New York City Bar Association asks Congress to investigate Barr conduct

The New York City Bar Association is calling on congressional leaders to launch an investigation into Attorney General William Barr, saying his public remarks threaten “public confidence in the fair and impartial administration of justice.”

“These public statements by Mr. Barr also contravene the norms applicable to his office and warrant further investigation by Congress as part of an inquiry into Mr. Barr’s conduct as Attorney General more generally,” the group wrote in a six-page letter sent Wednesday to the top Democrat and Republican in each chamber.

Among the examples cited by the bar association was an October speech at the University of Notre Dame, posted on the Justice Department website, in which the attorney general said “the founding generation … believed that the Judeo-Christian moral system corresponds to the true nature of man” and that “Judeo-Christian moral standards are the ultimate utilitarian rules for human conduct.”

Other examples cited in the letter include a speech Barr gave at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention in November, when he allegedly “vilified progressives,” and an interview last month where he “rejected the inspector general’s findings, asserting instead that a separate ongoing investigation into the FBI’s actions that he personally had directed would likely reach a different conclusion.”

The Justice Department’s inspector general released a report in December that found FBI agents were not motivated by political bias in opening investigations into associates of the Trump campaign in 2016. Barr later disputed some aspects of the report.

This is not the first time that the group has criticized Barr. In October, they called for Barr to recuse himself from a Justice Department review of the Trump administration’s dealings with Ukraine.