William Barr texts Trump Lawyer Pat Cipollone ‘You’re a STAR’

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William Barr texted Trump’s impeachment lawyer saying, “You’re a STAR.” He sent out the text as Trump’s defense team was wrapping up arguments on his first impeachment. Barr repeatedly went for Trump throughout his presidency before being forced to resign. See more stories on the Insider business page. LoadingSomething is loading.

As President Donald Trump’s first Senate impeachment trial is about to wrap up, Attorney General William Barr texted Trump’s attorney to congratulate him on his performance.

“You’re a STAR,” Barr texted Pat Cipollone, who was also Trump’s White House counsel at the time. That’s according to a trove of text messages released by the Justice Department this week.

Barr sent the text to Cipollone on Jan. 30, 2020, when Trump’s defense team reached an end to the argument against Trump’s conviction and removal from office.

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At the time, the House of Representatives impeached Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction in Congress. The charges relate to his one-month effort to strongly arm the Ukrainian government in launching investigations targeting Joe and Hunter Biden in an attempt to break Biden’s viability as a presidential candidate. Democratic.

While demanding the investigations, Trump also ordered the handling of nearly $ 400 million in valuable military aid to Ukraine and hung out at a White House meeting in front of Volodymyr Zelensky, then Ukraine’s newly inaugurated president, which he desperately sought.

At Trump’s Senate impeachment hearing, the president’s defense team said the allegations against him were unconstitutional and should be dropped. Although Barr congratulated Cipollone on his performance, most observers said the defense team’s arguments were light on facts and heavy on hyperbole and misinformation.

Among other things, they claim:

Trump did not condition security assistance or the White House meeting into Zelensky’s launch of investigations; There is no quid pro quo; Zelensky and other high-level Ukrainian officials did not know about the pause in security assistance until the end of August 2019, within a month after a phone call on July 25 in which he insisted Trump asked Zelensky to launch questions on Biden; No witness testified knowing of “any link” between military aid and political investigations; Trump is a good friend and a stronger supporter of Ukraine than its predecessor. , Barack Obama.

Cipollone, for his part, said Trump’s impeachment was an “effort to overturn” the results of the 2016 impeachment and “interfere” with the 2020 election. And Ken Starr, the former Whitewater special prosecutor who also served on Trump’s impeachment defense team, said the impeachment shouldn’t have played a ballot box.

Throughout the trial, Cipollone and other defense attorneys repeatedly compared the impeachment to an attempt to overthrow a legitimately elected president. But the Constitution gave the House of Representatives the “sole power to impeach” the president on accusations of treason, bribery, and other high-profile crimes and misdemeanors.

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Meanwhile, Barr has built a reputation for harassing Trump and functioning more as his personal defense attorney than the nation’s chief law enforcement officer since being confirmed as attorney general in early 2019.

Trump often praised him publicly and referred to Barr as “my attorney general.” But Barr’s wealth took over in 2020, when he couldn’t find enough evidence to support Trump’s claim that the FBI launched an investigation into Russia in an effort to drown out his presidency.

Trump’s anger at Barr reached a boiling point by the end of the year, when the attorney general refused to publicly endorse his conspiracy theory that the presidential election had been “manipulated” and stolen from him. The last straw came when, contrary to Trump’s claims, Barr told reporters in December that the Justice Department had discovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud nationwide.

He resigned in less than two weeks, but Trump continued to pressure the department to support his mismanagement claims and repeatedly asked senior department officials to force battlefield states not to confirm the victory of Biden.

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