Patrick Cotter served as a federal attorney for the United States Department of Justice for eight years. He was one of the prosecutors who put New York mafia boss John Gotti behind bars, before advising the United Nations on war crimes investigations in former Yugoslavia. Cotter has long been an admirer of William Barr, who was already Secretary of Justice under George H.W. Bush and has held the same position since last year Donald Trump holds. Barr’s photo hung on the wall of Cotter’s office. “I respected him extremely,” he says. That is over now.
–
Cotter looks horrified at the Department of Justice, which his former boss leads. “I haven’t seen what Barr has done in the past few months in my 38-year career,” he says. The President is interfering in the judiciary in an unprecedented way, Barr let that happen. “It will take a long time to remove this stain on the Ministry’s call.”
What alarms Cotter is the events surrounding Roger Stone, one of Trump’s close confidants. In the 2016 election campaign, according to US special investigator Robert Mueller, he was in contact with WikiLeaks. He urged the organization to publish emails from the Democrats that Russian hackers had stolen to harm Hillary Clinton.
–
