Trump company and its chief financial officer for a tax evasion scheme involving pricey executive benefits that were doled out at the company without the required taxes getting paid, and the New York criminal investigation that produced those charges remains ongoing.