House Judiciary Committee postpones March 31 Barr hearing

House Democrats had billed Attorney General Bill Barr’s March 31 testimony as a crucial opportunity to unearth answers about President Donald Trump’s efforts to influence Justice Department decisions related to two former associates. Now the Judiciary Committee has postponed it indefinitely.

The hearing is the latest to succumb to the lockdown on Capitol Hill, where only the Senate remains in session attempting to hammer out a massive coronavirus relief package. All matters not related to coronavirus have been effectively shelved.

But the hearing with Barr, which had remained on the books despite clear indications that coronavirus concerns would force its postponement, had been viewed as a crisis-level moment for lawmakers until the pandemic swept the globe.

Barr hadn’t appeared before the House Judiciary Committee in his 14-month stint as attorney general, and Democrats on the panel had pent-up questions about his handling of the report by special counsel Robert Mueller, as well as his role in the decision-making pertaining to the handling of a whistleblower report that set the stage for Trump’s impeachment for pressing Ukraine to investigate his Democratic rivals. And most recently, Barr had voiced exasperation at Trump over the president’s Twitter attack on prosecutors for recommending a harsh sentence for Roger Stone, a longtime Trump associate convicted for impeding the congressional investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

“Due to overwhelming health and safety concerns, the @HouseJudiciary will postpone our March 31st oversight hearing with Attorney General Barr,” the panel’s chairman, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), tweeted on Monday afternoon. “DOJ has made a commitment to rescheduling the hearing for when the crisis abates and the Committee is able to reconvene.”

A Justice Department spokesman confirmed that the department had committed to rescheduling the hearing at a later date.

The decision underscores the fact that nearly all inquiries and investigations led by Congress are on pause amid the coronavirus response, which has superseded nearly everything else in American life.

The hearing was announced on Feb. 12, just a week after the Senate acquitted Trump of two articles of impeachment accusing him of abuse of power and obstructing congressional investigations. Trump quickly embarked on an effort to push out of his orbit officials he viewed as having provided damaging information to lawmakers or those deemed insufficiently loyal to the president. That included the removal of the former U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., Jessie Liu, whom Trump nominated to a senior Treasury post, a nomination he subsequently withdrew.

In a subsequent letter to the Justice Department, Nadler requested reams of documents and access to high-level witnesses that he said could speak to Trump’s influence on department decisions and whether politics had seeped into prosecutorial decisions. Nadler sought interviews with four Justice Department prosecutors who quit the Stone case after Barr overruled their decision to seek a sentence of more than seven years and suggested that the judge consider a lower penalty. Barr’s decision came just hours after Trump attacked the prosecutors in the case.

Barr later told a television interviewer that he wished Trump would stop tweeting about Justice Department matters, a request that Trump repeatedly ignored in subsequent days.

Democrats also raised questions about Barr’s decision to tap U.S. attorneys across the country for special assignments related to some of the matters of particular interest to Trump. For example, they asked the Justice Department to interview John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, who is leading a wide-ranging investigation into the origin of the FBI’s 2016 Trump-Russia investigation.

It’s unclear whether the department provided documents at Nadler’s request. But those issues quickly faded as coronavirus became the nation’s foremost concern, sidelining all other public policy matters and congressional inquiries.