On Tuesday, Attorney General William Barr was asked during his testimony if it was ever acceptable for a president to accept foreign assistance for an election. In response, Barr said that it depended on the information.
Speaking to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, former FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann explained that it is a crime, something that Barr should be well aware of.
“First, there is a federal statute that makes it a crime to accept or solicit any assistance,” Weissmann explained. “So, the congressman had it totally right. So the attorney general’s initial statement was just wrong. And you could see what was going on there was that he was caught because he knew what the evidence was with respect to the president and the evidence with respect to the impeachment. And he was trying to duck it.”
“He eventually got to what was an obvious answer, which is, ‘No. you cannot accept or solicit any foreign assistance,’” said Weissmann. “And it goes to sort of a larger point that people have been getting at, which is the partisan nature of what the attorney general was up to today. Where he talked about the ‘Russian hoax,’ but at the same time, he was willing to say that there clearly is going to be foreign interference in connection with having mail-in voting. But he also had to admit he had zero evidence to support that. So, you had enormous dichotomies between the truth and partisan effort on his part to support the president.”
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