Trump pressures Barr to research Bidens as election nears

President Donald Trump on Tuesday called on Attorney General William Barr to immediately launch a study of Democrat Joe Biden and his son Hunter, effectively demanding that the Justice Department muddy his political opponent and abandon its historic resistance to getting involved in elections.

With just fourteen days to go before Election Day, Trump for the very first time explicitly called on Barr to investigate the Bidens and even pointed to the nearing Nov 3 election as reason that Barr shouldn't delay taking action.

“We’ve surely got to get the legal professional general to do something,” Trump said in an interview on “Fox & Friends.” “He’s surely got to act, and he’s got to act fast. He’s surely got to appoint somebody. That is major corruption, and this has to be known about before the election.”

Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University, suggested that Trump’s pressure campaign on Barr has moved into uncharted territory for presidential politics.

“The question is, Does Barr rot the guidelines and reforms from the post-Watergate era and progress with this?” Zelizer said. “We are seeing a total politicization of the justice system in the final stages of an election.”

Trump's pressuring of Barr comes as national and battleground polls show him facing an extremely narrow way to reelection. The president has repeatedly cited Hunter Biden’s past -often with unsubstantiated claims - as grounds that voters can’t trust Biden in the White House.

The president has been promoting an unconfirmed New York Post report published the other day that cites a contact in which the official from Ukrainian gas company Burisma thanked Hunter Biden, who served on the business's board, for arranging for him to meet Joe Biden during a 2015 visit to Washington. The Biden campaign has rejected Trump's assertion of wrongdoing and noted that Biden's schedule didn't show a gathering with the Burisma official.

Trump has yet to specify what crime he believes the Bidens have committed, but which has not stopped him from going as far as suggesting to voters that Biden belongs in jail.

The Justice Department didn't react to requests for touch upon the president’s call for an investigation.

The president’s attempts to darken Biden's reputation in the ultimate lap of the election echo his “lock her up” attacks in 2016 on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who faced FBI scrutiny in the final months of the campaign over her utilization of a private email server while conducting STATE DEPT. business.

Trump is wanting to use all levers of power at his disposal as he struggles to get ground on Biden. He has also expressed increasing anger over the resistance of the Justice Department for some of his appeals.

Furthermore to his call for a Biden probe, the president is becoming frustrated with Barr over the pace of the Justice Department's investigation in to the origin of the Russia probe, which will not be completed by Election Day.

Trump and his allies had high hopes for the probe, led by Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, betting it could expose what they believe is wrongdoing when the FBI opened a case into if the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia to sway the 2016 election.

But a year . 5 in, there’s been only one criminal case: a former FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to altering a government email in regards to a former Trump campaign adviser who was simply a target of secret FBI surveillance.

Trump’s hasn't hidden his frustration. He recently retweeted a photography of Barr with the caption "for the love of GOD ARREST SOMEBODY.” Throughout a rally in Arizona on Monday, he suggested Biden will be in prison if Barr wasn’t such “an extremely nice man.”

“I know people that could experienced him locked up five weeks hence,” Trump said. “Bill Barr is an extremely nice man and an extremely fair man. And in many ways, it doesn’t make some people happy.”

Barr has privately expressed frustration over the president’s public pronouncements. Although Barr is broadly in agreement with Trump on the need to investigate the origins of the Russia probe, he’s often bemoaned Trump’s insufficient understanding about the intricacies of the legal system and the steps that need to be taken to complete an investigation.

As the election nears, Barr has kept a lower profile, limiting his amount of time in front of the cameras to avoid facing direct questions from the media about Trump’s demands for greater Justice Department involvement in the election.

The department on Tuesday announced a landmark antitrust case in Washington against tech giant Google, but Barr was in Florida speaking at a police conference. Barr also offers remained relatively quiet after U.S. attorneys announced charges against several men accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democratic ally of Biden's.

“He’s toned it down, but it’s hard to really know what else may be going on behind the scenes,” Carl Tobias, a constitutional law expert at the University of Richmond, said of Barr.

While Barr has kept less profile in recent week, he has publicly sided with Trump on election matters. He said foreign nations could print counterfeit ballots, something intelligence officials say there’s no evidence of and would be almost impossible. After Trump encouraged NEW YORK voters to vote twice to try to test the machine, which is illegal, Barr declined to definitively say it had been illegal, instead saying he wasn’t acquainted with the laws atlanta divorce attorneys state.

Trump’s require a Justice Department investigation of the Bidens came just one single day after 11 GOP House members sent a letter to Barr calling for a particular prosecutor to probe whether Biden received foreign money during his tenure in the National government and if he allowed Hunter Biden “to peddle usage of his father with foreign business entities.”

R. Michael Cassidy, a legal ethics expert at Boston College’s law school, said the push could possibly be at odds with the department’s historical resistance to getting involved in shaping elections, but he added that Barr - similar to the president who appointed him - has demonstrated a willingness to bend norms.

“Remember, it is the same lawyer general who said that stay-at-home orders imposed at the state levels were the greatest intrusion on civil liberties since slavery,” Cassidy said. “He is a norm breaker. He’s not really a traditional attorney general.”