Ryan Goodman writes:

With unprecedented numbers of Americans starting to cast early votes in the presidential election come mid-September, many eyes are on what Attorney General William Barr and his colleagues in the Justice Department will do. If they abide by a longstanding Justice Department rule of forbearance — sometimes called the 60 or 90-day rule — they will refrain from public indictments or other overt disclosures in cases that could affect the election. Prosecutors would, instead, conscientiously defer such actions until after the public votes.

But that does not appear to be where Barr is headed. The attorney general has recently made statements that lay the groundwork for inappropriately deploying the Justice Department to damage the Democratic candidate for president, Joe Biden in the coming weeks. It’s by all appearances a highly orchestrated plan.

In this article, I discuss the scope of the Department’s rule of forbearance and how it has applied in practice over several decades. Two of the most significant cases occurred during the 1992 presidential campaign when Barr served as attorney general for President George H.W. Bush. Indeed, those cases illustrate, perhaps better than any other, the scope of the rule and what can go wrong in the wake of the rule’s violation. [Continue reading…]