Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. What is the pending business before the Senate?

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I rise to speak about the nomination of William Barr to be the next Attorney General of the United States.

Mr. Barr has an admirable record of public service in his career. He has dramatically more qualifications and experience than many of his predecessors and, certainly, the Acting Attorney General. We can see he brings more experience to the job.

I respect Mr. Barr and his family. I have told him as much to his face. He has a wonderful family, and he brought them with him to the hearing, and many of them have chosen public service careers, as he has.

I carefully reviewed his record, trying to consider him in not only the context of this awesome responsibility of being Attorney General, but at this awesome moment in history.

When it comes to the ongoing investigation of President Trump's campaign by Robert Mueller, I fear that Mr. Barr has said and done things that raise questions about his objectivity. He has clearly indicated to President Donald Trump and to all of us how he would oversee this investigation if he is confirmed. Just look at the unsolicited--unsolicited--19-page memo that William Barr sent to Special Counsel Mueller's supervisors and to the Trump legal defense team just in June of 2018.

It is notable that Mr. Barr did not send this memo to Special Counsel Mueller himself, and he did not make it public.

This was the only time Mr. Barr had sent a memo like this to the Justice Department, and he did not disclose in his memo that he had personally interviewed with the President the previous year about serving on the President's defense team.

This memo is critical for its substance. In it, Mr. Barr argued that Bob Mueller, the investigator, the special counsel, should not be permitted to ask the President any questions about obstruction of justice, even though Mr. Barr's analysis focused only on one narrow obstruction theory.

The memo calls into serious question Mr. Barr's ability to impartially oversee the obstruction of justice issues in the Mueller investigation at a moment in history when that is an essential question. Mr. Barr has made no commitment to recuse himself from such questions. That is worrisome.

That William Barr would volunteer a 19-page legal memo with dramatic efforts at research and verification, give this to the President's defense team and to Mr. Mueller's supervisors at the Department of Justice, and basically make arguments diminishing the authority of the special counsel to move forward in the investigation raises a serious question about his impartiality.

Just as important, I am alarmed by Mr. Barr's continued hedging about what he will do when Mr. Mueller completes his investigation and has a presentation of his conclusions, his evidence, and his findings.

Make no mistake. Special Counsel Mueller's findings and conclusions should be shared with the American people and with the U.S. Congress. Current Department of Justice regulations and policies allow for such a release. I am concerned that Mr. Barr will exercise his discretion under those regulations narrowly and issue a cursory report that does not take the findings of the Mueller investigation in their entirety and make them available to the American people. This investigation is too critical to seal its result in some vault at the Department of Justice.

I believe we can trust Bob Mueller to be impartial and unbiased. I don't know if he will find the President or people around him guilty of wrongdoing beyond the indictments and convictions that have already come down or whether he will conclude that there is no further responsibility or culpability, but I trust his findings, whatever they are. He is a true professional.

It is important, after we have gone through a year or two of investigation, that the American people hear the details, hear the information that may be part of the Mueller investigation.

I am also concerned that Mr. Barr will continue his predecessor's harsh approach on immigration instead of charting a different course.

It was just last year, I believe in April in 2018, when the Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced something called the zero-tolerance policy.

Do you remember it?

The zero-tolerance policy said that the U.S. Government would forcibly remove infants, toddlers, and children from their parents at our border.

The inspector general's reports say that it had been going on for a year before it was publicly announced.

Twenty-eight hundred children were removed from their parents. What happened to them next is shameful. There was no effort made to trace these children and the parents who were forced to give them up.

It was only when a Federal judge in San Diego stepped forward and required the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Health and Human Services to make an accounting of how many children were still not united with their parents that they took the effort to do so months--months--after those children had been separated from their parents.

I saw those kids in an immigration court in Chicago in a large office building that you would never guess was a court building in the Loop in Chicago. There it was, the immigration court taking up most of one floor in this office building. People were stacked three and four deep in the corridors, waiting for their hearing. But the judge--and she was a good person, a real professional--couldn't get her hearing underway. She had a problem with those who were appearing before her court that day. The problem was this: She had said that before they could start the proceeding, those who were appearing had to sit down. One of the clients who was in there for a hearing that day had some difficulty. I was there to witness it. The difficulty was she was 2 years old. She wasn't tall enough to crawl up in that chair without somebody lifting her.

The other client who had a hearing that day, who had been removed under this zero-tolerance policy, was a little more skillful. He spotted a Matchbox car on the top of the table, and this 4-year-old boy got up in the chair to play with it.

Those were two of the clients before this immigration judge in this office building in the Loop in Chicago. They had been forcibly removed from their parents, and they were up for a hearing. It was in August.

As a result of the hearing, as with most of the hearings, they said: We are going to postpone this until we get further evidence. The next hearing will be in December--December.

I would ask any parent, any grandparent: What would you think about being separated from that little girl, that 2-year-old girl, whom you love so much, for 6 months, 8 months, 9 months?

That was the policy of this Trump administration with zero tolerance--a policy created and announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

So when I asked Mr. Barr: You are going to take over this job. What is your view on this type of policy? Sadly, I didn't get a direct answer.

I am concerned that in many respects Mr. Barr could continue the harsh approach to immigration that we have seen by the Trump administration instead of charting a different course, a course more consistent with America's values and history.

We are in fact a nation of immigrants. Throughout American history, immigration has strengthened and renewed our country. I stand here today, the son of an immigrant girl who came to this country from Lithuania at the age of 2. Her son grew up and got a full-time government job right here in the Senate. It can happen. It is my story. It is my family's story. It is America's story.

When I listened to the diatribes by this President in the State of the Union Address about immigrants coming to this country--of course there are bad people. We don't want any of them in this country, and if they are here, we want them to leave. But think of all of the good people who have come to this country and made America what it is today. The President dismisses those folks, doesn't take them as seriously as he should, as far as I am concerned.

I want to know if this Attorney General, Mr. Barr, subscribes to the President's theories on immigration. For the past 2 years, President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions did everything in their power to make America's immigration policy harsh and unwelcoming.

Mr. Barr's comments and history make me fear that he will bring the full weight of the Justice Department to advance the President's anti- immigration agenda. Mr. Barr has refused to disavow the cruel and un- American zero-tolerance policy, which I just described, that led to thousands of children being forcibly removed from their parents, and he has fully and repeatedly echoed President Trump's call for a border wall after the debate we have been through over the last several months, falsely arguing that it will help to combat the opioid epidemic. That is a ludicrous argument. In fact, the Drug Enforcement Administration, which Mr. Barr would supervise, has found that the vast majority of deadly narcotics coming into America through the Mexican border are coming in through ports of entry. They are not being carried in backpacks by people scaling fences. That is where our security efforts should be made, not with some medieval wall.

Mr. Barr also falsely and repeatedly was critical of our asylum laws for a host of problems. Our asylum laws, which have historically had broad bipartisan support until this President came along, simply ensure that we honor our legal and moral obligation to provide safe haven to families and children who are fleeing persecution.

Who are these families seeking asylum and refugee status in the United States? You can find members of those families right here on the floor of the United States Senate. You can find three Cuban-American U.S. Senators--one Democrat and two Republicans--whose families came here as refugees from Castro's Cuba. Are we having second thoughts now about whether they are a valuable part of America? I am not. These people, these Cuban-Americans, have become an integral part of our Nation. They were once refugees and asylees. Now, they are party of America's future, and we are better off for it.

I could tell that story so many different ways. Soviet Jews trying to escape persecution in the old Soviet Union and the Vietnamese who stood by us and fought by our men and women in uniform during the Vietnam war, who had to escape an oppressive regime, came to the United States as refugees and asylees. We are now seeing under President Trump the lowest level of refugees in modern memory. We are walking away from our obligation to the world.

And Mr. Barr called for withholding of Federal funds to force cities to cooperate with the Trump administration's immigration agenda, even though courts have repeatedly struck down that approach.

Perhaps most troubling is Mr. Barr's comment to me that he thinks it is absolutely appropriate for the Attorney General to change the immigration rules to help advance a President's campaign. He said he did it to help the campaign of President Bush in 1992. The idea of an Attorney General letting campaign politics drive immigration enforcement is unacceptable regardless of the President.

I am also concerned with the views Mr. Barr expressed on something known as the unitary executive theory and his expansive view of Presidential power. He put it bluntly in that 19-page memo I mentioned before, when he said the President alone is the executive branch. We need an Attorney General who recognizes the need for checks and balances, but he did not believe that this President should be held accountable for many of the actions he has taken. I may be naive, but I don't believe any American is above the law, including the President of the United States.

This is not an ordinary time in the history of the Justice Department. President Trump has criticized the Judiciary, individual Federal judges, our intelligence Agencies, and the Department of Justice when they continued an investigation into his campaign. He has undermined their independence and integrity with his storm of tweets every single day.

William Barr said he sees the Attorney General as ``the President's lawyer''--in his words--but the chief law enforcement officer of the United States is supposed to be the lawyer for the people of the United States. We need an Attorney General who will lead the Justice Department without fear or favor and who will serve the Constitution of the American people even if it means standing up to a President.

If he is confirmed, I hope Mr. Barr will prove me wrong and that he will be a good Attorney General who came at the right moment in history, but I have not received the reassurances I was looking for from him to give him a vote to reach that position. I will be voting no on the Barr nomination.

I see my colleague and friend Senator Leahy on the floor. I will withhold two other statements for the Record to yield the floor.

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