Despite being out of the US Justice Department for years now, former Trump-era Attorney General Bill Barr has found himself back under the microscope and at the center of serious scrutiny after the New York Times dropped a bombshell report confirming that DOJ employees are raising questions about Barr’s role in a massive investigation into the heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar for tax avoidance that seemed to suddenly fall apart when Barr got the job.
The Times reports that the US Department of Justice was deeply involved in an extensive criminal investigation with the Internal Revenue Service, into the heavy equipment company, only for the investigation to suddenly be “derailed” after they were blocked from interviewing a key witness — a move that ultimately led to the demise the entire investigation as a whole.
“The interview was never rescheduled, and the investigation would limp along for another few years before culminating, in late 2022, with a victory for Caterpillar,” the report reads. “The Internal Revenue Service told the giant industrial company to pay less than a quarter of the back taxes the government once claimed that Caterpillar owed and did not impose any penalties.”
Now, DOJ employees want to what Bill Barr’s role was in this derailing, considering that the timing of the investigation falling apart lines up perfectly with Barr’s appointment as AG by Donald Trump.
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NYT reports that lawyers for Caterpillar “met with senior federal officials, including the Justice Department’s top tax official, Richard Zuckerman,” to lodge their complaints about the inquiries that were being made by DOJ investigators. Almost immediately after Barr was installed as Attorney General, Zuckerman ordered Justice Department agents to back off.
According to the Times, this move set off alarm bells throughout the Justice Department. So much so, in fact, that agent Jason LeBeau wrote to the department’s inspector general last year, stating, “It appears that Caterpillar was given special political treatment that the average U.S. citizen cannot obtain.”
NYT notes that Bill Barr was deeply affiliated with the heavy equipment company well before he was appointed to head of the Justice Department and had previously argued that the DOJ and IRS should dismantle the tax avoidance investigation.
Barr’s previous involvement with the company had eyebrows raised across the DOJ, as the Times reports, “In May 2018, Mr. Barr escalated the matter” in a letter that, “… argued that the investigation violated a requirement that federal criminal tax investigations be approved by the Justice Department’s tax division. And it took particular aim at Mr. LeBeau, saying he had a ‘basic misunderstanding of the relevant tax rules’ and was pursuing a ‘conspiracy theory.’ The attacks were an unusual effort to undermine the credibility of an individual investigator.”
“Kevin Sweeney, who spent six years in Justice Department’s tax division, said in a recent interview that the situation sounded ‘very unusual’ based on The Times’ description,” the report goes on to add, quoting Sweeney who said, “I would not expect the tax division to stop an investigation based on representations made by defense counsel without first having a discussion with the lead prosecutor.”
You can read the full report from the New York Times here.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Justice Department
