A Majority Of Voters Think That Attorney General Bill Barr Should Be Impeached
By Ethan Winter
Attorney General Bill Barr is a disgrace and voters think he should be impeached. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren has consistently called for Barrs resignation. In February 2020, she tweeted, for instance, “Donald Trump is shredding the rule of law in this country. His AG overruled career prosecutors to reduce the sentence for his buddy Roger Stone after Stone committed crimes to protect him. Every Republican who voted to acquit Trump for his corrupt actions enabled and owns this.” She renewed this call in May, tweeting, “William Barr is not the President’s lawyer – he is the country’s lawyer. His political interference is blatantly corrupt and he should resign.”
As part of a June survey, we posed voters with four arguments as to why Barr should be impeached and then offered them five response options ranging from he should definitely be impeached to he should definitely not be impeached, with a response option available if they weren’t sure.
The most effective argument was the one that highlighted Barr’s role in suppressing the findings of Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible connections between Trump’s 2016 and the Russian government. After reading this, 50 percent of voters said that Barr should be impeached while 30 percent said he shouldn’t be impeached--the remaining 20 percent weren’t sure. For the other five arguments, a plurality of voters all reported that Barr should be impeached. For instance, after voters are told that Barr has failed to adequately investigate police misconduct across the United State, 49 percent of voters say Barr should be impeached while 31 percent say he shouldn’t be.
While the Speaker of the House, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, has, to this point, resisted calls for impeaching Barr, saying that a solution will come after the November election, it should be emphasized that voters are quite receptive to arguments that make the case for his impeachment. Barr has a track record of clear misconduct, one stretching back to the administration of President George H. W. Bush that could and, indeed, ought to be aired at a hearing in the House where he must testify under oath.
Ethan Winter (@EthanBWinter) is an analyst at Data for Progress. You can email him at ethan@dataforprogress.org.
From June 27 through June 27, 2020, Data for Progress conducted a survey of 1,388 likely voters nationally using web-panel respondents. The sample was weighted to be representative of likely voters by age, gender, education, race, and voting history. The survey was conducted in English. The margin of error is +/- 2.6 percentage points.