Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) speaks and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) listens as U.S. Attorney General William Barr testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee May 1, 2019 in Washington, DC. Barr testified on the Justice Department’s investigation of Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election. Photo : Alex Wong ( Getty Images ) Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is running for president, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have time to hand Attorney General Barr his ass right quick. In fact, she did it all in less than a minute. Advertisement Here’s how it all went down: Barr—who may or may not subsist on a diet of T-Rex T-Bones and Brontosaurus burgers—was sitting before a firing squad of Democrats, and a feathering squad of Republicans, to answer why he took a 400-page report and summed it up in four pages, which completely ripped out the spine of the report, and then held a press conference to taint the American public’s view of said report, because he knew no regular American who wasn’t a member of Congress would read that shit, all to protect his lord and overseer President Trump. Well, when Harris got her shot, she didn’t miss: Sen. Harris: Attorney General Barr has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone? Barr: I wouldn’t, uh — Harris: Yes or no? Barr: Could you repeat that question? Harris: I will repeat it. Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone? Yes or no, please, sir. Barr: Um, the president or anybody else? Harris: Seems you would remember something like that and be able to tell us. Barr: Yeah, but I’m trying to grapple with the word “Suggest.” I mean, there have been discussions of matters out there that they’ve not asked me to open an investigation... Harris: Perhaps they’ve suggested? Barr: I don’t know. I wouldn’t say suggest. Harris: Hinted? Barr: I don’t know. Harris: Inferred? You don’t know. During the exchange, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) looked on like a girlfriend who was watching her best friend confront her lying man about cheating. Booker was literally sitting looking at Barr with the “bitch why you keep lying?” face, and it was glorious. In fact, Harris was the only Democrat who seemed to stump Barr and throw him off his game, and by his game, I mean lying to protect the president. Barr literally moved his lying game to Matrix levels where he basically argued, rejected or appeared to misread blatant statements that could’ve been concluded by a normal nonpartisan person as obstruction of justice. But Mr. Flintstone is clinging firmly to President Trump’s fat-ass tie, so until all of these people are impeached, we will have to live with them being shamed. Oh, Kamala wasn’t finished. W hen asked if she believed Barr should resign, Harris stated flatly: “Yes.” And then walked off with her HBCU swagger.<doc-sep>At the hearing, Barr shrugged all this off as if it were a big nothing. At one point, Barr casually misrepresented Mueller’s views on the matter, claiming that Mueller “was very clear with me that he was not suggesting that we had misrepresented his report.” But Mueller explicitly said Barr had misinformed the public! Barr took refuge in hair-splitting without betraying the slightest concern that he had misled the country.<doc-sep>Sen. Kamala Harris speaks to a crowd at the She The People Presidential Forum at Texas Southern University on April 24, 2019 in Houston, Texas. (CNN) — Democratic senator and presidential candidate Kamala Harris said she has concerns about the integrity of the US government following her questioning of Attorney General Bill Barr at a hearing on Wednesday. “One of the things that is very much at play and very present at this moment in time in our country is a concern about whether or not our democracy is intact, whether it can be trusted, whether the leaders in our democracy can be trusted,” Harris said Wednesday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.” Harris’ comments came hours after the conclusion of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Barr, where the newly minted attorney general defended his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe and his decision not to accuse President Donald Trump of obstruction of justice. Harris, who is running as a progressive prosecutor, has repeatedly created viral moments as she has questioned Trump nominees and Cabinet members in congressional hearings over the past few years. She has used her sharp, direct questions to illustrate her toughness – and implicitly her ability to take on President Donald Trump in future debates – and those skills have set her apart from other candidates in the 2020 field. During the hearing, Barr was unable to tell Harris whether anyone at the White House had suggested he open an investigation of anyone, asking her to specify whether she was referring to the President or anyone else. “Seems you’d remember something like that and be able to tell us,” Harris said. “Yeah but I’m trying to grapple with the word ‘suggest,’ ” Barr replied. “There have been discussions of matters out there that they have not asked me to open an investigation, but –” Harris asked, “Perhaps they’ve suggested, hinted?” Barr replied, “I don’t know, I wouldn’t say suggest. I don’t know.” The senator from California then grilled the attorney general on whether he had reviewed the underlying evidence as he was responsible for the charging decision. The line of questioning revealed that neither Barr nor Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had looked at Mueller’s underlying evidence before deciding not to charge Trump with obstruction of justice. The two also shared a testy exchange over Rosenstein’s role in the Mueller investigation, specifically whether Rosenstein had been approved by Department of Justice ethics officials to participate in overseeing the probe when he was also a witness. “Did you consult with DOJ ethics officials before you enlisted Rod Rosenstein to participate in a charging decision for an investigation, the subject of which he is also a witness?” Harris asked. “My understanding was that he had been cleared already to participate in it, by the –” Barr replied, before Harris reiterated, “So you had consulted with them, and they cleared it?” “No, I think they cleared it when he took over the investigation. That’s my understanding,” Barr responded. “You don’t know whether he has been cleared of a conflict of interest?” Harris asked. Barr responded, “Well, he wouldn’t be participating if there was a conflict of interest.” When pressed on whether Rosenstein’s case had been reviewed by ethics officials, Barr said, “I believe it was – well, I believe it was reviewed.” Harris told Cooper that while she believed voters would prioritize immediate economic and personal concerns, she thought they cared about the investigations and the conduct of the Justice Department, calling the issue “symbolic, and, actually, a litmus test on whether our democracy is intact.” “(In) this case it’s about whether the attorney general is fulfilling his responsibility to the people of our country,” Harris said. In recent weeks, her team has sent somewhat desperate sounding emails to supporters acknowledging that they have fallen short in their fundraising goals. On Wednesday, Harris sent a message seeking contributions a little over an hour after questioning Barr. “I’ll be frank: Attorney General Barr refused to answer most of my questions – and when he did, his answers were alarming,” the email read. “He admitted he had never even reviewed the underlying evidence of the Mueller report, and he refused to say whether the President has ever ordered him to investigate anyone. This is unacceptable.” She added, “I’m running for president because the American people deserve truth and integrity from their elected leaders. That’s not what we’re getting right now. If you’re with me in this fight, I need you now.” Harris, along with other 2020 competitors, later called on Wednesday for Barr to resign. In her CNN interview, Harris argued that what she called the lax reading from Barr of Mueller’s obstruction findings “calls into question the integrity of our criminal justice system” in comparison to the justice system’s treatment of people charged based on less exhaustive findings. “It makes people who walk into courthouses every day say, ‘Am I getting justice? Is this really justice?’ ” Harris said. “Is it justice for some or justice for all?”<doc-sep>
Attorney General William Barr had some tense moments with Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee during his testimony about Robert Mueller’s Russian investigation and the decision not to charge President Donald Trump with obstruction of justice. The committee is packed with veteran Democrats, including three who are running for president in 2020. One of them is California Sen. Kamala Harris, whose interaction with the attorney general has caught people’s attention. The full 8-minute, 13-second exchange that was tweeted out by CSPAN received nearly 1.5 million views by Wednesday night. Harris––who is the former attorney general for California and a former district attorney for San Francisco––interrogated Barr on several topics before her time expired, but she opened with a question about White House pressure on the Justice Department. “Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested you open an investigation into anyone?” she asked. First Barr asked Harris to repeat the question. Then, he challenged Harris’ wording: “I’m trying to grapple with the word ‘suggest.’ I mean, there have been discussions of matters out there that… they have not asked me to open an investigation but…” Harris responded: “Perhaps they’ve suggested?” Then, as Barr hesitated, she followed up, “Hinted?” “Inferred?” Barr ended the exchange with “I… don’t know.” Harris also pressed Barr to acknowledge that no one in his office––not he, nor Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, nor anyone else––had actually looked at the underlying evidence that Special Counsel Mueller’s team had gathered before Barr and Rosenstein made the determination not to charge Trump with obstruction of justice. “We accepted statements in the report as the factual record. We did not go underneath it to see whether or not they were accurate. We accepted it as accurate,” Barr said. Harris noted that Mueller’s office had collected a “great deal” of evidence. She asked whether a prosecutor could make such a critical decision without reading the evidence. “If in any U.S. attorney’s office around the country, the head of that office, when being asked to make a critical decision, about in this case, the person who is in the highest office in the land and whether or not that person committed a crime, in that case would you accept them recommending a charging decision to you if they had not reviewed the evidence?” Harris said. “That’s a question for Bob Mueller,” he said. “He‘s the U.S. attorney, he’s the one who presents the report.” “But you made the charging decision, sir,” Harris returned. Contact us at letters@time.com.