A group of nearly 2,000 former Justice Department officials are rallying for Attorney General William Barr to resign after the department decided to drop charges against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
The alumni base issued a statement that condemns the DOJ’s decision to drop charges against Flynn and suggests Barr should resign for "repeated assaults on the rule of law.”
"The Department’s action is extraordinarily rare, if not unprecedented,” the statement said of the decision to drop charges against Flynn. “If any of us, or anyone reading this statement who is not a friend of the President, were to lie to federal investigators in the course of a properly predicated counterintelligence investigation, and admit we did so under oath, we would be prosecuted for it.”
The group brings attention to its previous call for Barr to resign from the job after he intervened in the Roger Stone case.
They said it is unlikely Barr will resign, so they asked Congress to censure him.
The group expressed support for prosecutors who withdrew from the Stone and Flynn cases after Barr intervened, commending them for "upholding the oath that we all took.”
The former justice employees ask the judge overseeing the Flynn case to reject the government's motion to throw out the charges.
They said the DOJ’s reasoning for tossing the charges “does not hold up to scrutiny given the ample evidence that the investigation was well-founded and — more importantly — the fact that Flynn admitted under oath and in open court that he told material lies to the FBI in violation of longstanding federal law.”
“We urge Judge Sullivan to closely examine the Department’s stated rationale for dismissing the charges — including holding an evidentiary hearing with witnesses — and to deny the motion and proceed with sentencing if appropriate,” the statement reads. "While it is rare for a court to deny the Department’s request to dismiss an indictment, if ever there were a case where the public interest counseled the court to take a long, hard look at the government’s explanation and the evidence, it is this one.”
The former officials allege that Barr has used the DOJ “as a tool to further President Trump’s personal and political interests.”