Bill Barr: Trump announces via Twitter that the Attorney General has resigned

Attorney General William Barr will resign before Christmas, Donald Trump announced in a tweet, ending their feud a little over a month before the president leaves office.

The two had clashed recently over Mr Barr saying the Justice Department has not found the widespread voter fraud that the outgoing president says is to blame for his loss to the president-elect Joe Biden.

The deputy attorney general, Jeff Rosen, will become AG once Barr has officially left the department on 23 December.

Mr Barr’s fall from the president’s good graces underscored just how quickly a trusted hand could garner nothing but praise from the boss one day and be on his naughty list just a few days or weeks later.

Mr Barr’s final misstep came when he admitted the DOJ had not found any credible allegation of widespread voter fraud.

“There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that,” Mr Barr told the Associated Press, also referring to the Department of Homeland Security.

Justice officials have received complaints about some shenanigans – just as they do every cycle.

“Voter fraud claims that had been submitted to the country’s top law enforcement department were “very particularized to a particular set of circumstances or actors or conduct,” Mr Barr told the wire service.

White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, stopped short of giving the AG a vote of confidence a day after Mr Barr signalled Justice Department officials do not plan to pursue any criminal charges over the president’s allegations of a Democratic conspiracy to tip the balance in a handful of states he lost to Mr Biden.

Ever a cable television-obsessed showman, Mr Trump announced the AG’s departure about 10 minutes after California’s presidential electors assigned all 55 of their Electoral College votes to Mr Biden. That put him well over the 270-vote threshold needed to formally become the president-elect.

Mr Trump’s tweet amounted to his latest attempts to counter-programme Mr Biden’s transition period.

“Just had a very nice meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr at the White House. Our relationship has been a very good one, he has done an outstanding job! As per letter, Bill will be leaving just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family...” he wrote. “...Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen, an outstanding person, will become Acting Attorney General. Highly respected Richard Donoghue will be taking over the duties of Deputy Attorney General. Thank you to all!”

As Mr Barr’s Justice Department took no action, the president’s legal team was busy filing evidence-free lawsuits that federal judges, including some appointed by Mr Trump, have dismissed or ruled against them.

“With all due respect to the attorney general, there hasn’t been any semblance of a Department of Justice investigation,” Trump lawyers Rudolph Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said in a joint statement.

“Again, with the greatest respect to the attorney general, his opinion appears to be without any knowledge or investigation of the substantial irregularities and evidence of systemic fraud,” they added.

The president himself criticised Barr’s department in an 11 December tweet: “Why didn’t the Fake News Media, the FBI and the DOJ report the Biden matter BEFORE the Election.”

He told reporters recently in the Oval Office to wait a few weeks to see Mr Barr’s fate, saying he wanted to see what the AG did on the alleged voter fraud.

For most of his term as AG, Mr Barr appeared to be one of Mr Trump’s favourites.

They shared a vision of the Office of the President having vast powers, and seemed to have a sort of agreement to help one another codify as much of the “unitary executive” theory as they could.

But Mr Barr at times felt compelled to push back on the president.

For instance, he told a television interviewer that is was tough to do his job when his boss was constantly tweeting about DOJ business and cases.

Mr Trump said he would not stop doing so.

But Mr Barr also often defended Mr Trump, like when he said the president had never pressed him to drop a case against one of his associates or otherwise tried to put his finger on Justice Department business. He also noted that he had not launched any investigations into Mr Trump’s enemies – a statement made even as it has now become clear the FBI was investigating Hunter Biden, the sometimes-troubled son of the president-elect.