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AG William Barr agrees to testify before the House Judiciary Committee next month

Posted at 1:20 PM, Feb 12, 2020
and last updated 2020-02-12 16:46:45-05

Attorney General William Barr has agreed to go before the House Judiciary Committee on March 31 to respond to allegations that the Department of Justice is making decisions that are politically influenced.

The House Judiciary Committee wants to question Barr on three incidents from this week that it found questionable.

One was the DOJ's decision to overrule prosecutors' recommended sentence of Trump ally Roger Stone.

Stone was convicted on charges of lying to Congress, tampering with a witness and obstructing a House investigation. On Monday, the prosecution asked the judge for a 7-9 year sentence of Stone. But following tweets from the president, Barr overruled the prosecutors, stating that the sentencing guidelines prosecutors used were too harsh.

"This is a horrible and very unfair situation. The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!” Trump tweeted on Tuesday.

A second incident the committee is investigating is on Barr stating publicly that he has opened a "channel" for President Donald Trump's attorney Rudolph Giuliani to deliver information to the DOJ involving presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Giuliani has openly said that he is looking for information from the Ukrainian government on whether the former vice president and his son conducted any wrongdoing when Joe Biden pushed for the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor.

The third is the decision to pull the nomination of Jessie Liu, who is a U.S. Attorney who originally was nominated for a post in the Treasury Department. Liu oversaw the office that tried the prosecutions of several Trump allies, including Stone and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

The Judiciary Committee is chaired by Democrat Jerry Nadler, who was on the team that managed Trump's impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate.