Attorney General William Barr said on Friday that the Democratic Party is waging a “scorched earth, no-holds-barred war” against President Donald Trump , reports The Washington Examiner .
Barr made the remarks during a speech before the conservative Federalist Society.
During his address, the top Justice Department official suggested that House Democrats’ investigations into Trump and his associates are meant to “incapacitate” the presidency, arguing that Democrats in the United States Congress are abusing their powers to undermine the president.
“In recent years, both the legislative and judicial branches have been responsible for encroaching on the presidency’s constitutional authority,” he said.
This opposition to Trump, suggested Barr, began on the day Hillary Clinton lost the election, and Democrats have demonstrated that they are determined to “sabotage” the president and his administration by all means necessary.
The attorney general accused the opposition party of creating a “Resistance” to the president.
The Democrats created this resistance, according to Barr, in an effort to demonstrate that the Trump government is illegitimate, and to wage a “war” against the Trump administration.
“Now, ‘resistance’ is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power. It obviously connotes that the government is not legitimate,” he said.
“This is a very dangerous — indeed incendiary — notion to import into the politics of a democratic republic,” Barr opined, adding that Democrats “see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple” Trump’s government.
According to the attorney general, actions undertaken by the Democratic Party represent a “systematic shredding of norms.”
Barr’s statements echo the language Trump and other Republicans frequently use to push back against Democratic investigations and against the recently-launched impeachment inquiry.
According to the president and his allies, Democrats have launched a coup against the administration.
Barr’s remarks came on the second day of public testimony in the impeachment inquiry into Trump.
House Democrats decided to launch an investigation into Trump after an anonymous intelligence community whistleblower filed a formal complaint alleging that the president is abusing the power of his office to benefit his re-election campaign. According to the whistleblower, Trump pressured the Ukrainian government to investigate one of his main political rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden.
According to the anonymous individual, Trump threatened to cut military aid unless Ukraine does as he says in an apparent effort to damage Biden’s 2020 presidential bid.
House Democrats claim that the president committed impeachable offenses and that the transcript of his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky corroborates the whistleblower’s claims.
The president has strongly pushed back against the accusations and maintains that he has done nothing wrong.