Questions are swirling today about why Attorney General William Barr didn’t recuse him from the Jeffrey Epstein case. There are past associations between Epstein and Barr that some say highlights a clear conflict.
Barr had telegraphed at his confirmation hearing in January that he might have to step aside from any Justice Department reviews of Epstein’s case, because another lawyer at his then-firm, Kirkland & Ellis, had represented the wealthy financier. The other lawyer, Jay P. Lefkowitz, helped secure a plea deal for Epstein in 2008 that has been widely criticized as being too lenient, in that it allowed Epstein to spend just 13 months in jail in Florida, with work release privileges, to resolve allegations that he abused dozens of young girls.
So all indications were that Barr would indeed fully recuse himself, so what happened today is being called an unrecusal by some.
Barr weighed whether he would have to remove himself from involvement in the case in part because Epstein had previously hired lawyers from the law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP. Barr served as counsel to the law firm before becoming attorney general.
But Barr has recused himself from any retrospective review of the Justice Department’s decision more than a decade ago letting Epstein avoid prosecution on federal sex-trafficking offenses in Florida and the decades of prison time that he could have faced if convicted.
Legal analyst Elie Honig says:
This is trouble. I have zero confidence Barr will let this case play out in its natural course if it should start to implicate or do collateral damage to powerful, politically-connected people.
Attorney and frequent Trump critic George Conway says “He should be called to testify on whether he had any discussions with the White House on this.”
