Grover Cleveland was President twice. Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense twice. Now William Barr is poised to be Attorney General for a second time.
The let-em-all-loose crowd doesn't like Mr. Barr's prefatory note to a 1992 DoJ report titled The Case for More Incarceration. Mr. Barr noted, "there is no better way to reduce crime than to identify, target, and incapacitate those hardened criminals who commit staggering numbers of violent crimes whenever they are on the streets."
The violent crime rate in 1992 was 757.7 per 100,000 population. The property crime rate was 4903.7. The numbers for 2017 are 394.0 and 2362.2 respectively. That's a drop of about half in both statistics. Stand by for attacks on Mr. Barr for supporting a policy that "failed." We could use a lot more such "failures."
Senator McConnell, I wish you and your colleagues a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Take a recess.
Would love to hear how various C&C folks view the filings by prosecutors in the Cohen and Manafort cases, as well as views on whether you think a future AG Barr will seek to limit what the SCO is doing.
I do not intend to comment on the filings. I have not read them, and doing so is not high on my priority list.
I have said here before that all "special" or "independent" counsels should have their scope strictly limited to the cases that required their appointment to avoid the "mission creep" that has plagued presidents of both parties.
Then-Acting Attorney General Rosenstein obviously had the opposite view. If the scope is to be revisited, though, it will likely be done by the current Acting AG, not the incoming AG.
I understand your position, Kent, but in the Cohen case I wonder if you would adopt a kind of "fruit of the poisonous tree" view of the work of "regular" federal prosecutors. Some are saying the sharpest document to date has come from federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York with their Cohen sentencing filing strongly implicating the Prez in criminal activity.
Especially for these kinds of non-violent crimes, I am always eager to hear what the tough-on-crime crowd thinks. Also, for the record, I think the scope of the work of ALL federal prosecutors should be "strictly limited."