Bill Barr: Cover-up Attorney for Trump

[Howl]

Bill Barr, the Attorney General of the United States,  is smugly, openly and arrogantly flaunting his corrupt intent to promote and protect Trump and his associates.  This is where we're at on August 28, 2019. 

[fraurosena]

Gotta deflect from that pesky impeachment inquiry! 

Justice Dept. Is Said to Open Criminal Inquiry Into Its Own Russia Investigation

Quote

For more than two years, President Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russia investigation, portraying it as a hoax and illegal even months after the special counsel closed it. Now, Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into how it all began.

Justice Department officials have shifted an administrative review of the Russia investigation closely overseen by Attorney General William P. Barr to a criminal inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter. The move gives the prosecutor running it, John H. Durham, the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to convene a grand jury and to file criminal charges.

The opening of a criminal investigation is likely to raise alarms that Mr. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies. Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director under whose watch agents opened the Russia inquiry, and has long assailed other top former law enforcement and intelligence officials as partisans who sought to block his election.

Mr. Trump has made clear that he sees the typically independent Justice Department as a tool to be wielded against his political enemies. That view factors into the impeachment investigation against him, as does his long obsession with the origins of the Russia inquiry. House Democrats are examining in part whether his pressure on Ukraine to open investigations into theories about the 2016 election constituted an abuse of power.

The move also creates an unusual situation in which the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into itself.

Mr. Barr’s reliance on Mr. Durham, a widely respected and veteran prosecutor who has investigated C.I.A. torture and broken up Mafia rings, could help insulate the attorney general from accusations that he is doing the president’s bidding and putting politics above justice.

It was not clear what potential crime Mr. Durham is investigating, nor when the criminal investigation was prompted. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Mr. Trump is certain to see the criminal investigation as a vindication of the years he and his allies have spent trying to discredit the Russia investigation. In May, Mr. Trump told the Fox News host Sean Hannity that the F.B.I. officials who opened the case — a counterintelligence investigation into whether his campaign conspired with Moscow’s election sabotage — had committed treason.

“We can never allow these treasonous acts to happen to another president,” Mr. Trump said. He has called the F.B.I. investigation one of the biggest political scandals in United States history.

Federal investigators need only a “reasonable indication” that a crime has been committed to open an investigation, a much lower standard than the probable cause required to obtain search warrants. However, “there must be an objective, factual basis for initiating the investigation; a mere hunch is insufficient,” according to Justice Department guidelines.

When Mr. Barr appointed Mr. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, to lead the review, he had only the power to voluntarily question people and examine government files.

Mr. Barr expressed skepticism of the Russia investigation even before joining the Trump administration. Weeks after being sworn in this year, he said he intended to scrutinize how it started and used the term “spying” to describe investigators’ surveillance of Trump campaign advisers. But he has been careful to say he wants to determine whether investigators acted lawfully.

“The question is whether it was adequately predicated,” he told lawmakers in April. “And I’m not suggesting that it wasn’t adequately predicated. But I need to explore that.”

Mr. Barr began the administrative review of the Russia investigation in May, saying that he had conversations with intelligence and law enforcement officials that led him to believe that the F.B.I. acted improperly, if not unlawfully.

The F.B.I. opened the investigation in late July 2016, code-named Crossfire Hurricane, after receiving information from the Australian government that a Trump campaign adviser had been approached with an offer of stolen emails that could damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

F.B.I. agents discovered the offer shortly after stolen Democratic emails were released, and the events, along with ties between other Trump advisers and Russia, set off fears that the Trump campaign was conspiring with Russia’s interference.

The F.B.I. did not use information from the C.I.A. in opening the Russia investigation, former American officials said. But agents’ views on Russia’s election interference operation crystallized by mid-August, after the C.I.A. director at the time, John O. Brennan, shared intelligence with Mr. Comey about it.

The C.I.A. did contribute heavily to the intelligence community’s assessment in early 2017 that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and tried to tip it in Mr. Trump’s favor, and law enforcement officials later used those findings to bolster their application for a wiretap on a Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.

The special counsel who took over the Russia investigation in 2017, Robert S. Mueller III, secured convictions or guilty pleas from a handful of Trump associates and indictments of more than two dozen Russians on charges related to their wide-ranging interference scheme.

In his report, Mr. Mueller said that he had “insufficient evidence” to determine whether Mr. Trump or his aides engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the Russians but that the campaign welcomed the sabotage and expected to benefit from it.

Mr. Barr is closely managing the Durham investigation, even traveling to Italy to seek help from officials there to run down an unfounded conspiracy that is at the heart of conservatives’ attacks on the Russia investigation — that the Italian government helped set up the Trump campaign adviser who was told in 2016 that the Russians had damaging information that could hurt Clinton’s campaign.

But Italy’s intelligence services told Mr. Barr that they played no such role in the events leading to the Russia investigation, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy said in a news conference on Wednesday. Mr. Barr has also contacted government officials in Britain and Australia about their roles in the early stages of the Russia investigation.

Revelations so far about Mr. Durham’s investigation have shown that he has focused in his first months on the accusations that Mr. Trump’s conservative allies have made about the origins of the Russia inquiry in their efforts to undermine it. Mr. Durham’s efforts have prompted criticism that he and Mr. Barr are trying to deliver the president a political victory, though investigators would typically run down all aspects of a case to complete a review of it.

Mr. Durham is running the investigation with a trusted aide, Nora R. Dannehy, and a pair of retired F.B.I. agents. Other prosecutors are also assisting, people familiar with the investigation said.

In interviewing more than two dozen former and current F.B.I. and intelligence officials, Mr. Durham’s investigators have asked about any anti-Trump bias among officials who worked on the Russia investigation and about one aspect of the investigation that was at the heart of highly contentious allegations that they abused their powers: the secret application seeking a court order for a wiretap on Mr. Page.

Law enforcement officials suspected Mr. Page was the target of recruitment by the Russian government, which he has denied.

Mr. Durham has also asked whether C.I.A. officials might have somehow tricked the F.B.I. into opening the Russia investigation.

Mr. Durham has indicated he wants to interview former officials who ran the C.I.A. in 2016 but has yet to question either Mr. Brennan or James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence. Mr. Trump has repeatedly attacked them as part of a vast conspiracy by the so-called deep state to stop him from winning the presidency.

Some C.I.A. officials have retained criminal lawyers in anticipation of being interviewed. It was not clear whether Mr. Durham was scrutinizing other former top intelligence officials. Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the former director of the National Security Agency, declined to say whether he had spoken with Mr. Durham’s investigators.

Mr. Durham also has yet to question many of the former F.B.I. officials involved in opening the Russia investigation.

As Mr. Durham’s investigation moves forward, the Justice Department inspector general is wrapping up his own inquiry into aspects of the F.B.I.’s conduct in the early days of the Russia investigation. Among other things, the inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, is scrutinizing the application for a warrant to wiretap Mr. Page.

Mr. Barr has not said whether Mr. Durham’s investigation grew out of the inspector general’s findings or something that prosecutors unearthed while doing interviews or reviewing documents. But the inspector general’s findings, which are expected to be made public in coming weeks, could contribute to the public’s understanding of why Mr. Durham might want to investigate national security officials’ activities in 2016.

Though the inspector general’s report deals with sensitive information, Mr. Horowitz anticipates that little of it will be blacked out when he releases the document publicly, he wrote in a letter sent to lawmakers on Thursday and obtained by The New York Times.

Mr. Durham has delved before into the secret world of intelligence gathering during the Bush and Obama administrations. He was asked in 2008 to investigate why the C.I.A. destroyed tapes depicting detainees being tortured. The next year, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. appointed Mr. Durham to spearhead an investigation into the C.IA. abuses.

Career prosecutors had already examined many of the same cases and declined to bring charges, and in an echo of the Russia investigation, they fumed that Mr. Holder was revisiting the issue. Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, then the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said that the abuses had been “exhaustively reviewed” and that a new inquiry could put national security at risk.

After nearly four years, Mr. Durham’s investigation ended with no charges against C.I.A. officers, including two directly involved in the deaths of two detainees, angering human rights activists.

 

[Becky]

This administration is setting dangerous precedents. The Republicans may reap what they are sowing in the future. 

[Howl]

I have to wonder how many people at DoJ wake up, look at themselves in the mirror after a mostly sleepless night and wonder how much longer they can participate in the rampant corruption that is Bill Barr's DoJ. 

 

[Howl]

The latest from Rick Wilson, excoriating Barr and laying it all out.

Is William Barr the Head of DOJ or QAnon?     John Durham’s investigation of the Russia probe as a criminal matter is further proof that the Justice Department is a tool for Trump now

[GreyhoundFan]

With all the crap going down, I missed this yesterday:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"William Barr says ‘communities’ that protest cops could lose ‘the police protection they need’"

Spoiler

Speaking to a roomful of police officers and prosecutors on Tuesday, Attorney General William P. Barr drew a parallel between protests against soldiers during the Vietnam War and demonstrations against law enforcement today.

But this time, he suggested, those who don’t show “respect” to authority could lose access to police services.

“Today, the American people have to focus on something else, which is the sacrifice and the service that is given by our law enforcement officers. And they have to start showing, more than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves,” Barr said in pointed remarks delivered at a Justice Department ceremony to honor police officers.

Barr added that “if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.”

Although Barr didn’t specify what “communities” he was referencing, activists decried his speech as a clear attack on minorities who have protested police brutality and other racially skewed law enforcement abuses.

“Barr’s words are as revealing as they are disturbing ― flagrantly dismissive of the rights of Americans of color, disrespectful to countless law enforcement officers who work hard to serve their communities, and full of a continuing disregard for the rule of law,” Jeb Fain, a spokesperson for liberal super PAC American Bridge, told HuffPost, which first reported on the comments.

As attorney general, Barr has attacked liberal district attorneys who have pushed for police accountability in cities like Philadelphia and St. Louis and suggested that there should be “zero tolerance for resisting police.”

Before handing out honors to police officers at Tuesday’s ceremony for the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service in Policing, Barr described seeing deployed troops celebrated at airports and lamented that police aren’t more openly feted.

“When police officers roll out of their precincts every morning, there are no crowds along the highway cheering them on, and when you go home at the end of the day, there’s no ticker-tape parade,” he said, echoing virtually word-for-word comments he made in August to the Fraternal Order of Police.

The attorney general then compared police to Vietnam-era soldiers returning home to face those opposed to the conflict.

“In the Vietnam era, our country learned a lesson. I remember that our brave troops who served in that conflict weren’t treated very well in many cases when they came home, and sometimes they bore the brunt of people who were opposed to the war,” he said. “The respect and gratitude owed to them was not given. And it took decades for the American people finally to realize that.”

Similarly, he suggested, Americans should stop protesting police officers “fighting an unrelenting, never-ending fight against criminal predators in our society.”

Critics questioned Barr’s suggestion in the speech that police could stop protecting those who protest them.

“US Attorney General fails to understand police are not a protection racket,” tweeted Andrew Stroehlein, the European media director for Human Rights Watch. “(And no points for guessing which ‘communities’ he means).”

The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a message about Barr’s comments.

He is such a thug.

[fraurosena]

Rufus be praised!

Not sure if anything will come of this in the Senate with MoscowMitch at the helm, but I’m sure the House will start investigating— if they haven’t already.

[Howl]

Well, Parnas and his lawyer (Bondy) have cajones.  They are calling for Barr to recuse himself from anything Parnas related.  

Lev Parnas asks Attorney General William Barr to recuse himself from investigation

 

[fraurosena]

What she says!

 

[SassyPants]

Maybe Barr is setting the table for his eventual departure? 

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, SassyPants said:

Maybe Barr is setting the table for his eventual departure? 

Oh, what a lovely thought. Sadly, that’s not going to happen. Ari Melber sums it up nicely:

Personally, I think he’s attempting (badly) to create some plausible deniability before testifying before the House in a couple of weeks.

[GreyhoundFan]

Interesting thread from Justin Amash:

 

Continued under spoiler:

Spoiler

 

 

[fraurosena]

5 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Interesting thread from Justin Amash:

 

Continued under spoiler:

  Hide contents

 

 

That’s... scary.

[fraurosena]

Rick Wilson is the master of slap-downs.

 

[SassyPants]

Now he wants the Flynn case reopened.

[JMarie]

8 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Rick Wilson is the master of slap-downs.

 

Kinda OT: Is there an active investigation of Jim Jordan and OSU? It'd be great to see him voted out of office in November.  It'd be doubly great to also see him prosecuted and jailed.

[fraurosena]

Former Justice Dept. Lawyers Press for Barr to Step Down

Quote

More than 1,100 former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials called on Attorney General William P. Barr on Sunday to step down after he intervened last week to lower the Justice Department’s sentencing recommendation for President Trump’s longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr.

They also urged current government employees to report any signs of unethical behavior at the Justice Department to the agency’s inspector general and to Congress.

“Each of us strongly condemns President Trump’s and Attorney General Barr’s interference in the fair administration of justice,” the former Justice Department lawyers, who came from across the political spectrum, wrote in an open letter on Sunday. Those actions, they said, “require Mr. Barr to resign.”

The sharp denunciation of Mr. Barr underlined the extent of the fallout over the case of Mr. Stone, capping a week that strained the attorney general’s relationship with his rank and file, and with the president himself.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

After prosecutors on Monday recommended a prison sentence of up to nine years for Mr. Stone, who was convicted of obstructing a congressional inquiry, Mr. Trump lashed out at federal law enforcement. Senior officials at the department, including Mr. Barr, overrode the recommendation the next day with a more lenient one, immediately prompting accusations of political interference, and the four lawyers on the Stone case abruptly withdrew in protest.

The Justice Department said the case had not been discussed with anyone at the White House, but that Mr. Trump congratulated Mr. Barr on his decision did little to dispel the perception of political influence. And as the president widened his attacks on law enforcement, Mr. Barr publicly reproached the president, saying that Mr. Trump’s statements undermined him, as well the department.

“I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me,” Mr. Barr said during a televised interview on Thursday with ABC News.

In the days after the interview, Mr. Trump has been relatively muted. He said on Twitter that he had not asked Mr. Barr to “do anything in a criminal case.” As president, he added, he had “the legal right to do so” but had “so far chosen not to!”

But lawyers across the Justice Department continue to worry about political interference from the president despite public pushback by Mr. Barr, long considered a close ally of Mr. Trump’s.

Protect Democracy, a nonprofit legal group, gathered the signatures from Justice Department alumni and said it would collect more.

In May, Protect Democracy gathered signatures for a letter that said the Mueller report presented enough evidence to charge Mr. Trump with obstruction of justice were that an option. At the close of his investigation, the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III declined to indicate whether Mr. Trump illegally obstructed justice, citing a decades-old department opinion that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime. That letter was also critical of Mr. Barr.

Even as the lawyers condemned Mr. Barr on Sunday, they said they welcomed his rebuke of Mr. Trump and his assertions that law enforcement must be independent of politics.

But Mr. Barr’s “actions in doing the president’s personal bidding unfortunately speak louder than his words,” they said.

The letter comes days after some Democratic senators pressed for Mr. Barr to resign, and after the New York City Bar Association said that it had formally reported the attorney general’s behavior to the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Strikingly, the lawyers called upon current department employees to be on the lookout for future abuses and to be willing to bring oversight to the department.

“Be prepared to report future abuses to the inspector general, the Office of Professional Responsibility, and Congress,” they wrote, and “to refuse to carry out directives that are inconsistent with their oaths of office.”

Although Barr will never step down of his own accord, public statements like these remain an important part of the resistance against autocracy.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

49 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

A very telling paragraph from that article:

Why did he [Barr] try to squelch the Justice Department's investigation of the BCCI scandal? Does it have anything to do with the fact that his 250-lawyer former law firm represents one of the defendants? Does Barr's passion for "law and order" depend on the race and social standing of the alleged law breaker? Why did he find it necessary to file a governmental brief on behalf of Operation Reduce, another group of law breakers who disrupt abortion clinics and harass clinic patients?

Bill Barr hasn't suddenly changed into a biased flunky under Trump. He's been interfering in the judicial system his whole career. 

[GreyhoundFan]

A worthwhile read:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Because of course:

Some reactions:

Spoiler

[GreyhoundFan]

I am not a violent person, but I would love to punch his smug face:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Uh-oh, brace for a tweetstorm from the Mango Mussolini: "U.S. judge puts Justice Department’s move to drop charges against Michael Flynn on hold"

Spoiler

A U.S. judge put on hold the Justice Department’s move to drop charges against Michael Flynn, saying he expects independent groups and legal experts to argue against the bid to exonerate President Trump’s former national security adviser of lying to the FBI.

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said in an order Tuesday that he expects individuals and organizations will seek to intervene in the politically charged case. Having others weigh in could preface more aggressive steps that the federal judge in Washington could take, including — as many outside observers have called for — holding a hearing to consider what to do.

Sullivan’s order came after the government took the highly irregular step Thursday of reversing its stance on upholding Flynn’s guilty plea.

The action by Sullivan, a veteran 72-year-old jurist with a national reputation for advocating defendants’ rights to full government disclosure of evidence, appears to rule out immediate action on the Justice Department’s decision to reverse course and throw out Flynn’s December 2017 guilty plea.

Sullivan said he will “at the appropriate time” set a schedule for outside parties to argue against the Justice Department’s claims as the government seeks to drop the charges.

Such “friend-of-the court” or “amicus brief should normally be allowed when a party is not represented . . . has an interest in some other case that may be affected . . . [or] has unique information or perspective that can help the court,” Sullivan said.

The judge said he would be a rigorous gatekeeper, adding, “A criminal proceeding is not a free for all.”

A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In an immediate written response to the court, Flynn’s defense said the order was prompted by a notice Monday from an unspecified group referring to itself as “Watergate Prosecutors” that sought to file arguments in the case.

“No rule allows this filing,” Flynn attorney Sidney Powell objected.

Powell said in the more than two years of Flynn’s prosecution, “This Court has consistently — on twenty-four (24) previous occasions — summarily refused to permit any third party to inject themselves or their views into this case.”

Powell also challenged the constitutionality of Sullivan’s order, saying the courts have no authority to permit a third party to “usurp the role of the government’s counsel” in prosecuting an individual in a criminal case.

“This travesty of justice has already consumed three or more years of an innocent man’s life — and that of his entire family,” Powell wrote. “No further delay should be tolerated or any further expense caused to him and his defense.”

The judge’s ruling appeared to be prompted by a unique request filed one day earlier by the team of Watergate prosecutors who pursued an investigation of President Richard Nixon. They sought to file a friend-of-the-court brief to give their legal arguments against Barr’s unusual reversal of Flynn’s prosecution and said they had a “unique perspective on the need for independent scrutiny and oversight to ensure that crucial decisions about prosecutions of high-ranking government officials are made in the public interest.”

“The integrity of prosecutorial decision making is a cornerstone of the rule of law,” they wrote. “Amici have a special interest in restoring the public trust in prosecutorial decision making and in public confidence in the viability of future independent investigations and prosecutions if the results of such work are likely to be subjected to reversal by transparent political influence.”

Sullivan’s order noted that he was proceeding under a rule of civil procedure that gives judges sole discretion to accept outside arguments. Although there is no parallel criminal rule, the federal appeals court for Washington has ruled external entities in criminal cases can always ask to file an amicus brief, Sullivan said.

Legal experts said the order allows others to file objections to the Justice Department’s move and could open the door for adversarial proceedings in which one or more attorneys argue against the Justice Department. It would also permit, if the judge chooses, requiring both sides to produce evidence and revisit the case for and against Flynn.

In an evidentiary hearing, Sullivan could call witnesses — such as Flynn, his investigators or even prosecutors — to obtain more facts about how the case was handled and why Flynn and agents took the steps they did.

Sullivan has not hesitated to personally question Flynn in court before, as he did during a 2018 hearing, when he rejected a defense motion supported by the government for probation.

Sullivan had said he was not satisfied by the former three-star Army general’s cooperation with special counsel’s probe.

“Arguably, you sold your country out,” Sullivan told Flynn.

Flynn was convicted of lying to investigators about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador about easing U.S. sanctions during Trump’s presidential transition in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of interference in the 2016 election.

Flynn had initially repeated that he was guilty of lying, that no one had coerced him to admit his guilt and that he had no intention of taking back that plea. Flynn also said he took responsibility for wrongdoing that also culminated in his firing by Trump for misleading Vice President Pence, White House aides and the public.

After Mueller’s investigation into 2016 campaign interference closed last year, Flynn changed defense teams, began attacking prosecutors and gained Trump’s support, claiming he was entrapped in a partisan FBI and Justice Department conspiracy.

In January, Attorney General William P. Barr tapped Jeff Jensen, the U.S. attorney in St. Louis, to review how the case had been handled. Jensen said publicly last week that he recommended it be dropped. Jensen asserted that newly analyzed FBI reports and communications showed the bureau had no valid basis to question Flynn, so any lies he told were not relevant to a criminal probe.

The Justice Department’s attempts to dismiss the case last week prompted fresh accusations from law enforcement officials and Democrats that the criminal justice system was caving to political pressure from the Trump administration.

Flynn prosecutor Brandon Van Grack, a Mueller team member, quit the case in apparent protest before the Justice Department’s move to drop the charges, while Trump applauded the actions.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I love the Borowitz report: