, this issdale college a little more than an hour. A. G. Barr thank you very much. Im very honored to speak at this dinner, and i really appreciate your comments, larry. Great to get to know you. Ive been reading you over the years, and it is a real delight to have spent the evening with you. Im very pleased to speak to you at this Hillsdale College celebration of our magnificent constitution. Im a great admirer of hillsdale. I dont get to make many speeches like this. Im usually talking about crime rates and that kind of thing, but i wanted to speak at hillsdale, because it is one of the few maybe a handful of institutions of Higher Learning where it is actually worthwhile spending the money to get an education at. [applause] and i mean that sincerely. Sadly, many colleges these days dont teach the constitution, much less celebrate it. One out of every four americans dont know who we fought the revolution against. It is pretty pathetic and that number is increasing steadily as our educational institutions fail us, but at hillsdale, you recognize that the principles of the founding are as relevant today and as important today as ever and vital today to the survival of our great experiment here of freedom. I appreciate your observance and all you do for Civic Education and education, period, in this country. Now, when many people think of the virtues of our constitution, they first mention the bill of rights, of course. That is the talking point of the constitution, the bill of rights. You have rights. And i guess that makes sense. Thegreat legality is of bill of rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, especially, the right to keep and bear arms, just to name a few, are critical safeguards to our liberty, but as president reagan used to remind people, the soviet union had a constitution and even included some of these lofty sounding rights. Ultimately, however, those promises are just empty words , because there was no rule of law in that society to enforce them. The rule of law is a linchpin of American Freedom and the critical guarantee of the rule of law comes from the constitutions structure, the separation of powers. There are many elements of the rule of law, and there are many safeguards built into our great constitution, but tonight, i want to talk about the separation of powers. The framers recognized that by dividing the legislative executive and judicial powers, each significant, but each limited, they would minimize the risk of tyranny. That is the real genius of the constitution, and it ultimately is more important to securing liberty than the bill of rights. After all, the bill of rights is a set of amendments to the original constitution, i know you all know that the framers did not think it was needed. They did not need to include into the constitution an express enumeration of rights. Today, i want to talk about the powers that the constitution allocates to the executive branch, particularly in the area of criminal justice. The Supreme Court has correctly held that under article two of the constitution, that the executive has virtually unchecked discretion to decide whether or not to prosecute individuals for suspected crimes. We all know that, as the executive vested with the responsibility of seeing the at the laws are faithfully executed, the power to execute and enforce law is an executive function altogether. And that means discretion is vested in the executive to determine when to exercise the prosecutorial power. The only significant limitation on that discretion comes from other provisions of the constitution. For example, the United States attorney could not decide to prosecute only people of a particular race or a particular religion. But aside from that limitation, which, thankfully, remains only a hypothetical in our country, the executive has broad discretion to decide whether to bring criminal prosecutions in particular cases. The key question then is how the executive should exercise the its prosecutorial discretion. 80 years ago this spring, one of my predecessors in this job, then attorney general robert jackson, gave a famous each to the congress of the United States attorneys in which he described the proper role and qualities of federal prosecutors. Justice jackson was one of only a handful i think three maybe attorneys general who ultimately ended up as a justice on the Supreme Court. Much has changed in the eight decades since Justice Jacksons remarks, but he was a man of uncommon wisdom, and it is appropriate to consider his views today and how they apply in our modern era. Federal prosecutors possess tremendous power. Power that is necessary to enforce our laws and punish wrongdoing, but power that, like all power, any other power, carries inherent potential for abuse. Justice jackson recognized this, and as he put it, the prosecutor has more control over the life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in america. Prosecutors have the power to investigate people, interview their friends, and they can do so on the basis of mere suspicion of wrongdoing. People facing federal investigations incur ruinous legal costs and often see their lives reduced to rubble before a charge is even filed. Justice jackson was not exaggerating when he said, while the prosecutor, at his best, is one of the most been beneficent forces of our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst. Think about the power of a prosecutor. Does he have to answer to anything outside the office of the prosecutor . He can destroy peoples lives just by bringing an investigation, destroy a reputation, destroy their livelihood in todays world. And it is not just individuals, think of the corporations. Anderson, the accounting firm, thousands and thousands of jobs done away with in an instant because of a prosecutorial decision. A decision that was largely discretionary, because individuals are initially responsible for the crime, and the question of whether or not you are going to impute that to the corporation and take down the corporation itself is largely a discretionary call by prosecutors. In todays world, going after a corporation or a white collar defendant is like shooting fish in a barrel. There is no contest. You threaten a company with criminal liability and all the collateral effects that that has, no corporation is going to go to trial and fight that, and the prosecutors know that. It is just a question of how large the check is going to be. And that is all within the control of a prosecutor. The power, as Justice Jackson said, to strike at citizens the power that the prosecutor has is not merely it can strike at citizens not with just the individual strength, but with all the force of the government itself. That has to be carefully calibrated and carefully supervised. Because left unchecked, it has the power to inflict far more harm than it prevents. The most basic check on prosecutorial power is political accountability. It is counterintuitive to say that as we rightly strive to maintain an apolitical system of criminal justice, but political accountability, politics, is what ultimately ensures our system does its work fairly and with proper recognition of the many interests and values at stake. Government power completely divorced from political accountability is tyranny. Justice jackson understood this, and as he explained president ial appointment and Senate Confirmation of the United States attorneys and the Senior Department of justice officials is what legitimizes their exercises of the sovereign power. You are required to win an expression of confidence in your character by both the legislative and executive branches of government before assuming the responsibilities of a federal prosecutor. Yet in the decades since Justice Jacksons remarks, it has become a commonplace to argue that prosecutorial decisions are legitimate only when they are made by the lowest level line prosecutors, the career prosecutors handling any given case. Ironically, some of those same critics see no problem in campaigning for highly political, elected district attorneys to remake state and local prosecutorial offices in their preferred progressive image, which often involves overriding a considered judgment of the career prosecutors and police officers. But aside from that hypocrisy, the notion that a line prosecutors should make the final decisions within the department of justice is completely wrong, and it is antithetical to the basic values that undergirds our entire system. The Justice Department is not a praetorian guard that watches over a society, impervious to the ebbs and flows of politics. It is an Agency Within the executive branch of a democratic republic, a form of government where the power of the state is ultimately reposed in the people, acting through their elected president and their elected representatives. [applause] i know i do not include many applause lines in my prepared speeches. [laughter] had i known this was going to be a fireside chat, i wouldve cut this shorter, but i will give you something to clap at later, ok . [laughter] the men and women who have ultimate authority in the Justice Department are thus the ones on whom our elected officials have conferred that responsibility, by president ial appointment and Senate Confirmation. That blessing by the two political branches of government gives these officials democratic legitimacy that career officials do not possess. The same process that produces these officials also holds them accountable. The elected president can fire Senior Department of justice officials at will, and the elected congress can summon them to explain their decisions to the peoples representatives and to the public. Because these officials have the imprimatur of the president and congress, they also have a statute to resist these political pressures when necessary and they can take the heat for what the department of justice does or does not do. Line prosecutors, by contrast, are generally part of a permanent bureaucracy. They do not have the political legitimacy to be the public face for decisions, and they lack the political buyin to publicly defend those decisions. Nor can the public and its representatives hold Civil Servants accountable in the same way as appointed officials. Indeed, the publics only tool to hold the government accountable is an election. And the bureaucracy is neither elected nor easily replaced by those who are. Moreover, because these officials are installed by the democratic process, that is, the appointees, they are the most equipped to make the judgment calls concerning how we should wield our prosecutorial power. As Justice Scalia observed, and perhaps his most admired judicial opinion, his dissent in morrison v. Olson, almost all investigative and prosecutorial decisions including the ultimate whether, after a technical decision, whether, after a technical violation of the law has been found, prosecution is warranted involve the balancing of innumerable legal and practical considerations. Those considerations do not need do need to be balanced in each, and every case, as Justice Scalia also pointed out, it is nice to say let justice be done though the heavens may fall, but it does not comport with reality. It would be far more harm than good to abandon rather to ensure that every violation of is investigated and prosecuted to the nth degree. Our system works best when led by judgment, proportionality, and consideration of alternative sanctions, all the things that supervisors provide. Cases must be supervised by someone who does not have a narrow focus but who is broad gauged and pursuing a general agenda. And that person need not be a prosecutor, but someone who can balance the importance of a vigorous prosecution with other competing values. In short, the attorney general, senior doj officials, and u. S. Attorneys are indeed political, but they are political in a good and necessary sense. Indeed, aside from the importance of not fully decoupling Law Enforcement from the constraining and moderating forces of politics, devolving all authority down to the most junior officials does not even make sense as a matter of basic management. Name one Successful Organization or institution where the lowest level employees decisions are deemed sacrosanct. They arent. There arent any. Letting the most Junior Members set the agenda might be a good philosophy for a montessori preschool, but it is no way to run a federal agency. Good leaders at the department of justice, at any organizations , need to trust and support their subordinates. But that does not mean blindly deferring to whatever those subordinates want to do. One of the more annoying things that i hear and face, and this is been going on for decades. This strange idea that political officials interfere in investigations or in cases. What do you mean by interfere . Under the law, all prosecutorial power is vested in the attorney general. These people are agents of the attorney general. And as i say, the fbi agents, whose agent do you think you are . Now, i do not say this in a pompous way, but that is the chain of authority and legitimacy in the department of justice. And i say, well, what exactly am i interfering with . When you boil it right down, is t is the will of the most Junior Member of the organization. He has some idea that he wants to do something. What makes that sacrosanct . What makes the judgment of the next layer up or the next layer up . Each layer, by the way, fanning out and having more broader experience and a broader portfolio and a broader perspective. What makes the line attorney, who handling a particular case, their judgment so sacrosanct . The idea is, i guess, is they are not political, and therefore their judgments will not be political. From my experience in the department, in two different eras, career employees are not apolitical necessarily. Some are, some are very political and can check their politics at the door, and others cant. Others can be partisan, but they are not apolitical, necessarily. They are human beings like everybody else and they are very usually less experienced individuals than their supervisors. So this is what president s, the congress, and the public expects when something goes wrong in the department of justice, the buck has to stop somewhere, and that is at the top. The statute i referenced was 28 usc section 509, which could not be plainer. All functions of the offices of the department of justice, and all functions of agencies and employees of the department of justice are vested in the attorney general. And because the attorney general is ultimately politically accountable for every decision that the department makes, i and my predecessors have had an obligation to ensure that we make the correct decision. The attorney general, the assistant attorneys general, the u. S. Attorneys are not figureheads. We are supervisors. Our job is to supervise and anything less is an abdication. Participation by senior officials is also essential to the rule of law, the essence of the rule of law is that whatever rule you apply in one case must be the same rule you would apply in a similar case. Treating each person equally before the law includes how the department enforces the law. We should not prosecute someone for wire fraud in manhattan using a legal theory we would not equally pursue in madison or in montgomery or allow prosecutors in one decision to bring charges using a theory that a group of prosecutors in another division down the hall would not deploy against someone who is engaged in indistinguishable conduct. We must strive for consistency, and that is yet another reason why centralized Senior Leadership exists to harmonize the disparate views of our many prosecutors in a consistent policy for the department. I was being interviewed by a member of the press. It was a radio interview, and i got one of these questions like, well, you know, why are you interfering in some cases over here or some case over there . And i said why do you think we have one attorney general . We have 93 districts, 50 states, 93 districts. Do you think each u. S. Attorney should be a law unto themselves . Why do you think we have one attorney general . For uniformity of law. For having consistency in the application of law, for having someone who has the entire perspective of the playing field. And the cameramen were all nodding their head, this makes sense. This made sense. [laughter] jackson said we must proceed in all districts with that uniformity of policy which is necessary to the prestige of federal law, but i think there is more involved than prestige. Uniformity is what protects us. At the end of the day, our system is really the crystallization of the golden rule in a political system. And that is ultimately what protects us, which is, i am not willing to do to somebody else what i am not willing to have done to me. That is ultimately the foundation of our freedom. Ok . [applause] so, we see that in the legislative branch think about it constitutionally, im here, since im talking about the constitution tonight. The legislature in the United States cannot make one law that applies to new york and another that applies in california. There are a lot of reasons for that, think about it, then you could have little fractions in the country buying favor and building a majority to adopt rules that do not apply to everyone the same. But it is also because you cannot have the rest of the country say, ok, we are going to go to war, and, by the way, the draft law only applies to new york. The constitution requires uniformity across the nation. That is legislation. When you make a rule legislatively, it has to apply to everybody, but it also applies to the enforcement of law. The same uniformity is required because that is the ultimate guarantor of freedom. All the supervision will not be enough without a strong culture across the department of fairness and commitment to evenhanded justice. That is what Justice Jackson called the spirit of fair play and decency that should animate a federal prosecutor. Sounds quaint today, doesnt it . In his memorable turn of phrase, even when the government technically loses its case, it has really won, if justice has been done. We want our prosecutors to be aggressive and tenacious in their pursuit of justice, but we also want to ensure that justice is ultimately administered dispassionately. The one thing ill say is the job of the prosecutor is to try the case and attempt to achieve a conviction of guilt. But that is when the job of the prosecutor is over. In some cases, we may express our views as to what the sentence should be, but the sentencing belongs to the judge, the judicial function. After the prosecutor wins the case, we like that competitiveness, we like that spirit and aggressiveness, but once the case is won, passions must cool. Justice, in the sentencing phase, has to be fair. That is why the sentence is given by the neutral judge. Now we are all human, and like any person, a prosecutor can become over invested in a particular goal. Prosecutors who devote months of their lives to investigating a particular target may become deeply invested in their case and assured of the rightness of their cause. When a prosecution becomes my prosecution, particularly if the investigation is highly public or has been acrimonious , or is the prosecutor is confident early on that the target has committed a serious crime, there is always a will to urge to will a charge into existence, even if the facts of the law or the fair handed administration of justice do not support bringing a charge. This risk is inevitable and cannot be avoided simply by hiring as prosecutors only moral people with righteous motivations. I am reminded of a passage by cs lewis. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. [laughter] the robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. [applause] they may be more likely to go to heaven i do not know. [laughter] but, at the same time, likelier to make hell on earth. [laughter] there is another reason for having layers of supervision. Individual prosecutors can sometimes become headhunters. It is all too often they are consumed with taking down their target, subjecting their decisions to review by detached supervisors, ensure the involvement of dispassionate decisionmakers. This was of course the central problem with the independent Council Statute that Justice Scalia criticized in the morrison v. Olson. Creating an unaccountable headhunter was not some unfortunate byproduct of that statute, it was the stated purpose of the statute. That was what Justice Scalia meant by his famous line, this wolf comes as a wolf. As he went on to explain, quote, how frightening it must be to have your own independent counsel and staff appointed with nothing else to do but to investigate you until investigation is no longer worthwhile. With whether it is worthwhile, not depending upon what such judgments usually hinge on. , competing responsibilities, and to have that counsel and staff decide, with no basis for comparison, whether what you have done is bad enough, willful enough, and provable enough to warrant an indictment. How admirable the constitutional system that provides the means to in void such a distortion and how unfortunate the judicial decision that has permitted it. Now, that was a problem that took care of itself. It was a statute that democrats applauded until it applied to bill clinton, and then we did away with it in h. W. Bushs administration. Took the heat, castigated by the media for killing the independent counsel statute, and then during the transition, bernie nussbaum, who lasted about two seconds as a white house counsel, a fancy new york lawyer came down came in and said, do you have any advice . This was my last days as attorney general, and i said, i think you should allow independent counsel to die its natural death here. We took the heat for it. We did what had to be done, do not resuscitate it. As a republican, nothing would please me more, but as an american, it is a bad statute. He said, well, we are committed to the most moral and Ethical Administration in history, and we are going to reenact it. So they did and the rest is history. By the way, if you want a little kick, go to cspan i think they took my name off of it, but if you put in independent counsel statute nadler, you will see a hearing from, like, 1995 or 1996, whenever the whitewater thing was going on , with nadler leading the committee about how terrible the independent counsel statute was and how terrible ken starr was. If you have time, look at it, thatse all the arguments we are making here today, nowadays, were laid out. He said, mr. Barr, i admire you, you are very consistent on this question. So anyway. It is fun to watch. He anyway. [laughter] so anyway. [applause] i said, headhunters, and that is because, as jackson said, if the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor, that he will pick people that he thinks he should get rather than pick the cases that need to be prosecuted. Any erosion in prosecutorial detachment is extraordinarily perilous. For, as he said, it is in this realm in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass or select some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense. That the greatest danger of abuse in prosecutor power lies, it is here that Law Enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with a predominant or governing group. Being attached to the wrong political views or being personally obnoxious to or in any way to the prosecutor himself. And that is what we frequently say. I would like to say we do not see headhunting in the department of justice. And that would not be truthful. I see it every day. And it is a temptation that the power of prosecution is a heavy dy power. And it is a temptation sometimes to go after people rather than crimes. We see that every night. You know this country is in serious problem, with all the problems we face the mystically, when most of our news coverage, or what passes for news coverage, are bloviating talking heads discussing whether some action in washington, some action taken by an official constitutes some esoteric crime. You know, looking through statute books to see, can we say , you know, that this is a crime . Because disagreement no longer is enough. Political disagreement and political debate. Now you have to call your adversary a criminal, and instead of beating them politically, you try to put them in jail, becoming sort of like an Eastern European country, where if you are not in power, you are in jail or you are a member of the press. [laughter] [applause] now, one of the areas that i think theres a problem is the way we interpret statutes these days, and we have to recalibrate that if were ever going to restore the rule of law. Clarity in the law is indispensable to the rule of the law. And if a law is malleable, then it can be applied differently in different cases, and that is the breakdown of law. Now, one of the most irritating developments over the last 50 or 60 years is equity driving law out of the marketplace. If you go and read Supreme Court decisions, the Supreme Court thinks its being oh so and this has been going on, as i say, going on for decades, instead of articulating a law, a rule, they say its the totality of circumstances and its equity. What if, you know, what was the conscience of the fifth vote on the Supreme Court . You know, they cant articulate the rule. But its that very discipline of being able to universalize the principle that youre applying in a case that ensures the rule of law and that ensures that the person is being treated fairly. And it is that process of universalizing it that says, im only going to apply to this person what im willing to do to every other similarly situated person and be able to articulate the rule, and weve completely lost that in our law. And thats why lawyers are so infuriating beyond their normal, you know, irritating nature, which is they cant tell the client what the law is. Yeah, well, you could go this way, it could go that way. [laughter] and thats because their law has broken down, and its broken down because the justices dont feel they have to go through that discipline anymore. The nature of judicial power is being debased. We dont, you know, you cant equity has its uses and its place, but it cant be constitutional law. And these are some of the points that are similarly made by Justice Scalia in his article about the rule of law being the law of rules. And in recent years, the department of justice has sometimes acted like a trade association for prosecutors. More like that than the administrator of a fair system of justice based on clear and sensible rules. In case after case, weve advanced and defended hyperaggressive extensions of the criminal law. This is wrong, and we have to stop doing it. Now, i couldnt believe it, you know, id get in, and id see some statute, and people would say, well, how are we going to interpret this statute . This court over here said this should be limited to such and such. Are we going to acquiesce in that and adopt that as our interpretation . And normally the answer you would get in the department of justice is, well, that sort of ties us down. Of course, thats the whole point of the law. [laughter] that sort of ties us down, you know, we want our prosecutors to have the broadest possible discretion. So we cant buy into that. Lets leave it loosey goosey. And i said, well, no, i mean, we have to say what the law is. And that decision was a good interpretation of the law, and it should be adopted. The fact that it hems us in, and we cant just use this law, you know, as a Utility Knife is a good thing. But thats not the perspective generally and institutionally recently in the department of justice. We should want a fair system with clear rules that people can understand. It does not serve the ends of justice to advocate for fuzzy and manipulable criminal prohibitions and maximize the options of the prosecutor. S. Preventing that sort of proprosecutor uncertainty is what the ancient rule of lenity is all about. Im sure you know what that is, which is if theres fakeness in vagueness in a law, you interpret it in the most lenient way possible from the standpoint of the defendant, and that rule should likewise inform what we do at the department of justice. When we think about the substance of the criminal law,. Advocating for clear and defined prohibitions will sometimes mean that we cannot bring charges against someone whom we believed is engaged in bad conduct. But that is what it means to be a government of laws and not men. We cannot let our desire to get bad people turn into the functional equivalent of the mad emperor caligula who inscribed criminal laws in tiny script, atop a tall pillar, where no one could read it. To be clear, what im describing is not the al capone situation, where you have someone who has committed multiple crimes, and you decide to prosecute that person for only the clearest violation. That carries a sufficient penalty. I am talking about taking vague statutory language and then applying it to a criminal target in a novel way that is, at minimum, hardly clear from the statutory text. This is inherently unfair, because criminal prosecutions are backwardlooking. We charge people with crimes based on past conduct. If it was unknown or unclear that the conduct was illegal when the person engaged in it, that raises real questions about whether it is fair to prosecute the person criminally for it. Examples of the department defending these sorts of extreme positions are unfortunately numerous, as are the rejections of those arguments by the Supreme Court. These include arguments as varied as the departments insisting that a philadelphia woman violated the Chemical Weapons Convention implementation act, implementing the convention on the prohibition of the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons. She did this by putting chemicals on her neighbors door knob, as part of an acrimonious love triangle involving the womans husband. The Court Unanimously rejected that argument in bond vs. United states, where they argued that a fisherman violated the antishredding provisions of the sarbanesoxley law when he threw undersized grouper over the side of his boat, which the Supreme Court rejected in yates v. United states. [laughter] or, more recently, arguing that aides to the governor of new jersey fraudulently, quote, obtained property from the government when they realigned the lanes on the George Washington bridge to create a traffic jam, which the Supreme Court unanimously rejected in kelly v. United states. There are many other examples. In fact, you know, its interesting when people say that the Trump Administration is lawless. And i usually am kind of scratching my head saying, you know, we litigate all our stuff, we win a lot of it. So, you know, i wouldnt say we were lawless. [laughter] but again, the Obama Administration had some of the people who were in muellers Office Writing their briefs in the Supreme Court, so maybe that explains something. [laughter] [applause] yeah, very aggressive positions very, you know, sort of aggressive, and were gonna prosecute these people and so forth. And then theyre not crowing so much after they get whooped in the Supreme Court. Anyway, taking a capacious approach to criminal law is not only unfair to the criminal and bad for the department, its corrosive of our political system. If criminal statutes are endlessly manipulable, and everything becomes a potential crime, rather than watch policy experts debate the merits and demerits of a particular policy choice, we are treated i anticipated this in my earlier statement these pundits speculating about whether things can be prosecuted. This criminalization of politics is not healthy. The criminal law is supposed to be reserved for the most egregious misconduct, conduct so bad that our society has decided it requires serious punishment up to and including being locked away. These tools are not built to resolve political disputes. And it would be a Bad Development for us to go the way of these thirdworld countries where Political Parties routinely prosecute their opponents for various illdefined crimes against the state. This is not the stuff of a mature democracy. We abet this culture of criminalization when we are not disciplined about what charges we will bring, what legal theories we will adopt, rather than root out true crimes, while leaving ethically dubious conduct to the voters. Our prosecutors have all too often inserted themselves in the political process based on the flimsiest of legal theories. We have seen this time and time again, with prosecutors bringing illconceived charges against prominent political figures, or launching debilitating investigations that thrust the department of justice into the middle of the political process and preempt the ability of the people to decide. This criminalization of politics will only worsen until we change the culture of concocting new legal theories to criminalize all manner of questionable conduct. Smart, ambitious lawyers have sought to amass glory by prosecuting prominent public figures since the roman republic. It is utterly unsurprising that prosecutors continue to do so today, to the extent the Justice Department leaders will permit it. As long as im attorney general, we are not going to permit it. [applause] in short, it is important for prosecutors at the department of justice to understand that their mission, above all others, is to do justice. And that means following the letter of the law and the spirit of fairness. Sometimes that will mean investing months or years in an investigation and then concluding it is without criminal charges. Our job is to be just as dogged in preventing injustice as we are in pursuing wrongdoing. On this score, as in many, Justice Jackson said it best, and i will close with his words, the qualities of a good prosecutor are as elusive, and as impossible to define as those which mark a gentleman. And those who need to be told would not understand it anyway. A sensitiveness to fair play and sportsmanship is perhaps the best protection against the abuse of power. And the citizens safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes. And who, above all, approaches his task with humility. Thank you. [applause] thank you. Thank you. [applause] is this on . Again, i am sorry for the prepared remarks. I like these things a lot better. Thank you, general. That was spectacular. Also profound, i think. I have the first question. I have a few from the audience. And the minute your duties require you to go home and rest, you may do so. Of course. Even though he just said he would not prosecute me because he is mad at me. [laughter] partly what you said is process of a transfer of authority from elected people to Civil Servants. Do you see that going on in other parts of the government . A. G. Barr you know, of course. But this is the game at the department of justice, how it has been used as a political football. Basically, when the left controls the executive branch, then no one says anything about supervision of the lawyers in the department of justice. Being by the political officials. But when the republicans win or conservatives are in charge of the department of justice, then all we hear day in and day out is the people we should stand back and let the career people around the department of justice. And, you know, do not get me wrong, a lot of my family are career people in the department of justice, i love the department of justice, and i love the people in the department of justice. But, as i say, the legitimacy in our system comes from political supervision and political accountability. Should the Supreme Court have the exclusive power to interpret the constitution . [laughter] a. G. Barr yes. [laughter] this is not my question, but i will sharpen it. The president takes an oath to uphold a. G. Barr let me say that i think president jackson was correct, that each branch has, in the first instance, the responsibility to interpret the constitution and what they think the constitution means. And so, if the president believes that he has the power to do something under the constitution, he should be able to exercise that power. And if the Court Disagrees and orders him not to, then hes lost the case. That is what i thought. What is your Favorite Song to play on the bagpipes . [laughter] a. G. Barr there are too many. Its not songs. Theyre called tunes. Scotland the brave. A. G. Barr well, thats a very common one. Thats the one that you see on the video, playing scotland the brave. I miss playing the bagpipes. When i was attorney general last time, you know, scalia called the chambers and said to my assistant, do you think the attorney general would like to take a quick walk with me around the mall . And i said, ask Justice Scalia, whether he realizes or not, its a federal offense to threaten the life of a federal official. I say the same thing about playing the bagpipes these days. People ask me to play the bagpipes. I say you know, its an offense to threaten the life of the attorney general emergency vehicles standing by. I think the definition of a gentleman is somebody who knows how to play the bagpipes and does not. A. G. Barr no. I disagree with that. [laughter] ive played since i was eight years old. And, you know, my parents, being academicians and growing up on the Upper West Side in bella abzugs district in new york, we lived in Columbia University housing, which was great housing overlooking the hudson river. But they wanted, you know, they said, billy, its time that you learn an instrument. Violin, piano. I said bagpipes. [laughter] somebody wonders if ballot harvesting is constitutional, and also how do we go about in this day and age guaranteeing the propriety of our elections . A. G. Barr i was once head of the office of legal counsel, which is sort of a legal beagle office. I cant off the top of my head give you authoritative answers on some of these questions. I will just say generally, im very concerned. Let me draw a distinction between what may pass muster under some recent case law at the Supreme Court and what really is in accord with the constitutional scheme and the basic principles. And sometimes you have to go back to basic principles to understand the provisions of the constitution and what they should mean. As ive said, the whole idea of an election is to have a single expression of will by everybody at the same time based on the same information. Thats what an election is. So we have election day, and now we have an election season. And not only that, its a season that has like, extra innings. So its becoming absurd. Decisions made weeks apart are not the body politic making a sober decision about the state of affairs at one time. Were losing the whole idea of what an election is. And when people try to play games like, do you have any empirical evidence that, you know, mailin ballots are, you know . Common sense. We havent had it on the scale thats being proposed now. So i dont have empirical other than the fact that weve always had voting fraud. You know, there will always be people who attempt to do that. I dont have empirical evidence that on this scale, you know, these problems were materialized. But what i say to people is, why do we vote today the way we do . Think about it. Why do people show up at one place where they have a list of people who are eligible to vote, you show who you are, you go behind a curtain . Why do you go behind the curtain . Secret ballot. No one else is allowed there. Why is that a rule . Coercion, undue influence. Why a secret ballot . Many reasons. You cant sell or buy votes easily if theres a secret ballot. You dont succumb as much to undue influence or pressure. That is all blown away the lessons of the english system before us and the american system, and how the vote evolved and how we tried to perfect it and protect its integrity for all this time are just swept away by mailin voting. Where you dont have anonymity your name is connected to that vote, and you open the floodgates to coercion. And so i dont think harvesting should be permitted, personally. Some states have passed down under the constitution, the state sets the rules and theyre permitting harvesting of ballots. But its a potential abuse. [applause] ill go back to your main argument and that is, the authority of the attorney general comes through the president from the people. And so, do you sense a growing spirit of managing the people, managing how they vote, managing what they can do by the government . A. G. Barr i think it raises the fundamental question, which is this, that our constitution was meant for a discerning, informed, virtuous people. And you have to raise the question of whether we still have that in our country. But we certainly have forces that are attempting to cultivate a dependent people. And its, you know, its the same old game. Whats our bread and circuses today . Its all distraction. You know, as pascal said, its all about distracting people from anything thats important and principle and whats happening. Thats why so many people dont pay attention. Theyre distracted. Theyre distracted by, you know, all the stimulation of their senses that go on, and that goes part and parcel with creating dependence. So you have more and more people that just dont care. You know, i was mortified. I saw today that most people dont know what the holocaust is about in the United States, some poll or something. I couldnt believe it. Now, i thought they taught holocausts or concentration camps very well in school, because when i was giving a memorial day speech one year, i did some research. And most high school students, if you ask them, awhat do you know about world war ii . Well, first they dont know who fought in world war ii. But then they say what they know about world war ii is about the concentration camps. And that we used Nuclear Weapons against japan. Those are the two things. So i said, at least you learned about the concentration camps. Yes, the internment of the japanese. Yeah, you should visit some high schools today. If mullers team destroyed information, whos responsible . I think theyre talking about wiping phones. Whos responsible . What consequences can there be . A. G. Barr well, i dont want to get into that particular thing. The appropriate people in the department are taking a look at that, and we will see where it goes. What are the constitutional hurdles for forbidding a church from meeting during covid19 . A. G. Barr what are the constitutional hurdles . The rule right now is articulated by the Supreme Court. Some people might disagree with it, but in the sense that it doesnt go far enough in protecting religion, but the current standard is that you can place restrictions on religion, the exercise of religion, as long as you dont discriminate against religion and apply the same restrictions on everybody else that is similarly situated. You cant allow people to go to theaters and get together in commercial establishments or other kinds of activities and then prohibit churches from doing it. And some of the states were going that far. So thats the basic hurdle you have to get over. I know youre from michigan, and therefore youre particularly sensitive to the caprice of the governors regulations. I am very amused, because the press gets all huffy and puffy about, you know, bill barr believes in strong executive power, ooh, you know, hes a fascist or Something Like that. [laughter] which i wont even respond to. But they couldnt be happier with the governors. The governors are exercising what kind of power are they exercising . Executive power. In many states, there are no statutes, or the legislators bowed out of the picture. Right . Just letting the governors do what they want to do. Now, what ive said is, yes, there is executive power by its very nature does come and should fill the void right at the beginning of any crisis like this. In some crises, like war, you do need a strong component of executive leadership. But once the emergency nature of it starts to abate, the legislature should give a little bit more guidance like, yeah, you can do this for 30 days and then come back to us. If we dont like what were youre doing, well exercise a little more control over it. But there has been very little of that. And most of the governors do what bureaucrats always do, which is they act, you know, they defy common sense. And, you know, they treat free citizens as babies that cant take responsibility for themselves and others. So i was saying, well, one, you have to give Business People an opportunity. Tell them what the rules are. Which rule of masks you have this month. Tell the Business People what the rules are, and then let them try to adapt their business to that. Then youll have ingenuity and people will at least have the freedom to try to earn a living. But putting a national lockdown, stay at home orders, is like house arrest. Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on Civil Liberties in american history. [applause] we supported this case. We did get a lot of the states to ease up on the churches and, you know, wed write letters to the governors and the governors would comply. But my view was, it doesnt take a Rocket Scientist to realize that an artificial cap of 10 doesnt make any sense when youre talking about st. Patricks cathedral compared to a small country church. And so one of the rules under the constitution is you have to sort of calibrate whatever burden youre going to place on religion, youre gonna have to take account of the circumstances and make it as narrow as possible to achieve your end. And so we said, how about just a percentage of the fire marshal occupancy standard . The Supreme Court, 54 vote, wouldnt go along with that because they wanted to say that you have to give a lot of latitude to governors in these crises. I agree, you should give a lot of latitude, but we have epidemics and pandemics this is a very serious one, a grave one. But they come, and just because something is a medical crisis, it doesnt give a complete blank check to executive rule. Here, here. [applause] that leads me to wonder, i read that there have been north of 75,000 suicides during the shutdown. And what mechanism is there or should there be in the government to take care of all these ancillary effects . A. G. Barr heres my problem. I have Great Respect for the medical profession. The scariest day in a lawyers life is when he realizes the medical profession is really pretty much the same as the legal profession. Theyre human beings. They put their pants on one leg at a time. Theyre right sometimes, theyre wrong other times. They disagree with each other. Theres some good doctors, theres some bad doctors. But just like lawyers, doctors are specialists. They will view a broad social problem, an issue, through a set of blinders, in a sense. So, you know, your doctor might say to you, bill, if you want to live 20 years longer, you should just do this, this, this, this and this. And he might be right. But i dont want to pay those costs to live 20 years longer. Id rather take my chances. Now, i understand there are externalities here, and you cant threaten other peoples lives. But the point is that you have to balance that against a lot of other factors. The point you made is exactly what was not done, but was self evident to anyone who had the power of logic. Which is, yes, doctor, you might be right. But just think of all the collateral consequences and the costs of that. And that is not science, okay . It is the generalist and the representatives of the entire community that should be making these balancing acts. It is not dictated by science. So all this nonsense about how something is dictated by science is nonsense. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] online at cspan. Org or listen on the free cspan radio app. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hosted a Virtual Meeting on Climate Change with her counterparts from the g7 nations. We will also hear from the dalai dall. Jane goo rep. Pelosi it is my honor to welcome this distinguished group of leaders to the 19th annual g7 speakers meeting on addressing the Climate Crisis with Environmental Justice for all. We are pleased to be joined by the ambassadors of the g7 nation. It is a privilege to be here once again to confront the existential threat of our time, the Climate Crisis. As we have over the years. On parliaments committed for the ocean. Thank you to the