Barr Clashes With House Democrats in Testimony, Defending Protest Response

Critics have called those figures misleading because they do not account for relative population differences; a Black person is more likely to be killed than a white person.

Republicans backed the attorney general for showing “courage” by taking aim at the Russia investigation and attacks on the police.

Their most visceral defense came in a five-minute video montage that appeared to show protesters or people infiltrating their ranks turning to violence. It began with footage of cable news anchors describing the protests as “peaceful” before streaming through scenes like a police precinct being set ablaze in Minneapolis, American flags burning, cans being hurled at the police and stores being looted.

“I want to thank you for defending law enforcement, for pointing out what a crazy idea this defund-the-police policy, whatever you want to call it, is, and standing up for the rule of law,” Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the panel’s top Republican, told Mr. Barr before playing the video.

Republicans cheered on Mr. Barr as he defended his decision to overrule career prosecutors in the Stone case, saying that they were trying to treat Mr. Stone more harshly than other defendants. The Judiciary Committee heard testimony from one of the prosecutors last month who accused department leaders of changing the sentencing recommendation for “political reasons.”

“The line prosecutors were trying to advocate for a sentence that was more than twice what anyone else in a similar position had ever served,” Mr. Barr said. “This is a 67-year-old man, first-time offender, no violence, and they were trying to put him in jail for seven to nine years. I was not going to advocate that. Because that is not the rule of law.”

But the prosecutors said in court that they arrived at the seven-to-nine-year recommendation by following the Justice Department’s own sentencing guidelines, as is customary in any federal criminal case. Questioned by the federal judge who oversaw the Stone case, department officials acknowledged that it was the policy of the United States attorney’s office in Washington to seek the harshest possible sentence under the sentencing guidelines and to let the judge decide whether it was warranted.