MSNBC’s John Heilemann: There’s ‘Lawlessness at the Top of the Nation’s Top Law Enforcement Agency’

MSNBC’s John Heilemann: There’s ‘Lawlessness at the Top of the Nation’s Top Law Enforcement Agency’

MSNBC’s John Heilemann warned on Friday of lawlessness at the top of the Justice Department after its decision to drop the case against Michael Flynn. Flynn had plead guilty to lying to the FBI and his actions were key to understanding the Trump campaigns possible connections to Russia in 2016.

Heilemann told Morning Joe that Attorney General William Barr is exercising raw power on President Donald Trump’s behalf.

“There have been so many depredations and so many abuses and so many things that have troubled me, and I think should trouble everyone, Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal, about the way justice is prosecuted and not prosecuted in many administration over the course of the last three or so years,” Heilemann said.

“I really think this one is at the pinnacle of things that should be disquieting to people who think that — who rely on the notion that the Justice Department, in some measure, still pursues justice in an apolitical way. I think it’s just so — I have said since the Attorney general came in, since Bill Barr became attorney general, he’ easily the most troubling member of the Trump administration. I think it’s been obvious that he’s been pursuing a totally political agenda from the moment he walked in the door.”

“We’ve talked about it a hundred time on this show, Joe. You know the exercise of raw power that Barr executed on Donald Trump’s behalf with respect to, basically, throttling, killing, spinning, destroying any public prospect of the Mueller Report being read in the proper way, and read for what it said.”

Heilemann explained that Trump’s tweets and comments indicated that this decision was on the way.

“We’ve seen this, in some sense, coming the last couple years and yet you thought there was no possible way that any attorney general, given these circumstances, given the convictions, given the repeated admissions of guilt, given the plea agreements they led to, all of those things, that you could walk in and somehow get out of this.”

“And yet, here we are. I just think it speaks to lawlessness. Lawlessness at the top of the nation’s top law enforcement agency. That agency now operating in a purely political, totally — a totally political and way in which, in the pursuit of political ends, abuse of power in the most naked way is just the order of the day now at the DOJ.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.

Darragh Roche

Darragh Roche is Political Media Editor

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