Attorney General William Barr may have bribed his way into being Attorney General after an investigative report showed a spike in his donations to Republican Senators shortly prior to his confirmation hearing.
According to a report by Ephrat Livni and David Yanofsky for Quartz, Barr increased the number of donations to Republican Senators prior to him stepping in a room with them to convince them to allow him to become Attorney General.
For their report, Livni and Yanofsky took a close look at the attorney general’s history of political donations. And they describe the donations Barr made from 1993 to mid-2018 as “occasional at best.” But the amount of money Barr donated politically, according to the Quartz reporters, sharply increased “in the lead-up to his Senate confirmation hearings for attorney general earlier this year.”
According to the report Barr donated $51,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) in the five months leading up to his confirmation as U.S. attorney general by the Senate. Before 2018, the journalists note, Barr donated a total of $85,400 to the NRSC in 25 years.
Livni and Yanofsky, examining Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings, found that between October 2018 and February 2019, Barr’s donations to the NRSC were “ramped up” and “substantially different” from his NRSC donations prior to that.
“The fact that any one person can give such large amounts to a political party creates a perception problem,” Noti told Quartz. “Someone giving such large amounts to a senatorial committee before their confirmation certainly raises appearance questions.”
Barr has come under a lot of backlashes after critics accused him of using his position of power to protect Donald Trump from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
