“Ah. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. Ah,” was Barr’s initial response. It went downhill from there.
U.S. Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) destroyed Attorney General Bill Barr Wednesday afternoon with a wide variety of questions, all of which he answered poorly. She literally left him stammering, and did so with time to spare.
“Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone?” Harris asked Barr – presumably a simple question, especially as he’s only been in office for two and a half months.
“Ah. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. Ah,” was Barr’s initial response.
“Yes or no?” Harris asked.
“Could you repeat that?” Barr requested, seemingly having forgottten the question.
“I will repeat it,” Harris, clearly in control, said, and did. “Yes or no, please, sir,” she added.
“Um, the president or anyone else,” Barr said, thinking out loud, and clearly stalling for time.
“Seems you’d remember something like that,” Harris replied.
“I’m trying to grapple with the word ‘suggest,’ I mean, there have been discussions out there,” Barr continued. “They haven’t asked me to.”
“Perhaps they suggested,” Harris, almost mockingly, offered. “Hinted? Inferred?”
Switching gears, Senator Harris asked Barr if, in reaching his conclusion to not prosecute the president for any crimes, “did you personally review all of the underlying evidence?”
“No,” Barr admitted.
“So you accepted the [Mueller] report as the evidence?”
Barr admitted he had.
Harris pressed, asking if Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein or anyone else in his executive office had reviewed the evidence. Barr again admitted no one had.
“Yet you represented to the American public that the evidence was not ‘sufficient to support an obstruction of justice defense,'” Harris charged.
Barr admitted he had not reviewed any evidence, Harris reminded him that he was the one who made the decision to not charge the president, and then blasted him for that decision and for having claimed he had examined the evidence, which he had not.
When Barr tried to wiggle out of culpability, Harris replied: “You said it was ‘your baby.’ What did you mean by that?”
Harris also slammed Barr for allowing Rosenstein to take part in deciding to not charge Trump, since he “is also a witness” in that investigation. It did not go well:
And finally, this: