Bill Barr: Cover-up Attorney for Trump

[WiseGirl]

Sure I believe him just as much as I believe anyone in this administration. How stupid does he think we are? (Rhetorical question)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/08/attorney-general-barrs-dishonest-defense-clearing-lafayette-square/

[GreyhoundFan]

Oooh, Billy had the temerity to contradict his lord and master. Maybe he'll be booted?

 

[GreyhoundFan]

A great op-ed by Dana Milbank: "So this is why Bill Barr is such a bully"

Spoiler

Police in Buffalo shove a 75-year-old man to the ground and blood pours from his ear. Police in Brooklyn knock down a young woman and call her a “bitch” because she asked why she had to leave the street. Federal authorities in Washington fire tear gas at peaceful demonstrators, then lie about it.

Get the feeling law enforcement in this country is being run by a middle-school bully?

If so, you are not wrong.

Childhood bullies have a predisposition to become adult bullies, research shows, and, sure enough, it seems Attorney General William Barr was a teenage bully more than 50 years ago.

Back in 1991, during Barr’s confirmation to be George H.W. Bush’s attorney general, lawyer Jimmy Lohman, who overlapped with Barr at New York’s Horace Mann School and later Columbia University, wrote a piece for the little-known Florida Flambeau newspaper about Barr being “my very own high-school tormentor” — a “classic bully” and “power abuser” in the 1960s who “put the crunch on me every chance [he] got.”

Nobody noticed the Flambeau piece at the time, but Lohman posted it on Facebook when President Trump nominated Barr in 2018, and it took on “a life of its own,” Lohman told me Tuesday from Austin, where Post researcher Alice Crites tracked him down. The article resurfaces in social media each time Barr does something unconscionable — which is often.

The 1991 description of 1963 Barr’s harassment sounds eerily like the 2020 Barr. He “lived to make me miserable,” with a “vicious fixation on my little Jewish ‘commie’ ass,” Lohman alleged, because he wore peace and racial-equality pins. He said the four Barr brothers picketed the school’s “Junior Carnival” because proceeds went to the NAACP, and he alleged that Billy Barr, the “most fanatic rightist” of the four, later “teamed with the New York City riot police to attack anti-war protesters and ‘long hairs.’ ”

The 1991 article says Barr, a “sadistic kid,” has “come a long way from terrorizing seventh graders just because they wore racial equality buttons.” The Justice Department didn’t respond to my request for comment.

Lohman’s account is consistent with Marie Brenner’s reporting for Vanity Fair: “A few who knew the Barr boys came to call them ‘the bully Barrs’; the siblings, these former classmates claimed, could be intimidating.” A petition from Horace Mann alumni asks the school to “rethink” an award for Barr, who “violated our school’s Core Values of Mutual Respect and Mature Behavior.”

Historian Paul Cronin, in Politico this week, says Barr was part of the “Majority Coalition” at Columbia that fought antiwar demonstrators. Barr had told the New York Times Magazine he was part of a “fistfight” in which “over a dozen people went to the hospital.” Cronin noted: “There appears to be no record of any trip to the hospital.”

Now Barr exaggerates violence on a grand scale. After he directed the forceful eviction of peaceful demonstrators from Lafayette Square, he claimed to Fox News on Monday that the image of peaceful demonstrators was “miscreated” to ignore “all the violence that was happening preceding that.” He alleged that there were two “bottles thrown at me” when he surveyed the scene; footage showed him at a safe distance. He charged that previously “things were so bad that the Secret Service recommended that the president go down to the bunker”; Trump claimed it was merely a bunker “inspection.”

Barr has also championed the president’s authority to use the military against protesters, even as Pentagon leaders recoiled. He assembled a militia-like force of often-unidentified federal police in Washington. He blamed antifa for recent “domestic terrorism,” but no new criminal complaint mentions antifa. He claims there is no systemic racism in law enforcement.

That’s consistent with his earlier management of the Justice Department as a thugocracy: mischaracterizing the Mueller report; alleging the Obama administration “spied” on the Trump campaign; naming a special prosecutor to investigate — and deliver an election-season report on — the Russia-probe Barr already declared a “travesty”; attempting to indict the official who approved the probe; overruling prosecutors to seek leniency for Trump friend Roger Stone; getting mentioned by Trump as participating in the attempt to get political dirt on Democrats from Ukraine; lending credibility to Rudy Giuliani’s allegations about the Bidens; dropping an investigation into campaign finance allegations against Trump; dropping the election-interference prosecution of a Russian firm; trying to drop the prosecution of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn; asserting his sole authority to approve election-related probes; and has just assigned another special prosecutor to fulfill Trump’s wish to probe the Obama administration’s “unmasking” practices.

Now Barr is undermining mail-in ballots, threatening the credibility of November’s elections.

If only people had listened to Jimmy Lohman and the Florida Flambeau. “There was something prescient, if I say so myself, about calling him a fascist 30 years ago,” Lohman said Tuesday. “I believe he’s shown his real colors, especially in the last few weeks.”

Be Best? Not Barr. Lohman had better guard his lunch money.

 

[Xan]

Bill Barr tried to fired Geoffrey Berman, US Attorney for SDNY.  Berman has refused to step down.  Hypothesis is that Barr is attempting (probably at Trump's urging) to replace Berman so that the investigation regarding Guiliani will be disrupted.  It isn't going like Barr planned.  Now they're going to have hearings about it on Wednesday.  I'm getting my popcorn ready...

From CNN:  

"In a fast-escalating crisis Friday night, Attorney General William Barr tried to oust Geoffrey Berman, the powerful US attorney for the Southern District of New York who has investigated a number of associates of President Donald Trump, but Berman defied him by refusing to step down.

In an extraordinary statement sent roughly an hour after Barr said Berman was set to leave the office, Berman said he had learned of his purported exit from a press release.

"I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position, to which I was appointed by the Judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. I will step down when a presidentially appointed nominee is confirmed by the Senate," Berman said. "Until then, our investigations will move forward without delay or interruption."

The standoff opens up a fresh crisis at the Justice Department, places the leadership of the most prominent federal prosecutors office outside Washington in a precarious position and again raises questions about Barr's willingness to steer the department to suit Trump's political agenda.

Berman's rebuttal came about an hour after the Department of Justice announced Trump intends to nominate Jay Clayton, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who has never been a prosecutor.

A Justice Department official told CNN that Berman was offered other positions at Justice, including the head of the civil division, where assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt abruptly announced his departure this week. Berman declined.

A second source with knowledge of the matter said Berman was asked to resign and refused. Barr asked Berman to resign in an in-person meeting in New York on Friday, the source said."

[fraurosena]

4 hours ago, Xan said:

Bill Barr tried to fired Geoffrey Berman, US Attorney for SDNY.  Berman has refused to step down.  Hypothesis is that Barr is attempting (probably at Trump's urging) to replace Berman so that the investigation regarding Guiliani will be disrupted.  It isn't going like Barr planned.  Now they're going to have hearings about it on Wednesday.  I'm getting my popcorn ready...

 

[fraurosena]

Posting this for the Bolton excerpt (click to see the entire quote), not the article --which repeats what @Xan said above:

 

[fraurosena]

Oh.my.Rufus!

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Even though there's nothing funny about Barr's lawlessness, the truncated headline did make me giggle:

 

[AnywhereButHere]

Well, if you’re going to keep “resigning” people by surprise, it’s inevitable that one will eventually fight back. I would’ve loved to see Fucknut’s face when Berman’s response to his resignation was - Am Not! ? And wasn’t Berman appointed in the first place by the Keebler Elf, Sessions? Sad when the puppets you thought would support you break their strings. ?‍♀️
 

Fucknut does seem to enjoy adding multiple battlefront to his war on the American people. I guess he doesn’t realize that really doesn’t work out too well... 

[fraurosena]

Trump has officially fired Berman.

 

Methinks this will not be the end of it.

Here is a copy of the letter Barr sent Berman telling him Trump has fired him.

(Did Trump fill in the zero's in 2000 with his sharpie?)

[AnywhereButHere]

 

Quote

Mr. Barr’s attempt to fire Mr. Berman got pushback on Saturday from an unexpected source: Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a close ally of Mr. Trump.

Mr. Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee — the body that would approve Mr. Clayton’s nomination — suggested in a statement that he would allow New York’s two Democratic senators to thwart the nomination through a procedural maneuver. He complimented Mr. Clayton but noted that he had not heard from the administration about any formal plans to name him.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/06/20/nyregion/trump-geoffrey-berman-fired-sdny.amp.html

This comes at almost the end of the article, and it will be interesting to see if Graham follows through (what are the chances...).

[fraurosena]

Berman has chosen to step aside and let his deputy take over.

I hope Berman speaks out publicly about the reason for his ousting.

[GreyhoundFan]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Berman has chosen to step aside and let his deputy take over.

I hope Berman speaks out publicly about the reason for his ousting.

I heard on our local news radio station that he's being invited to testify before the House oversight committee.

[GreyhoundFan]

WTAF?

 

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

WTAF?

 

So this men’s what? Is Barr going to start arresting Muller and all who worked on the probe?

What is next? Will he declare the election as a coup?

What the fuck can be done to stop this. 
I’m really getting terrified now

[fraurosena]

7 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

So this men’s what? Is Barr going to start arresting Muller and all who worked on the probe?

What is next? Will he declare the election as a coup?

What the fuck can be done to stop this. 
I’m really getting terrified now

This is only the beginning of the desperate and frenzied attempts to cling to power. They are losing the election, and they know it. Prepare to witness ever more outrageous claims as November comes closer. Of course they are going to claim the election a coup, or fake, or illegal, or fraudulent. That's a given. They're scared shitless of what will happen to them after.

But I wouldn't worry too much about them. It's only posturing. Whatever they attempt is only windbaggery. 

As long as the military remains independent -- and all the signs say that they are --  you will have nothing to be terrified about.

[fraurosena]

 

Interesting development that everyone knows will lead to nothing in the way of testimony. Still, this is a smart move from Nadler.

Because Barr's refusal to comply will yet again emphasise the Executive Branch's contempt for the Legislative Branch.  Which will lead to public outrage. Which will only serve to drive voter turnout even more. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Wait...Barr lied to someone? What a shocker.

[fraurosena]

Putting this here because it’s DOJ related. 

 

[fraurosena]

Here's a link for those of you who want to follow Aaron Zelinsky's testimony live.

 

[fraurosena]

Nadler just said that Barr will not get away with his actions...

 

[fraurosena]

 

[fraurosena]

 

[Dandruff]

6 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Nadler just said that Barr will not get away with his actions...

I want to believe.