Bill Barr: Cover-up Attorney for Trump

[GreyhoundFan]

The actual address is 950 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington DC 20530.

 

Edited May 3, 2019 by GreyhoundFan

[Dandruff]

4 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

The actual address is 950 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington DC 20530.

I suspect he won't resign, but also wouldn't like the postcards.

What would it realistically take to get him disBarred?

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, Dandruff said:

I suspect he won't resign, but also wouldn't like the postcards.

What would it realistically take to get him disBarred?

People would have to file a grievance with the state bar. They would then make a decision. Even though I live in Virginia, I don't know how seriously they would take the complaint, considering he isn't our attorney on a personal matter. I believe they do take action if, say, your divorce attorney lies in court about something.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump finds in Barr the attorney general — and shield — he long sought"

Spoiler

For a time, President Trump was reluctant to select William P. Barr as his attorney general. The veteran Justice Department official from the George H.W. Bush administration was not a longtime Trump loyalist, and the president wondered whether one of his own political allies might serve better as a shield, people familiar with the matter said.

But Trump was ultimately persuaded — in part because his lawyers and advisers told him Barr was a strong supporter of presidential power and unafraid of taking on critics. This week, the president has been thrilled with his choice, particularly after Barr sparred so vigorously with Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that some were left wondering whether he viewed himself as the president’s defense attorney, according to people familiar with the matter, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

In Barr’s first three months in the job, his actions have served to protect Trump, though his motive is up for debate. Barr’s defenders note that the attorney general has long advocated strengthening the power of the executive branch, and the attorney general has told other lawyers that he is more interested in protecting the presidency than the man in the job.

But critics say that Barr has emerged as the partisan champion Trump always wanted — one willing to defend the president’s most questionable conduct, put a Trumpian spin on the results of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation and mislead Congress along the way.

“He has failed the men and women of the Department of Justice by placing the needs of the president over the fair administration of justice,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said at a congressional hearing Thursday that Barr skipped after a dispute over the terms of his appearance.

Barr’s defenders say he is unbothered by the criticism.

“He is not at all surprised at the partisan reception he received,” said Richard Cullen, an attorney and close friend of Barr’s who spoke with Barr after his Senate testimony. “He is going to follow what he believes is the law, politics be damned.” Cullen represents Vice President Pence.

Political fires have raged around Barr, who was also attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration, from even before his confirmation along largely partisan lines. But he has come under sustained attack this week after The Washington Post reported that Mueller had sent a memo to Barr complaining about how the attorney general had described the results of the special counsel investigation in a letter to Congress.

In his letter to Congress after Mueller ended his inquiry, Barr wrote that Mueller had not found that Trump or his associates coordinated with Russia to influence the election, and that the special counsel would not reach a decision on whether the president obstructed justice. Mueller countered in his own letter that the attorney general “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the special counsel’s work.

The revelation of Mueller’s March letter — which Barr derided as “a bit snitty” — sparked calls from some Democrats for Barr to resign. They also accused the attorney general of lying to Congress for not revealing Mueller’s concerns during a congressional hearing in April. Barr was asked during that hearing whether he knew to what media reports were referring when they revealed frustration among some on Mueller’s team about the limited information Barr had revealed to Congress about their work.

“He lied to Congress,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said during a news conference Thursday. “The attorney general of the United States of America was not telling the truth to the Congress of the United States. That’s a crime.”

Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said Pelosi’s comment was “reckless, irresponsible, and false.”

Trump, who spent a few hours at most with Barr before picking him as attorney general, told people that he was pleased with Barr’s pugnacious performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, though one Trump ally who regularly speaks with the president said his joy was “shortsighted” because Barr lost credibility with some lawmakers who could be useful later.

On Wednesday night, Trump tweeted a link to a Wall Street Journal editorial lauding Barr’s testimony and bearing the headline, “A Real Attorney General” — a phrase which, to Trump, means “someone who is defending him at all costs,” one former White House official said. Trump and senior White House officials have urged surrogates to go on TV and praise Barr — and even arranged a call Wednesday afternoon to disseminate supportive talking points.

People familiar with the matter said that in the call, deputy White House press secretary Steven Groves told them to say of Barr that “nobody really laid a glove on him” and that Barr had “dismembered arguments about obstruction of justice.”

Before he was nominated, Barr wrote a detailed memo — which he sent to the Justice Department, as well as to lawyers working for the White House and Trump — blasting Mueller’s apparent theory of how Trump could have interfered with justice as “fatally misconceived.” In Barr’s view, the president should not be investigated for using his powers to affect an investigation — meaning that the firing of James B. Comey as FBI director would be out of reach for federal prosecutors.

Democrats alleged that the memo was essentially a tip at the time about how he might curtail Mueller’s not-yet-completed probe. On Wednesday, Barr held to his view, repeatedly insisting that Trump’s asking his White House counsel to have Mueller removed was not a prosecutable obstruction case because Trump had a legal right to end Mueller’s investigation.

Mueller declined to conclude whether his team believed there was a prosecutable case against Trump for obstructing justice. His report, which laid out detailed accounts of possible obstructive conduct he investigated, asserted that he could not say even privately whether the president committed a crime because of Justice Department guidance that says a sitting president cannot be indicted. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein reviewed the case themselves and determined that a charge could not be brought.

A White House official said that Barr had “set the narrative” in a way that was positive for the White House and that the swirling debate about the special counsel has just been “noise.”

David Rivkin, a conservative lawyer who has worked with Barr, said he believed Barr was more interested in defending the executive branch of government than the president himself. Barr was no early Trump supporter; he was a major political contributor to Jeb Bush, one of the president’s primary opponents.

“His behavior is sufficiently explained by his well-known and publicly articulated views to constitutional principles,” Rivkin said.

Barr also turned the tables on Mueller — expressing confusion about how the special counsel came to some decisions and confirming that he would examine, as many Republicans want, the origins of the FBI probe that the special counsel eventually took over.

Trump campaign advisers, who said they had raised more than $1 million after the Mueller report was released, said the attorney general’s comments have generally been helpful — especially his earlier assertion that there was “spying” during the 2016 presidential race.

At the same time, Barr sought to extricate the Justice Department from the political battles of Mueller’s investigation, declaring at one point, “We are out of it.” The comment resonated with some Barr supporters who are eager to see more stability in the Justice Department.

“It seems to me that the attorney general’s handling of the report and the issues it raised now has a punctuation point, and there are many other important matters to the American people on his plate that merit attention,” said George Terwilliger, a former deputy attorney general and a friend of Barr’s.

But more battles lie ahead. Last month, White House lawyer Emmet Flood sent Barr a letter declaring that Trump’s decision not to invoke executive privilege to block any portions of the Mueller report should not be over-interpreted. The president, Flood wrote, might still seek to curtail his advisers’ cooperation with Congress over the report or prevent the release of underlying investigative materials.

That posture will almost certainly spark a battle between Congress and the White House — with Barr at the center of the fight.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"2 Dems push D.C., Virginia bar associations to investigate Barr"

Spoiler

Two House Democrats on Friday urged the bar associations in Washington and Virginia to launch an ethics investigation into Attorney General William Barr’s public comments on special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.) — both former prosecutors — say they believe Barr “at best misled Congress” and “at worst perjured himself” when he told lawmakers this week he was unsure why some members Mueller’s team were reportedly dissatisfied with his public portrayal of Mueller’s report.

Barr had exclusive access to the report for nearly a month and publicly contended it had proven the president was “falsely accused” of colluding with Russia. Barr also dismissed evidence suggesting Trump had obstructed Mueller’s investigation, ruling that it was insufficient to support a criminal charge even though Mueller described some of the evidence as "substantial."

“By deceiving Congress and the American people, who vested their trust in both the Office of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice at large, Attorney General Barr must be subject to a professional review for the sake of the legal profession and the public,” Lieu and Rice wrote in a letter to the bar associations.

The two Democrats say the rules of the Virginia and D.C. bars require “candor” toward official tribunals and that engaging in “dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation ... reflects adversely on the lawyer’s fitness to practice law.”

Spokeswomen for the two bar associations did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment as well.

Democrats are enraged about two particular exchanges in which Barr did not disclose Mueller’s apparent dissatisfaction with his handling of the report. In an exchange with Barron April 9, Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) asked the attorney general whether he knew why news reports had reflected dissatisfaction among Mueller’s team with Barr’s handling of the report. “No, I don’t,” Barr replied.

The next day, when Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) asked Barr whether Mueller supported his findings that there was not sufficient evidence to conclude the president obstructed justice, Barr replied, “I don’t know.”

Barr allies have defended his statements as accurate based on the way lawmakers framed the questions. But Democrats say Barr should have used the opportunity to reveal Mueller’s concerns, expressed in a letter to Barr on March 27, several days after Mueller submitted his final report. In the letter, Mueller said Barr’s public depiction of the report did not “fully capture the context, nature and substance” of the final report.

Barr told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that he spoke with Mueller by phone and that Mueller had indicated his displeasure was not with the accuracy of Barr’s representation but with the coverage of his findings by the news media. But Mueller’s letter, which was made public on Tuesday, did not reflect that complaint.

The attack is no less than the seventh effort by Democrats to squeeze Barr for his handling of the Mueller report. They already subpoenaed him to produce Mueller’s unredacted findings and underlying evidence to Congress — a subpoena whose May 1 deadline Barr ignored.

Barr also skipped a May 2 hearing called by the House Judiciary Committee to discuss the Mueller report. The committee’s chairman has been authorized to subpoena Barr a second time to compel his testimony, but he instead may move to a contempt proceeding as soon as Wednesday over Barr’s rejection of the first subpoena.

Other Democrats have demanded Barr’s impeachment, suggested fining him for not complying with a congressional demand, are planning to fight his resistance in court and have suggested referring him to his own Justice Department on criminal charges.

On Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) accused Barr of committing a crime by lying to Congress, an allegation that the Justice Department rejected as “reckless, irresponsible, and false.”

 

[fraurosena]

8 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"2 Dems push D.C., Virginia bar associations to investigate Barr"

  Hide contents

Two House Democrats on Friday urged the bar associations in Washington and Virginia to launch an ethics investigation into Attorney General William Barr’s public comments on special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.) — both former prosecutors — say they believe Barr “at best misled Congress” and “at worst perjured himself” when he told lawmakers this week he was unsure why some members Mueller’s team were reportedly dissatisfied with his public portrayal of Mueller’s report.

Barr had exclusive access to the report for nearly a month and publicly contended it had proven the president was “falsely accused” of colluding with Russia. Barr also dismissed evidence suggesting Trump had obstructed Mueller’s investigation, ruling that it was insufficient to support a criminal charge even though Mueller described some of the evidence as "substantial."

“By deceiving Congress and the American people, who vested their trust in both the Office of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice at large, Attorney General Barr must be subject to a professional review for the sake of the legal profession and the public,” Lieu and Rice wrote in a letter to the bar associations.

The two Democrats say the rules of the Virginia and D.C. bars require “candor” toward official tribunals and that engaging in “dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation ... reflects adversely on the lawyer’s fitness to practice law.”

Spokeswomen for the two bar associations did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment as well.

Democrats are enraged about two particular exchanges in which Barr did not disclose Mueller’s apparent dissatisfaction with his handling of the report. In an exchange with Barron April 9, Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) asked the attorney general whether he knew why news reports had reflected dissatisfaction among Mueller’s team with Barr’s handling of the report. “No, I don’t,” Barr replied.

The next day, when Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) asked Barr whether Mueller supported his findings that there was not sufficient evidence to conclude the president obstructed justice, Barr replied, “I don’t know.”

Barr allies have defended his statements as accurate based on the way lawmakers framed the questions. But Democrats say Barr should have used the opportunity to reveal Mueller’s concerns, expressed in a letter to Barr on March 27, several days after Mueller submitted his final report. In the letter, Mueller said Barr’s public depiction of the report did not “fully capture the context, nature and substance” of the final report.

Barr told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that he spoke with Mueller by phone and that Mueller had indicated his displeasure was not with the accuracy of Barr’s representation but with the coverage of his findings by the news media. But Mueller’s letter, which was made public on Tuesday, did not reflect that complaint.

The attack is no less than the seventh effort by Democrats to squeeze Barr for his handling of the Mueller report. They already subpoenaed him to produce Mueller’s unredacted findings and underlying evidence to Congress — a subpoena whose May 1 deadline Barr ignored.

Barr also skipped a May 2 hearing called by the House Judiciary Committee to discuss the Mueller report. The committee’s chairman has been authorized to subpoena Barr a second time to compel his testimony, but he instead may move to a contempt proceeding as soon as Wednesday over Barr’s rejection of the first subpoena.

Other Democrats have demanded Barr’s impeachment, suggested fining him for not complying with a congressional demand, are planning to fight his resistance in court and have suggested referring him to his own Justice Department on criminal charges.

On Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) accused Barr of committing a crime by lying to Congress, an allegation that the Justice Department rejected as “reckless, irresponsible, and false.”

 

Although I laud this attempt at disbarring Barr, does anyone honestly think he would leave office even if he were?

[GreyhoundFan]

"Barr taps U.S. attorney in Connecticut to investigate origins of Russia probe"

Spoiler

Attorney General William P. Barr has tapped John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut, to investigate the origins of the special counsel’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Barr picked Durham in recent weeks to work on the review, which is designed to ensure the U.S. government’s “intelligence collection activities” related to the Trump campaign were “lawful and appropriate,” a person familiar with the decision said.

Barr had confirmed the review publicly, though the person leading it was not previously known. Durham’s selection was first reported by the New York Times.

Durham was confirmed as a U.S. attorney in February 2018 and had previously earned a reputation as a dogged career prosecutor tapped by previous attorneys general for other high-profile roles.

In 1999, Attorney General Janet Reno appointed Durham to investigate law enforcement corruption in Boston, and more recently, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. called on him to investigate the treatment of CIA detainees and the destruction of videotapes.

In its 448-page report, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team wrote that while its investigation established that the Trump campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from” information stolen in Russia-backed efforts, it “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Mueller also found 10 “episodes” of potential obstruction of justice by President Trump but ultimately concluded that it was not his place to determine whether the president broke the law.

In the weeks since the release of the report, Trump and his allies have launched a new rallying cry: “Investigate the investigators.”

Trump’s campaign is publicly calling for criminal investigations into former FBI officials and is making “spygate” fundraising pitches, seeking to turn the tables and transform the Russia investigation into a political asset instead of a liability.

Trump and other Republicans have argued that the FBI “spied” on Trump’s campaign by surveilling former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page under a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Page’s communications were surveilled in late 2016 and early 2017, after he left the Trump campaign. Barr has said government “spying” occurred on the Trump campaign, though he has insisted he did not intend the word to carry a pejorative meaning.

Critics contend that the allegations are an effort by Trump to divert public attention away from his own actions.

 

[fraurosena]

Barr's statements to WSJ are in perfect alignment with Trump's tweets today. It's obvious that owing to the Mueller report redactions and underlying evidence becoming more and more public, they are desperate to delegitimize the FBI. 

 

[fraurosena]

Unsurprisingly, Barr is continuing his false messaging on Faux. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"We don’t have an attorney general"

Spoiler

Last September, President Trump told an interviewer: “I don’t have an attorney general. It’s very sad.”

The problem was not that Jeff Sessions wasn’t showing up to work. It was that Sessions had recused himself from the Russia investigation and therefore couldn’t act to protect Trump by shutting it down.

Well, now Trump most certainly does have the attorney general he long envisioned. William P. Barr is making this abundantly clear, most recently in an interview aired Friday on Fox News.

But the thing is, now we don’t have an attorney general.

Barr has proved remarkably willing to spin, dissemble and advocate for the president in an ongoing performance more worthy of a spokesflack than the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

But in this Fox News interview, Barr really pulled out all the stops.

Barr confirmed, as he has before, that he is investigating the investigators — that is, taking another look at the genesis of the investigation into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election and the Trump campaign’s possible complicity with it. This is, of course, exactly what Trump has demanded for years.

“I’ve been trying to get answers to the questions and I’ve found that a lot of the answers have been inadequate and some of the explanations I’ve gotten don’t hang together,” Barr said, stressing how important it is to know “whether government officials abused their power and put their thumb on the scale.”

This is more than just a declaration that the FBI launched an investigation of a foreign attack on our political system and possible coordination with it by Americans. It also subtly bolsters the idea that the FBI did this in a way that was designed to harm the Trump campaign.

Indeed, Barr openly validated Trump’s longtime claim that the whole FBI probe was a “witch hunt.”

“I think if I had been falsely accused, I would be comfortable saying it was a witch hunt,” Barr said.

This echoes Barr’s extraordinary news conference just before releasing the redacted Mueller report, at which he appealed to us to understand how victimized Trump felt by the Mueller investigation when considering his efforts to obstruct it.

Now Barr has gone all the way and validated the phrase “witch hunt.”

Perhaps most strikingly, Barr hinted darkly that Democrats should be worried about the outcome of his investigation of the investigators. Asked about Democratic charges that he’d previously misled Congress, Barr said:

“It’s a laughable charge, and I think it’s largely being made to try to discredit me, partly because they may be concerned about the outcome of a review of what happened during the election.”

Really? The attorney general of the United States is telegraphing that the conclusion of an unfinished investigation should be feared by one of two major political parties?

“I don’t think it’s appropriate for the attorney general to be casting DOJ actions in terms of whether they’re good or bad for one political party," Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told us. “He’s implying that what’s going on behind the scenes at DOJ will be good for Republicans and bad for Democrats.”

“The special responsibility of the attorney general is that he’s charged with upholding all of our laws,” Vladeck continued. “The more it looks like partisanship is behind his actions, the more it’s understandable why public confidence in the Justice Department has waned.”

“What Barr should be doing right now is working to establish public credibility and faith in a nonpartisan Justice Department,” adds Susan Hennessey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

By the way, we know how the FBI investigation began — when Trump aide George Papadopoulos bragged to an Australian diplomat that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton and was giving it to the Trump campaign, and Australia informed the FBI.

As for the thumb being put on the scales against Trump, 11 days before the election, the director of the FBI publicly stated that the Democratic nominee was under renewed investigation. The investigation into the Trump campaign, on the other hand, was kept secret and did not affect the election.

What’s more, throughout the investigation, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III accused the president of precisely nothing. He made almost no public statements and allowed no leaks. Yet Barr claims that because Trump felt “falsely accused," it was appropriate for him to launch endless attacks on the very foundational legitimacy of the investigation, which Trump also tried to obstruct multiple times.

One last point about Barr’s embrace of the “witch hunt” idea. He’s flirting with the position of the president and his party that there should never have been any investigation in the first place. A “witch hunt” is an investigation that lacked any legitimate purpose from the get-go.

So despite the fact that Russia launched a “sweeping and systematic” effort to help Trump get elected; despite the between 100 and 250 contacts between Trump campaign figures and people associated with Russia; despite Trump World repeatedly signaling eagerness for the Kremlin’s help; despite that fact that everyone involved was constantly lying about contacts with Russia; despite the fact that Trump’s former campaign chair, former national security adviser and former personal lawyer would all go on to plead guilty to crimes — despite all that, Barr is still casting doubt on the investigation’s legitimacy.

Donald Trump now has an attorney general. But the United States no longer does.

 

[Howl]

This is simply chilling.  I can't even imagine how many bricks are being shat at the FBI. 

Barr is 100% on getting Trump re-elected and implementing the right wing agenda.  Of all the outrageous shit that's happened to this point, this may well be the most horrifying.  I can't even at this point.  This may be what gets Trump reelected in 2020. 

I wonder if George Conway is going to start tweeting about Barr the way he tweets about Trump.  George? GEORGE???

[GreyhoundFan]

I wonder if he gets the sycophant discount.

 

[Howl]

Barr is engineering an actual coup via the judicial branch.  I'll take bets on the possibility of a quiet uprising in the IC when Barr starts selectively using IC information to crucify McCabe, Comey, Strzok and Page, for starters. 

On another thread, I posted an Aunt Crabby tweet where she noted that the declassification order came a few days after Trump had a long phone call with Trump.  

If the names of intelligence assets are released to Putin and those people start falling out of windows, having mystery heart attacks (!), shooting themselves in the head and accidentally ingesting polonium tea, the IC will be enraged and will figure out who leaked those names.  

[Howl]

A quote from this article in The Atlantic sums it up:

Quote

 If Trump’s claims had any basis in reality, he would convene an independent commission of respected fact finders. Instead, he has relied on supporters willing to do his bidding—first Devin Nunes, now William Barr. The mission he has assigned them: Fight to suppress documents properly subpoenaed by Congress to answer important public questions, then pick and choose U.S. national secrets to defame career professionals who sought to protect the integrity of the nation’s elections against foreign adversaries who manipulated those elections in Trump’s favor."

MAY 23, 2019, David Frum  Trump’s Cover-Up Accelerates The president directed his attorney general to declassify information—raising the prospect of selective disclosures.

 

Edited May 26, 2019 by Howl

[Howl]

Holy Crap, Justin Amash (R-Currently a Good Guy) has filleted Barr today, via a long Twitter thread.  Barr's sleazy actions can't be ignored, because all his lies and "misprepresentations" about the Mueller Report are exposed.   Amash lays it out with stunning clarity, point by irrefutable point.  

For those not on twitter, or who prefer this format, click on the text below for a complete unroll of the Amash thread (4-minute read). 

Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented key aspects of Mueller’s report and decisions in the investigation, which has helped further the president’s false narrative about the investigation. 

Edited May 28, 2019 by Howl

[laPapessaGiovanna]

Barr has a busy day between backpedaling and damage control

So he 'personally felt' that Mueller exonerated tRump.

He also said that "he does not think some Obama-era Justice Department officials who oversaw the Russia investigation committed treason.

"Not as a legal matter, no," Barr told CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford when asked if he believed senior officials in the Obama administration committed treason, an accusation Mr. Trump has repeatedly made."

Is there a different sort of treason? A treason that's a you know "romantic matter"? An "artistic matter"?

[Howl]

Barr and McConnell are easily the two people most dangerous to our democracy today.  

But I keep coming back to all of the highly placed people in the Trump administration whose extreme religious beliefs terrify me -- Catholic, Fundy, whatever -- and Barr is no exception.   I supposed he's consider himself a "traditional" Catholic, which would be completely OK if he weren't in a position to inflict his beliefs on the country.  

Here's a useful article from Dec. 2018 (before Barr was confirmed as AG) summing up Bill Barr's past writings on (not wanting) separation of church and state and bemoaning how secularism has led to moral decay:  William Barr Wants To Bring ‘God’s Law’ To America

Barr is just another of the large cadre of highly placed and very powerful Trump admin people (mostly Catholic) cynically using Trump as a means to an end, greasing the skids of the Trump juggernaut as a way to continue changing our country from a democracy to a theocracy, and not caring which democratic ideals are shat on to achieve that end. 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 31, 2019 by Howl

[Howl]

emptywheel.net deconstruts Jan Crawford's ridiculously softball interview with William Barr here: ON NINE DIFFERENT OCCASIONS, BILL BARR WAS UNABLE TO OFFER ANY EVIDENCE OF IRREGULARITY IN RUSSIA INVESTIGATION

It's the end of MAY for heaven's sakes, and Bill Barr is cozily sitting in front of a roaring fire for this lame puff interview. 

Emptywheel.net always has a well informed robust comments section (bull shitters, trolls and sockpuppets are quickly shown the door) and this particular comment is a succinct summary of my thinking about what's going on currently: 

Spoiler

Barr is dangerous.
I believe we have just seen a hint of the dark ambitions of many people in and connected to the Trump administration; people that have no business being anywhere near the levers of power.
They have made use of the MAGA machine to spin their messages closer and closer into acceptance.
Now they have Barr, a master manipulator of words, to provide them cover if they choose to take things further.

emptywheel is Marcy Wheeler and six other contributors.  Marcy Wheeler "is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties." 

emptywheel carefully follows current events around Trump, Congress and DoJ.  Recommended. 

Edited June 1, 2019 by Howl

[GreyhoundFan]

Barr is such a tool. I'm glad Ted smacked him:

 

[Howl]

Omarosa is being sued by DoJ for not filing a financial disclosure/ethics form after she was fired from the WH and she faces a fine of up to $50,000. 

Yeah, THAT Omarosa.  So, that Omarosa wrote a tell-all book critical of Trump and the chaotic WH and is now being sued by DoJ. 

Omorosa and her lawyer claim that the WH Office of Legal Counsel seized and has withheld the documents she needed to file the form.  Yeah, so who is currently in the WH counsel's office (since Spring 2019)?  Bill Barr's SiL. 

<snip> from  this CNN article:  Justice Department sues Omarosa Manigault Newman for failing to file financial disclosure report after she was fired

Quote

"The lawsuit alleges that Omarosa Manigault Newman 'knowingly and willfully' failed to file a report. This is untrue," he [ [Omarosa's lawyer] said in a statement...

...Phillips [Omarosa's lawyer] alleged the records Newman would need in order to file a report were seized by the White House counsel's office when she was fired. The White House refused to acknowledge the documents existed until May 10, he said.. He said the documents are still being withheld by the White House, and the Department of Justice released the complaint before Newman had been served in the lawsuit.

This is a warning shot to anyone who leaves the WH and is planning on writing a book criticizing Trump, because this is an act of purest revenge. 

It's critical to remember that Trump's primary retaliatory tool is the threat or actuality of a law suit, and now he has Bill Barr and the force of the DoJ at his disposal.  This is so insanely f**ked. 

This is just more evidence of Bill Barr's utter corruption and now the DoJ has been degraded into a punitive tool to do the WH's bidding. 

I know, I know, Omarosa is NOT a sympathetic figure and she and Trump are two of a kind, but this just enrages me.  

Also, I'm dead from the irony of this administration suing someone for not filing an ethics/financial disclosure form. 

Edited June 26, 2019 by Howl

[Howl]

So, here we are.  Jeffrey Epsein is in jail and likely won't be given a bail option; he has three US passports and a private jet that flies internationally.  

Let's go back a bit in time, shall we?  Back to when Bill Barr's father hired Jeffrey Epstein to teach at the Dalton School, an ultra exclusive co-ed prep school in NYC, where he'd have lots of access to girls in his preferred age range. 

I know, weird connection, right?  And remember, in current time (now), Bill Barr's SiL is part of the White House counsel team.

I'm starting to wonder if Bill Barr was hired not only to run interference in the Mueller investigation, but to run interference with the Epstein case, if the need arose.  Remember, these charges are coming out of the Southern District of New York and Bill Barr is their boss.  However, Barr would not have known what was in the indictment until it was unsealed today. 

As part of the arrest, Epstein's house was raided and hundreds (thousands?) of photos of underage girls were recovered along with who knows what else. 

There has been some speculation that Epstein has developed a goldmine of compromising photos/videos of the rich and famous doing bad things with underage girls, and part of his wealth is coming from blackmail.  But if it exists, that evidence could be stashed in lock boxes at Swiss banks, or almost anywhere in the world.  If compromising evidence against Trump comes to light, I would not be surprised to see Barr take action to spare Trump. 

Where was I?  Barr promised to recuse himself from the current Epstein case, but hmmmm, part of the case hinges on a Federal judges decision recently that, because the victims were not even aware that a plea deal was offered until it was a fait accompli, it can be voided. 

Will Barr recuse himself? I doubt it. 

Edited July 8, 2019 by Howl

[fraurosena]

In a true democracy, William Barr would be immediately removed from office.

William Barr’s donations to Senate Republicans spiked just before they confirmed him as attorney general

Quote

In between stints as US attorney general for George HW Bush in the early 90s and now for Donald Trump, while making millions as an executive at Verizon and a lawyer at Kirkland & Ellis, William Barr sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to various Republicans and their causes.

Most of those donations made between 1993 and 2019 were occasional at best. But in the lead up to his Senate confirmation hearings for attorney general earlier this year, his giving habits suddenly changed. Barr’s donations became far more frequent, notable for their size, recipients, and possible utility to him. In total, Barr gave $51,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC)—a group that raises money to help elect Republicans to the Senate—in the months leading up to the Senate’s confirmation of his nomination.

[graph showing Barr's contributions]

Barr’s ramped up contributions took place over a 5-month period from October 2018 to February 2019 and were substantially different than his prior giving to the NRSC, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings. In the past Barr gave sporadically, once in 2009 and 2011, twice in 2014, one contribution in 2015, and another in 2016. Then, Jeff Sessions’ tenure as attorney general got rocky, and Barr started giving regularly. He donated on a schedule, providing $10,000 every month to the NRSC, on the third of the month, starting in October. That continued until he was confirmed on Feb. 14, 2019, just 11 days after his last contribution.

Neither Jeff Sessions, Loretta Lynch, nor Eric Holder—the three prior attorneys general—made payments to either party committees or senators ahead of confirmation hearings and votes. Holder gave $250 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2007—two years ahead of his confirmation, and also made a contribution to then California senator Barbara Boxer in 2008. Lynch gave $13,800 to Barack Obama’s election efforts in 2008. She wasn’t nominated to become attorney general until 2014.

Quartz contacted the Department of Justice for comment from the attorney general on the contributions but has not yet received a response. This story will be updated if the DOJ replies to the query.

The donations do not violate FEC rules. The contributions should, however, “raise eyebrows,” says Adav Noti, a senior director at the nonprofit, nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center in Washington DC, a campaign finance watchdog.

“The fact that any one person can give such large amounts to a political party creates a perception problem,” Noti—who was formerly associate general counsel at the FEC— explained. “Someone giving such large amounts to a senatorial committee before their confirmation certainly raises appearance questions.”

The obvious question raised by these donations is whether they were intended to influence a particular outcome. “Maybe it’s a coincidence. Maybe not,” Noti says of the timing and sums. But as long as there was no implicit or explicit quid pro quo, no exchange for an official act—and there is no evidence here that Barr expected or was promised anything in exchange for his donations—there is no legal issue with the contributions. Still, Noti said it is “a flaw in the system” that such large and targeted contributions are permitted.

Barr himself has opined on the matter of prosecutors contributing to political campaigns. In 2017, he spoke to the Washington Post about the prosecutors former special counsel Robert Mueller was hiring as part of his investigation into Russian meddling in the US election and the president’s efforts to thwart that investigation, some of whom had contributed to Democratic causes. “In my view, prosecutors who make political contributions are identifying fairly strongly with a political party,” Barr said.

His own donations are similarly suspect. They also indicate that Barr wasn’t quite as reluctant to serve under Trump as has been previously reported. In June, the New York Times wrote that “by all accounts, Mr. Barr was not anxious to join Mr. Trump’s team,” and noted that he declined an earlier opportunity to represent Trump as his private criminal counsel, saying, “I didn’t want to stick my head into that meat grinder.”

However, Barr did in 2017 send an unsolicited 20-page memo to then deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein regarding Mueller’s investigation, titled “Mueller’s ‘obstruction’ theory.” In it, he wrote, “the Constitution vests all Federal law enforcement power, and hence prosecutorial discretion, in the President.” (Emphasis in the original). Barr stated that there can be “no limit on the President’s authority to act on matters which concern him or his own conduct.” In other words, he wasn’t lying low hoping to go unnoticed but signaling strongly that he would defend Trump.

Indeed, as attorney general, Barr has played a key role in supporting the president. When the Mueller report was completed in March, Barr issued a misleading statement indicating that it cleared the president of obstruction of justice allegations. But when the full 448-page report was released in April, it showed only that Mueller felt constrained by a rule that barred him from charging the president. Mueller actually outlined in the report 11 situations in which Trump tried to thwart his team’s work. The attorney general held a press conference before releasing the full report that again minimized any wrongdoing on the president’s part and spoke of his “non-corrupt motives,” which stood in stark contrast to Mueller’s extensive findings. Barr wasn’t entirely forthright and he seemed to be speaking as if he was the president’s personal defense attorney rather than the nation’s chief prosecutor.

In May, testifying before the Senate about the report, he explained his position, which further illuminated Barr’s view on executive power. “The president does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow [the investigation] to run its course. The president could terminate the proceeding and it would not be a corrupt intent because he was being falsely accused.” Later that same month, Trump authorized Barr to investigate the investigators, and look for “crimes” the president claims were committed by “the other side” when examining his own activities.

It’s become apparent that serving as attorney general under Trump, who shares Barr’s expansive notions of executive power, allows Barr to pursue what his former DOJ colleague Donald Ayer called “his life’s work of creating an all-powerful president.”

According to the New York Times, “Trump’s advisers saw him as the perfect replacement for Attorney General Jeff Sessions when the president forced him out in November: someone with Republican establishment gravitas and distinguished legal pedigree who seemed to share at least some of the president’s views.”

He was reportedly recommended for the role by Abbe D. Lowell, the criminal defense lawyer representing Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter Ivanka, among others. Based on the stark increase in Senate Republican donations ahead of his confirmation, Barr was anything but indifferent to the recommendation or the prospect of becoming attorney general again, this time under a like-minded president.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 18, 2019 by fraurosena

[GreyhoundFan]

Because Barr wants to fulfill the orange toxic megacolon's fantasy of killing people: "Justice Department plans to restart capital punishment after long hiatus"

Spoiler

The Justice Department announced Thursday that it plans to resume executing prisoners awaiting the death penalty, ending almost two decades in which the federal government had not imposed capital punishment on prisoners.

Attorney General William P. Barr ordered the Bureau of Prisons to schedule executions for five inmates on death row. The prisoners were convicted of murdering children.

The Trump administration’s push to resume capital punishment in the federal system, while not surprising, goes against the recent trend of declining executions across the country.

The last federal execution was in 2003. In the years since, there has been an informal moratorium on executions of federal prisoners, as Justice Department officials reviewed its lethal-injection procedures. That practice was underscored during the Obama administration by then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s personal opposition to the death penalty, even while he approved prosecutors’ decisions to seek the death penalty in specific trials.

Barr said it was time for convicted killers sentenced to death by juries to receive that ultimate punishment.

“The Justice Department upholds the rule of law — and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system,” Barr said in a statement.

Barr ordered the Bureau of Prisons to adopt a new policy for lethal injections, one that officials said closely mirrors the protocols used in Georgia, Missouri and Texas, replacing a three-drug lethal combination with one drug, pentobarbital.

The Justice Department has scheduled executions in December and January for the following prisoners: Daniel Lewis Lee, for the killing of a family of three, including an 8-year-old girl; Lezmond Mitchell for the killing of a 63-year-old and her 9-year-old granddaughter; Wesley Ira Purkey for the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl and the murder of an 80-year-old woman; Alfred Bourgeois for molesting and killing his 2-year-old daughter; and Dustin Lee Honken, for shooting and killing five people, including two children.

The number of executions nationwide has plummeted over the last two decades, falling to 25 last year, down from 98 in 1999. The number of states carrying out death sentences has also declined as some have abolished capital punishment, announced moratoriums or struggled to obtain the drugs sought for executions.

New Hampshire abolished the death penalty this year, making it the 21st state to formally abandon capital punishment. In some of the other states where it remains the law, the death penalty is effectively frozen, including by governor-issued moratoriums in California and Pennsylvania and a court order in North Carolina.

Supporters of capital punishment, who argue that it should be applied for heinous crimes, have said that delays in carrying out death sentences are unfair to the relatives of victims. Opponents of the practice have argued the system is dangerously flawed, pointing to cases of people who have been exonerated after being sentenced to death.

Ruth E. Friedman, head of the Federal Capital Habeas Project, which seeks to improve legal representation for people on federal death row, said there were “troubling questions about the new execution protocol” announced Thursday.

“A pervasive myth is that the federal death penalty is ‘the gold standard’ of capital punishment systems, applied only to the worst offenders for a narrow class of especially heinous crimes involving unique federal interests, with highly skilled and well-resourced lawyers on both sides,” she said in a statement. “This is false. In fact, the federal death penalty is arbitrary, racially-biased, and rife with poor lawyering and junk science.”

Friedman called for “additional court review before the federal government can proceed with any execution.”

Nationwide, a majority of Americans support the practice, though that number has declined significantly since the mid-1990s. At that time, when crime rates were far higher, 4 in 5 Americans backed capital punishment, while a Pew Research Center poll last year found that 54 percent of people supported it.

According to Pew, most Republicans still back it, while Democrats oppose the death penalty. President Trump has been an outspoken supporter of capital punishment for decades, while Democratic candidates running against him have argued that it should be abolished.

The Justice Department’s decision to shift to a single drug for lethal injections — which remain the primary method of executions nationwide — mirrors a move that has taken place in states facing difficulties in obtaining the drugs officials have sought.

States still seeking to schedule executions have scrambled to obtain lethal-injection drugs in recent years in the face of opposition from pharmaceutical firms that do not want their products used in carrying out death sentences.

Companies have tightened their restrictions on how such drugs are sold, and in some cases have gone to court to try to prevent them from being employed to carry out death sentences.

In some states, authorities have moved to rewrite their execution protocols to rely on different drug combinations — in some cases, doing so multiple times — or expanded their ability to use other execution methods such as firing squad, electric chair and nitrogen gas. Nebraska last year became the first state to use the powerful opioid fentanyl in an execution.

Texas, Georgia and Missouri — three of the 11 states that have carried out executions since 2017 and all among the country’s most active death penalty states — have shifted their protocols from three-drug combinations to relying only on pentobarbital, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The Justice Department has sought and won death sentences in two high-profile cases in recent years, sending both the Boston Marathon bomber and the Charleston, S.C., church gunman to death row.

When Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber, was sentenced to death in 2015, the Justice Department was operating under a de facto moratorium on executions due to an ongoing review of federal death penalty policy. The government lacked the drugs needed to carry out an execution at that time.

It was not immediately clear if the federal government had obtained the pentobarbital needed for the executions announced Thursday. The Bureau of Prisons declined to comment.

Toward the end of the Obama administration, the bureau said it was still “in the process of revising its execution protocol.” The Washington Post had inquired this year regarding the federal death penalty and whether the Bureau of Prisons had execution drugs or was trying to obtain them. The bureau said that “protocols surrounding executions are law enforcement sensitive; thus, we are unable to provide them.”

Federal death sentences account for a fraction of the more than 2,600 people on death row in the United States. Executions are also extremely rare for federal prisoners, with the government carrying out three executions since the federal death penalty statute was expanded in 1994.

In 2001, the government executed Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing and Juan Raul Garza for murdering three men. The last federal inmate to be executed was when Louis Jones Jr. was put to death in 2003 for the kidnapping, rape and murder of 19-year-old Army Pvt. Tracie Joy McBride. All three executions were carried out using the three-drug protocol.

 

[Howl]

There is so much bad confluence here.  So much.  

Some key words: "Trump says he has granted Attorney General William Barr the ability to share classified intelligence documents pertaining to the Russia investigation with Devin Nunes.  

WTAF?  Remember that no member of Congress, that we are aware of, has read the entire Mueller report, and especially the part that deals with the IC.  More damage control. 

This tells me Trump is seriously contemplating appointing Nunes to DNI. Or is he? 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Barr's lips are firmly and permanently attached to the mango moron's backside: "Barr books Trump’s hotel for $30,000 holiday party"

Spoiler

Attorney General William P. Barr is planning a holiday treat for his boss.

Last month, Barr booked President Trump’s D.C. hotel for a 200-person holiday party in December that is likely to deliver Trump’s business more than $30,000 in revenue.

Barr signed a contract, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, for a “Family Holiday Party” in the hotel’s Presidential Ballroom Dec. 8. The party will feature a buffet and a four-hour open bar for about 200 people.

Barr is paying for the event himself and chose the venue only after other hotels, including the Willard and the Mayflower, were booked, according to a Justice Department official. The official said the purpose of Barr’s party wasn’t to curry favor with the president.

Barr holds the bash annually, and it combines holiday festivities and a ceilidh, a party featuring Irish or Scottish music.

“Career ethics officials were consulted, and they determined that ethics rules did not prohibit him from hosting his annual party at the Trump hotel,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the party is not a Justice Department event.

Barr’s decision to book his boss’s hotel marks the latest collision between Trump’s administration and his business, which the president no longer operates but from which he still benefits financially.

Trump said Monday that he was likely to hold next year’s Group of Seven international summit at his golf resort in Doral, Fla. Already the federal government and GOP campaigns have spent at least $1.6 million at his properties since he entered office, according to a Post analysis, though the actual figure is likely to be higher because of the difficulty of obtaining up-to-date records.

Barr, the nation’s top law enforcement official, has previously faced criticism for adopting language that hews closely to Trump’s. For example, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III complained that Barr’s characterization of his investigation — which closely mirrored the president’s — “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s final report. Experts have cited that and other examples in questioning Barr’s independence from the president.

“It creates the appearance that high-level political appointees or allies of the president may feel like they need to spend money at the president’s businesses as a show of loyalty, and that is something that makes me deeply uncomfortable and should make taxpayers deeply uncomfortable,” said Liz Hempowicz, director of public policy at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight.

The Trump Organization declined to comment. Representatives from the Willard Hotel declined to comment, citing the company’s privacy policy. A spokeswoman for the Mayflower Hotel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Barr’s decision to book the Trump hotel is noteworthy, in particular, because Justice Department attorneys are defending the president’s business in court. Trump’s D.C. hotel has hosted a number of foreign governments as clients, business that has generated two lawsuits, one from the attorneys general of Maryland and D.C. and the other from about 200 Democratic members of Congress.

Both cases are being considered in federal court, and the Justice Department is defending the president’s position that he has not run afoul of the anti-corruption provisions in the Constitution called the domestic and foreign emoluments clauses.

D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D), a plaintiff in one of the emoluments cases against Trump, said Barr’s plans make him fear “that all this does is it normalizes conduct of presidential supporters or would-be supporters, who clearly know a clear avenue to curry favor with the president and that is to do business with the president’s business.”

White House aides, including inside the White House Counsel’s Office, have warned Trump and Cabinet officials against making official visits to his properties.

Barr’s event falls into a different category. It isn’t an official event — it’s a party. His contract requires that he spend $4,500 to rent the ballroom — space designed by Ivanka Trump before she joined her father in the White House — and $135 per person for a buffet and open bar, a number that is likely to change after Barr chooses a menu for the event.

Walter Shaub, a former director of the Office of Government Ethics who has been an outspoken critic of Trump’s ethics record, called Barr’s decision to book Trump’s hotel “one of those things that doesn’t violate the rules, but it’s really troubling.”

“He keeps sending signals that his loyalty is to a politician and not to the country,” Shaub said. “And it’s part of an ongoing erosion of credibility at the Department of Justice.”

It’s difficult to determine whether Barr will pay market rate for the event, as the Justice Department official asserted he would. The contract, sent to Barr at his Northern Virginia home, calls for a minimum of $100 per person for food and beverage before adding 35 percent for taxes and tip. It requires that Barr pay at least $31,500, even if he cancels the event.

The hotel’s publicly available menu lists a “banquet dinner” as costing $115 per person for two hours plus $30 for each additional hour. A hosted bar costs $29 for the first hour per person and an additional $12 per hour for each additional hour. If Barr opts for that level of service at those prices, the food and beverage bill for 200 guests would probably top $45,000.

Hotels typically have lots of available space on Sunday nights, leading them to offer less expensive rates. A contract the hotel signed with Virginia Women for Trump for a Monday event in the summer of 2018, obtained separately by The Post, required a $3,050 room rental fee and a $39,000 banquet fee for a much larger group, 818 people, though it did not include an open bar.

Hempowicz said that if Barr receives a discount from the hotel, it would give other Americans dealing with the Justice Department reason for concern, whomever the party is for.

“If the attorney general gets a discount while the Justice Department defends the hotel in court, that is not how the justice system is supposed to work and it’s not how the Department of Justice is supposed to work,” she said.