Bill Barr: Cover-up Attorney for Trump

[GreyhoundFan]

"5 takeaways from the scathing testimony about William Barr’s Justice Department"

Spoiler

The Justice Department under Attorney General William P. Barr has made several controversial and extraordinary decisions with regard to President Trump and his allies. And two of those decisions came to a head Wednesday.

First came a federal court ruling that the case against Michael Flynn should be dropped after Barr’s Justice Department moved to withdraw its prosecution — despite Flynn already having pleaded guilty. Arguably the more interesting development came Wednesday afternoon, when a former prosecutor on the Roger Stone case testified that political pressure was indeed behind the Justice Department’s reduction in Stone’s sentencing recommendation.

Aaron Zelinsky was one of four prosecutors who withdrew from the case when that decision was made, and in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, he detailed what happened.

Zelinsky’s testimony came after the committee on Tuesday released a blistering opening statement he had written. You can read up on that here.

Below are some takeaways from his and others’ testimony.

1. Zelinsky names names

In his opening statement and his early testimony, Zelinsky didn’t name the official who told him that the Stone decision was politicized. Instead, Zelinsky just said it was a “supervisor.” And for some reason, House Democrats didn’t probe this for nearly two hours.

So it fell to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to ask Zelinsky who it was. But Jordan may not have gotten the answer he anticipated.

“So the supervisor for the questions you’re asking is the supervisor of the fraud and public corruption” unit in the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office, Zelinsky said, adding, “His name is J.P. Cooney.”

Zelinsky said in his opening statement that this supervisor had said “that the U.S. attorney had political reasons for his instructions, which our supervisor agreed was unethical and wrong.”

Zelinsky also added that other officials were party to the discussions.

“At the time in the office, there was a first assistant, there was a criminal chief — they were all involved in these discussions,” Zelinsky said. He later named the first assistant as Alessio Evangelista.

Jordan asked whether these officials had spoken with Barr, Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen or then-U.S. Attorney Timothy Shea.

Zelinsky responded, “My understanding is they did.”

Jordan, apparently taken aback, then pressed Zelinsky on the apparently secondhand nature of these exchanges. “It sounds like you heard stuff that you’re now bringing to this committee as fact,” Jordan said. “'So-and-so says to someone what they told someone else.'”

Regardless, to the extent the committee wants to pursue the matter, they apparently know whom to call next.

2. Zelinsky says DOJ abandoned the rule of law

Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Tex.) at one point asked Zelinsky whether Barr had abandoned the rule of law. She cited another withdrawn prosecutor from the Stone case, Jonathan Kravis, who wrote a Washington Post op-ed last month saying of his 10-year tenure in the DOJ, “I left a job I loved because I believed the department had abandoned its responsibility to do justice in one of my cases, United States v. Roger Stone.”

Garcia asked Zelinsky whether he agreed with that statement, and Zelinsky was direct.

“I do.”

The other two prosecutors who withdrew from the Stone case, Adam Jed and Michael Marando, haven’t been as public about their reasons for withdrawing.

3. GOP’s dodgy attacks on the witnesses’ credibility

Jordan and the GOP tried to undermine Zelinsky and his fellow witnesses’ credibility from the get-go, but again they may not have gotten what they bargained for.

Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.), for instance, accused Justice Department attorney John Elias of trying to help Democrats with impeaching Trump.

“You wanted to come work for the majority during the impeachment. Is that not correct?” Collins asked.

Elias, though, indicated that his outreach to the Democratic majority on the committee came long before impeachment.

“I actually think that — I think it was a year prior,” he said, adding, “It was early 2019.”

Separately, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) picked up on the GOP’s argument that Zelinsky’s appearance via video was out of bounds or intended to avoid intense cross-examination.

“As a prosecutor … I’m reticent to discuss my family publicly,” Zelinsky responded.

Johnson, though, pressed him: “You have family concerns, is that right? Is that right? That’s what you tell us.”

Zelinsky responded, “I have a newborn child, congressman.”

Johnson then tried to compare this to the GOP’s witness, former attorney general Michael Mukasey, who appeared in person, saying Mukasey would quarantine himself after the hearing because he has a young grandchild.

4. A Barr predecessor: ‘We’re on the way to something far worse than Watergate’

Former deputy attorney general Donald Ayer preceded Barr in that role in the George H.W. Bush administration, and he has since been one of Barr’s most high-profile critics. He began his testimony Wednesday with some particularly stinging remarks.

“I am here because I believe that William Barr poses the greatest threat in my lifetime to our rule of law and to public trust in it,” Ayer said. “That is because he does not believe in its core principle that no person is above the law. Instead, since taking office, he has worked to advance his lifelong conviction that the president should hold virtually autocratic powers.”

He added later, “I think we’re on the way to something far worse than Watergate, where you had a problem of public distrust, because it’s becoming very transparent that many things are being done essentially for reasons that are completely unrelated to the merits of the case.”

Ayer has previously signed letters decrying Barr’s leadership of the Justice Department and has called for Barr’s resignation.

5. GOP witness says ‘maybe’ Trump politicized allies’ cases

Whatever one thinks of Barr’s actions, even he has admitted that Trump’s tweets about ongoing Justice Department matters involving allies are problematic. Barr in February said that such tweets about the Stone case “make it impossible for me to do my job.” (He has declined to weigh in publicly since then, even as Trump has continued the practice.)

And the one GOP witness Wednesday, Mukasey, seemed to agree with that, at least in part.

Under questioning from Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), who is under consideration for Joe Biden’s vice presidential pick, Mukasey acknowledged that “maybe” such tweets constituted applying political pressure in an ongoing case.

“I can’t speak for the president. The president is, by definition, a political — ” he said, before Demings cut him off.

“Based on your professional — political or professional — experience, do you believe the president has engaged in a political way as it pertains to sentences or what happens to his friends?” Demings asked.

“The attorney general himself criticized the president for tweets — ” Mukasey said.

“So that's a yes?” Demmings asked.

“It’s a maybe,” Mukasey said.

 

[onekidanddone]

8 hours ago, fraurosena said:

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

 

Maybe it is just my depression talking, but once I watched this I don’t have much faith  

IM

Mods: I think this is supposed to be in a quote box  but I can’t get it to work 

 

Edited June 25, 2020 by onekidanddone
Messed up the YouTube link

[fraurosena]

Soooo....

If they do proceed with impeaching him, this won’t lead to Barr being removed; it will almost certainly be a repeat of what happened with Trump’s impeachment. However, instead of getting rid of him, it will serve to showcase what Trump and his cronies stand for. It will take some time for the whole procedure to take place, and it will be fresh in the minds of voters come November.

[GreyhoundFan]

I bet there will be a twitter meltdown from the tangerine toddler tonight:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Barr is out there doing more dirty work for twitler:

 

[fraurosena]

Yasssss......

 

[fraurosena]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Five takeaways from Attorney General Barr’s contentious congressional hearing"

Spoiler

Attorney General William P. Barr testified for the first time in his tenure in front of a critical congressional audience — a House Judiciary Committee with a Democratic majority — as the Justice Department faces questions from critics who say it is helping President Trump politically in ways ranging from policing and protests to intervening in criminal investigations of Trump allies.

“In your time at the department,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold E. Nadler (D-N.Y.) said in his opening statement, “you have aided and abetted the worst failings of this president.”

Barr came ready to defend himself from such accusations, an opportunity Republicans on the committee repeatedly gave him.

Here are five takeaways from Barr’s testimony.

1. He is all in as a partisan player

By now, Barr has established himself as a loyal defender of Trump, willing to make decisions that at the very least give the appearance that Barr is doing Trump’s personal bidding. Barr denies politics play a role in his decisions while leading the Justice Department.

But on Tuesday, he did little to dissuade the criticism that Trump’s personal desires influence him. In his efforts to defend himself, Barr painted Trump as the consummate professional president, giving Barr “complete freedom” to do what he needs. “From my experience, the president has played a role properly and traditionally played by presidents,” Barr testified.

We don’t know what happens behind closed doors between Trump and Barr, but Barr’s projection of the president is just not consistent with the president’s public comments on law enforcement, which he regularly attacks when investigations don’t go his way. Here he is after his friend Roger Stone was sentenced to more than three years in prison.

In his written opening statement, Barr accused Democrats in Congress of trying to “discredit” him. And he echoed Trump’s words about the nationwide protests against racial injustice. He downplayed the central theme of Black Lives Matter — police brutality. “The threat to black lives posed by crime on the streets is massively greater than any threat posed by police misconduct,” his statement read.

And Barr asserted that his repeated efforts to change the direction of investigations of Trump allies were influenced only by the rule of law.

“I am supposedly punishing the president’s enemies and helping his friends,” Barr said. He challenged his critics to point to one enemy he has unfairly indicted.

On the friends front, Barr said, “The president’s friends don’t deserve special breaks, but they also don’t deserve to be treated more harshly than other people.”

He referred to two recent controversies:

1. Reducing Stone’s sentence, an act that led all four federal prosecutors on the case to resign from the case in protest. One testified to Congress last month that the Justice Department reduced the sentence for “political reasons.” (Stone got the lower sentence, then Trump commuted that sentence altogether. Barr has implied he doesn’t agree with the commutation.) “Do you think it’s fair for a 67-year-old man to be sentenced to prison for seven to nine years?” Barr said.
2. Doing an about-face on former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, dropping charges that Flynn had previously pleaded guilty to. “There was no basis to investigate Flynn,” Barr said of the FBI. (Justice Department officials involved in the investigation at the time disagree.)

But his opening statement moved neither side. “Your opening statement reads like it was written by Alex Jones or Roger Stone,” Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) told Barr, referring to two combative Trump allies.

2. Under increased scrutiny, Barr is not backing down from sending federal agents into cities

There is a chasm between how Barr, Trump and their Republican defenders in Congress view federal police presence in U.S. cities and how Democrats and many protesters see it.

Barr is arguing that Portland, Ore., officials abdicated their duty to keep the peace and that federal officials had to take over to protect the federal courthouse.

“What unfolds nightly around the courthouse cannot reasonably be called a protest; it is, by any objective measure, an assault on the government of the United States,” Barr said in his opening statement.

Democrats argue that Trump is co-opting federal law enforcement for his political benefit, mainly to scare suburban voters into voting for him and to distract from his failure to keep the coronavirus in check. And they accuse Barr of being a willing ally.

“The president wants footage for his campaign ads, and you appear to be serving it up to him as ordered,” Nadler said. (One of the Trump campaign’s most recent ads was filled with fiery scenes of urban unrest and contained this warning: “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”)

The protests across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis in May had been fizzling — until Barr sent federal agents to Portland, where there were still some nightly clashes between protesters and police. That has stirred up more protests across the nation.

Now the Justice Department inspector general’s office is investigating federal police actions against protesters in Portland, where demonstrators report being clubbed and thrown into unmarked vans. The inspector general’s office will also look at what happened in D.C., where in June federal agents fired chemical agents at peaceful protesters, clearing a park across from the White House before Trump stood for a photo opportunity in front of a damaged church.

Barr is also sending federal police to other cities as part of what he says is a separate project to help fight violent crime, not quell protests. Some mayors, including in Chicago and Kansas City, Mo., have said they’ll cautiously welcome the help as long as it’s not targeted at stirring up trouble on the streets.

“Understandably, Americans are very suspicious of your motives here,” Nadler said.

3. Barr doesn’t think police have a racism problem

On the major topic of the day — police brutality and what the Justice Department can do about it — Barr was willing to acknowledge some racial inequities in how police treat black Americans. But he referred to it as a past issue in his opening statement: “Given our history, it’s understandable that among black Americans, there’s some ambivalence and often distrust toward the police. Until just the last 50 years ago or so, our laws and our institutions were explicitly racist, explicitly discriminatory.”

More often than not, under questioning, Barr was not willing to say there is systemic racism among police in the United States. He tried to cite statistics that show the opposite. Barr said he’s seen studies that said “police are less likely to shoot at a black suspect, a little more likely to shoot at a white suspect.”

He also cited Washington Post tallies of police shootings that show eight unarmed black men have been fatally shot by police in 2020, compared with 11 unarmed white people. What Barr did not mention was that white people make up much more of the U.S. population than black people, and when you look at the data in a more representative way, black people are unequivocally shot by police at a higher rate than white people.

Senate Republicans, seeing that even white Americans support the Black Lives Matter protests drawing attention to this cause, have been willing to acknowledge that police target black people at a higher rate. They quickly put together a police reform bill, which failed.

Barr and Trump have disagreed with them.

4. Barr doubled down on raising fears about voting by mail

Barr has said multiple times that he’s worried about foreign actors manipulating voting by mail at a large scale in November. He repeated that Tuesday.

But Barr has no evidence to back up that concern, and election officials say what he’s warning about is unlikely.

Here’s the deal: Among the five states that vote by mail statewide and the thousands of absentee ballots cast every year, there is no evidence that voting by mail leads to substantial voter fraud.

A number of states have practices to confirm absentee ballots, making them difficult to impossible to duplicate on a massive scale. To do so, bad actors would have to know a person’s personal signature and correct address. They would have to mail ballots in the same envelopes that the state is using in a way that doesn’t attract election officials’ attention by duplicating ballots among those who have voted. All of this from a foreign country.

What some election experts warn is more likely than widespread fraud is that Barr and Trump’s comments lead to widespread suspicion about the outcome of the race.

If Trump were to clearly lose and not leave office, claiming fraud, there would be nothing clear in the rule book for what to do then.

At the least, Barr responded under questioning that if a president clearly loses an election, the president has no remedy with which to contest it.

5. Barr hesitates to say a president shouldn’t accept foreign help to get elected

In probably one of the most stunning exchanges of the day, Barr at first did not denounce clearly illegal behavior. The question was prompted by Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.).

Cicilline: Is it ever appropriate, sir, for the president to solicit or accept foreign assistance in an election?

Barr: It depends what kind of assistance.

Cicilline: Is it ever appropriate for the president or presidential candidate to accept or solicit foreign assistance of any kind in his or her election?

Barr: No, it’s not appropriate.

Foreign help in an election is absolutely illegal, in any kind. Trump was impeached by the House in late 2019 for trying to get Ukraine to make former vice president Joe Biden, now his 2020 opponent, look bad.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

So, so true:

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

So, so true:

I beg to differ-- well nuance, really. Although I agree Bill Barr is right up there, he is not the absolute worst of the worst.

That honour belongs to Mitch McConnell.

YMMV

[47of74]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

So, so true:

Nah not quite.  He designed far worse humans.  Such as Hitler, Stalin, Fuck Face von #Bunkerbitch, Putin, and Edrogan.  Of course Barr is ten gallons of shit in a five gallon hat.

[front hugs > duggs]

On 7/29/2020 at 11:00 AM, 47of74 said:

Nah not quite.  He designed far worse humans.  Such as Hitler, Stalin, Fuck Face von #Bunkerbitch, Putin, and Edrogan.  Of course Barr is ten gallons of shit in a five gallon hat.

Barr and McConnell are like the Himmler and Goebbels of Trump's Hitler in my opinion. While Hitler and Stalin (and others) overtly murdered people, Trump's administration is just subtly doing it.

 

*I am Jewish and I do believe that comparing Trump to Hitler is hyperbole, but he is no doubt a fascist**

[mamallama]

I'm also Jewish and my father fled Germany in 1934.  I would say the comparison is hyperbolic right now but Trump right now sounds a lot like the Hitler my father fled in 1934.

[GreyhoundFan]

Barr gives a disgusting tongue bath to his lord and master:

 

[fraurosena]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Barr gives a disgusting tongue bath to his lord and master:

 

Yeah, sorry guys, that "He's always working" is so preposterous it literally made me guffaw. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Good heavens:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I love Ted Lieu:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I'm sure Billy thinks he was given the power by Jesus:

[GreyhoundFan]

Billy boy needs to go.

 

[fraurosena]

20 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Billy boy needs to go.

 

This is all the more reason for Pelosi (and the House Dems) to impeach him. 

[GreyhoundFan]

I hope Billy Boy is crying into his beer tonight: "‘Unmasking’ probe commissioned by Barr quietly concludes without charges or any public report"

Spoiler

The federal prosecutor appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr to review whether Obama-era officials improperly requested the identities of individuals whose names were redacted in intelligence documents has completed his work without finding any substantive wrongdoing, according to people familiar with the matter.

The revelation that U.S. Attorney John Bash, who left the department last week, had concluded his review without criminal charges or any public report will rankle President Trump at a moment when he is particularly upset at the Justice Department. The department has so far declined to release the results of Bash’s work, though people familiar with his findings say they would likely disappoint conservatives who have tried to paint the “unmasking” of names — a common practice in government to help understand classified documents — as a political conspiracy.

The president in recent days has pressed federal law enforcement to move against his political adversaries and complained that a different prosecutor tapped by Barr to investigate the FBI’s 2016 investigation of his campaign will not be issuing any public findings before the election.

Legal analysts feared Bash’s review was yet another attempt by Trump’s Justice Department to target political opponents of the president. Even if it ultimately produced no results of consequence, legal analysts said, it allowed Trump and other conservatives to say Obama-era officials were under scrutiny, as long as the case stayed active.

The department — both under Barr and Trump’s previous attorney general, Jeff Sessions — has repeatedly turned to U.S. Attorneys across the country to investigate matters of Republican concern, distressing current and former Justice Department officials, who fear department leaders are repeatedly caving to Trump’s pressure to benefit his allies and target those he perceives as political enemies.

Kerri Kupec, the Justice Department’s top spokeswoman, had first revealed Bash’s review in May, after Republican senators made public a declassified list of U.S. officials, including former vice president Joe Biden, who made requests that would ultimately reveal the name of Trump adviser Michael Flynn in intelligence documents in late 2016 and early 2017.

In an appearance on Fox News that month, Kupec told host Sean Hannity that Barr had tapped Bash, the top federal prosecutor in San Antonio, to review Obama-era officials’ unmasking requests. She said that though the practice “inherently isn’t wrong,” the frequency with which requests were made or the motive for making them could be “problematic.”

Though “unmasking” is common and appropriate because it allows government officials to better understand a document they are reading, Trump and others suggested the list of requests that ultimately revealed Flynn’s name showed wrongdoing.

Bash’s team was focused not just on unmasking, but also whether Obama-era officials provided information to reporters, according to people familiar with the probe. But the findings ultimately turned over to Barr fell short of what Trump and others might have hoped, and the attorney general’s office elected not to release them publicly, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive investigation. The Washington Post was unable to review the full results of what Bash found.

Bash announced last week that he was leaving the department — surprising many in the Justice Department because it came so close to the election — though he made no mention of the unmasking review. He said in a statement that he had informed the attorney general of the decision a month earlier and had “accepted an offer for a position in the private sector.” He gave formal resignation letters to the president and the attorney general on October 5, and his last day was Friday.

Before being nominated as the U.S. Attorney, Bash worked in the Solicitor General’s Office and as an associate counsel to Trump. Bash thanked Trump and others in the statement, and Barr offered his “gratitude” for Bash’s service.

“I appreciate his service to our nation and to the Justice Department, and I wish him the very best,” Barr said.

Asked Tuesday if Bash had quit over anything related to unmasking, Kupec said, “No, that was not my understanding.” At the time Bash’s departure was announced, she had said of the unmasking review, “Without commenting on any specific investigation, any matters that John Bash was overseeing will be assumed by Gregg Sofer,” who was tapped to replace Bash as the U.S. Attorney. She declined this week to comment specifically on the status of the unmasking investigation.

Bash declined to comment. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Antonio said he could not immediately comment.

It was not immediately clear why the department was holding back Bash’s findings. Officials do not generally discuss investigations that have been closed without criminal charges — though Bash’s case is unusual because it was announced publicly by the department spokeswoman. Justice Department policies and tradition, too, call for prosecutors not to take public steps in cases close to an election that might affect the results.

Before Bash’s appointment, Kupec had said that a different federal prosecutor, John Durham in Connecticut, also had been looking at unmasking as part of his broader investigation into the FBI’s 2016 probe of whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to influence the election. It was not clear how Durham’s and Bash’s work intersected.

Barr recently told some Republican lawmakers that no report of Durham’s investigation would be released before the November election, though unlike Bash’s review, Durham’s work seems to be ongoing, people familiar with the matter said. Trump has in recent days called the delay in the Durham case “a disgrace,” and asserted that his 2016 Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, should be jailed. He was previously critical of another prosecutor specially tapped by then-Attorney General Sessions to investigate matters related to Clinton, but whose case ended with no public report or allegations of wrongdoing.

Barr had said previously he would not hold back Durham’s findings because of concerns about any impact on the election, as investigators were not focused on political candidates.

From early on in the Trump administration, some GOP lawmakers have sought to investigate and highlight Obama-era unmasking requests, believing them to be inappropriate. The effort was initially pushed in part by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), though the House Intelligence Committee he chaired at the time also asked U.S. spy agencies to reveal the names of U.S. individuals or organizations contained in classified intelligence on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

In May, Sens. Ron Johnson (Wis.), Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) and Rand Paul (Ky.) breathed new life into the effort, releasing a list of those who had made unmasking requests. The list included the names of more than three dozen former Obama administration officials. Among them were Biden, former White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, former FBI director James B. Comey, former CIA director John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper.

Then-acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell had declassified and personally delivered the list to the Justice Department — his arrival captured by a pre-positioned Fox News camera — on the same day the Justice Department moved to drop criminal charges against Flynn.

Paul said at the time that, “We sort of have the smoking gun because we now have the declassified document with Joe Biden’s name on it.” And Trump renewed his broader attacks on the investigation of possible coordination between Russia and his campaign, suggesting those involved should be jailed.

“I’m talking with 50-year sentences,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network.

Kupec soon appeared on Fox News and announced Bash’s inquiry. His work came on top of that of Durham and U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen in St. Louis, who had been tapped specially to review the Flynn case and ultimately advised that the Justice Department should drop it.

The end of Bash’s case is similar to that of another review conducted by John Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah who was asked in November 2017 by Sessions to look into concerns raised by Trump and his allies in Congress that the FBI had not fully pursued cases of possible corruption at the Clinton Foundation and during Clinton’s time as secretary of state. The Washington Post reported in January that the inquiry of had effectively ended with no tangible results. In the months that followed, Trump bemoaned the state of the inquiry on Twitter, asserting that Huber “did absolutely NOTHING.”

“He was a garbage disposal unit for important documents & then, tap, tap, tap, just drag it along & run out of time,” Trump wrote.

 

[fraurosena]

Has Bill Barr been seen in public since the superspreader event at the WH?

[Becky]

I am unclear if he is still in quarantine.  He released a statement on the Whitmer kidnapping plot, but it was presented by a spokesperson.

He first announced he would NOT quarantine after the rose garden superspreader event, then the next day it was announced he would, even though he had tested negative.  Perhaps he had a positive test and it is being kept quiet?  

[Cartmann99]