Biden and Harris say they won’t interfere with DOJ in apparent rebuke to Trump
President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris vowed to let Justice Department officials make their own decisions about prosecuting cases.
“We will not tell the Justice Department how to do its job,” Ms Harris said in clip of an interview to air later Thursday night on CNN.
Then Mr Biden added this: “I guarantee that’s how it’ll be run.”
“I’m not going to be telling them, ‘Go prosecute A, B or C,” he said. “It’s not my Justice Department, it’s the people’s Justice Department.”
The duo and other Democrats have accused the outgoing president, Donald Trump, of putting political pressure on Justice officials to do his bidding and protect his friends during his four years in office.
The sitting president, meantime, spent part of Thursday appearing to put pressure on his embattled attorney general.
“He hasn’t done anything yet. When he looks he’ll see the kind of evidence that right now you are seeing in the Georgia [state] Senate,” Mr Trump told reporters, referring to William Barr. “They are going through hearings right now in the [state] Senate and they are finding tremendous volumes. So [the Justice Department] haven’t looked very hard. Which is a disappointment, to be honest.”
That came two days after Mr Barr told an interviewer the Justice Department has not found any evidence of the widespread voter fraud Mr Trump and his team continue to allege – but not in the lawsuits they have filed in several states.
Mr Barr and the president had a reportedly contentious meeting in the Oval Office on Tuesday, when the AG was in the building for what a spokeswoman said was a meeting with Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Wednesday would not say the president retains confidence in his attorney general, leading reporters to pick Mr Trump’s brain during an unrelated event a day later in the Oval Office.
Asked if he still has confidence in Barr, he replied: “Ask me that in a number of weeks from now. They should be looking at all of this fraud. This is not civil. This is criminal stuff. This is very bad criminal stuff.”
Read More
Trump and GOP claim $30m jump in donations since Wednesday
Biden considers 100-day mask mandate and says he’d take vaccine on TV
Joe Biden asks Dr Fauci to be part of his Covid response team
