Bill Barr was seen by many as a significant upgrade over Jeff Sessions as the leader of the Trump administration’s U.S. Department of Justice, but Peter Navarro has a different opinion.
Bill Barr accused of being anti-Trump
The former White House trade advisor claims that Barr was President Joe Biden’s “first attorney general” based on the way the DOJ under Barr (presumably before he left) allegedly pre-cleared or fast-tracked Biden’s blitz of executive orders that went into effect as soon as he was inaugurated. Navarro described the situation as Deep State coup and insisted that Barr should have been fired much sooner than his December 2020 departure.
Navarro was responding to a question from Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo who wondered how 17 of Biden’s left-wing wish list of executive orders were promptly ready to go on day one. In contrast to the way Biden’s edicts were vetted quickly through the federal bureaucracy, Navarro asserted that DOJ lawyers dragged their feet on then-President Donald Trump’s directives.
“We got slow-walked at the Department of Justice, and this is a problem I told Barr about numerous times. And he should have been fired months before he was. By the last year of this administration, he was really working against this administration in a lot of ways,” Navarro said Sunday.
“And these executive orders, the bottleneck was at the Department of Justice on so many things that we did. And you can see what President Biden is doing now. He’s just unwinding things that are gonna come back to haunt the American worker big time,” Navarro declared on “Sunday Morning Futures“ in the video clips embedded below.
This is the second time I’ve seen Navarro call Bill Barr Biden’s first AG. He says the Trump administration had 30 executive orders ready to go after Election Day and talks about a “deep state coup” pic.twitter.com/lExQi13RiS
— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) February 7, 2021
President Trump vs The Deep State
Earlier in the interview, Navarro recalled that while working for Trump, he drafted about 50 executive orders, and the last step in the process was getting the DOJ to sign off on them to validate proper statutory authority.
“Here’s the news behind the news. Bill Barr, President Trump’s attorney general, actually turns out to be also Joe Biden’s first attorney general,” Navarro continued. “Here is what was happening: We had over 30 executive orders cued after Election Day ready to go, but we kept running into all of these roadblocks and hurdles. It turns out that Bill Barr’s Office of Legal Counsel was fast-tracking all of these Biden EOs, and basically it was a Deep State coup…”
Navarro then recalled how he and his colleagues drafted “a beautiful executive order” that would have prevented the CCP “from selling bulk power equipment into our electricity grid” and therefore, as a matter of national security, make the U.S. less vulnerable to a cyber attack on the grid. Barr helped Biden unravel that order, Navarro lamented. “Bad news there.”
It’s not a particular revelation perhaps that the Democrat-dominated federal bureaucracy was generally hostile to Trump’s America First Agenda, but perhaps the scope of the opposition is receiving greater focus. Leaving Obama holdovers and Never Trumpers in place, for example, constitutes one of the miscues by the Trump administration.
Navarro has separately advised Trump to fire his stodgy impeachment lawyers and hand the defense to U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz.