Lowering The Barr, Con't

Bill Barr's "Justice Department" is now openly targeting Democratic governors heading into the election, accusing them of killing seniors in veterans homes with COVID-19.

President Donald Trump’s top civil rights official at the Department of Justice announced this week that he was considering launching investigations into how state-owned nursing homes responded to the coronavirus. The four states he targeted all have Democratic governors. This highly unusual public announcement of potential investigations raised alarm bells among Civil Rights Division alumni and Democrats that DOJ’s move was motivated by partisan politics.

Eric Dreiband, the assistant attorney general running the Civil Rights Division, sent letters to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday, requesting documents and information under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA) about how public nursing homes in their states responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cuomo and Whitmer said in a joint statement that the inquiries were “nothing more than a transparent politicization of the Department of Justice in the middle of the Republican National Convention.” They called DOJ’s move a “nakedly partisan deflection” and questioned why Republican-run states that, based on federal guidelines, had similar rules about nursing home admissions were not being targeted.

In a press release on Wednesday, the Justice Department claimed, without pointing to evidence, that state orders “may have resulted in the deaths of thousands of elderly nursing home residents.” The department said it was “evaluating whether to initiate investigations,” meaning that it had not actually launched a probe. It is unusual for DOJ to highly publicize such a preliminary inquiry.

The press release went on to compare the COVID-19 death rate in the blue state of New York to the death rate in the red state of Texas, despite the vast array of factors and variables ― including population density and the geographical progression of COVID-19 ― that made the Empire State more vulnerable to the pandemic than the Lone Star State.

The bigger problem is that CRIPA cases cover prisons and jails, which have had massive outbreaks of COVID-19 in states like Alabama, Texas, Florida, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, but the Justice Department has yet to open a single investigation involving inmate deaths.

CRIPA is a 40-year-old federal statute meant to protect Americans held in government-run institutions like jails, prisons, mental health facilities and state-owned nursing homes. The vast majority of nursing homes in the United States are privately run and therefore not covered by CRIPA, even if those entities receive most of their funding through Medicare. Pennsylvania, for example, has just seven such state-owned facilities, which house roughly 1,300 residents ― a small fraction of the state’s nursing home population of more than 80,000.

With more than 180,000 Americans dead in a pandemic that has devastated the U.S. economy, Trump’s reelection campaign benefits from drawing heat away from the administration’s handling of the crisis and onto Democratic governors’ decisions. The best-known state-run nursing facilities tend to be veterans homes, allowing the administration to suggest that Democratic governors failed to protect our nation’s elderly war heroes.

Moreover, the most common CRIPA cases involve jail and prison conditions. But DOJ hasn’t announced any inquiries into how such facilities have handled COVID-19 despite the fact that jails and prisons have seen some of the biggest coronavirus clusters in the U.S. Nearly 160,000 incarcerated individuals and staffers have tested positive for the virus, and at least 1,000 have died ― including 116 people held in facilities run by the Justice Department’s own Bureau of Prisons.

While CRIPA gives DOJ limited jurisdiction over state-owned nursing homes, a department official suggested that the inquiry could drive at a much larger question that goes far beyond the scope of the preliminary probe.

“Those 50,000 COVID dead in NY/NJ deserve to have an investigation to determine if their Governors are responsible for their deaths,” the DOJ official wrote.

The Trump Regime is scrambling to remove blame for the federal government's failed COVID-19 response by any means possible, even if that means prosecuting Democratic governors. This is 100% a political witch hunt, announced on the final day of the Trump Dear Leader Show, and in a second term, Bill Barr will be completely free to prosecute as many Democrats as he can find.

And he will.  The thing with enemies' lists is that there's always more enemies to fill them with.