Attorney General Bill Barr is overruling President Donald Trump and denying access of key documents exposing Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks to the families of the victims.
Trump had previously pledged to release the information, but Barr is now claiming that national security concerns prevent him from disclosing the information. He joined acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell and other senior government officials in pleading to a federal judge to keep the documents sealed last week.
Barr would not even disclose the reasons why the documents need to remain shrouded in secrecy. The bureaucrat claimed giving any reasoning to justify his extreme lack of transparency “would reveal information that could cause the very harms my assertion of the state secrets privilege is intended to prevent.”
The 9/11 families want truth and justice after federal officials have lied about the attacks for decades. They filed a lawsuit in federal district court in 2017 demanding that information be released showing the extent of the relationship between the plane hijackers and Saudi officials.
“The extraordinary lengths that they’re going to here suggest that there must be some deep, dark secret that they’re still trying very hard to hide after almost 20 years,” said attorney Steven Pounian, who is representing the families in the court of law.
“But who are they protecting? Something might be a Saudi government secret. But how can these be secrets that still need to be kept from the American people after all this time?” he asked.
The Justice Department has allowed some of the information to be released to the families’ lawyers under the condition that it not be made public, but the feds are fighting tooth and nail to prevent more information from being disclosed.
Barr’s chicanery is making President Trump look like a liar and a fool because he had personally assured 9/11 victims’ families that the information would be released. He did so during a remembrance of the attack on Sept. 11, 2019 in the White House.
“He looked us in the eye on 9/11, he shook our hands in the White House and said, ‘I’m going to help you — it’s done,’” said Brett Eagleson, a banker whose dad was killed in the World Trade Center as a result of the terror attacks.
“I think the 9/11 families have lost all hope that the president is going to step up and do the right thing. He’s too beholden to the Saudis,” he added.
A bipartisan group of Senators, including Charles Grassley of Iowa, Chuck Schumer of New York, and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, have criticized the FBI for slapping the 9/11 victims’ families in the face. They issued a letter on Apr. 13 demanding that the feds stop dishonoring the victims of the attack with their secretive and disgraceful behavior.
“The September 11 attacks represent a singular and defining tragedy in the history of our Nation,” the senators wrote in their letter to the Justice Department inspector general, Michael Horowitz. “Nearly 20 years later, the 9/11 families and the American public still have not received the full and transparent accounting of the potential sources of support for those attacks to which they are entitled.”
Once again, the Trump administration is failing to live up to its word to clean up the federal swamp. Barr is just as crooked as he was when he served under globalist President George H.W. Bush during his first go-around as AG.
