Bill Barr: Cover-up Attorney for Trump

[fraurosena]

This seems like a disturbing  follow-up to the judge’s decision to release the OLC memo.

[thread]

However, DOJ doing this is a smart strategic move.

By only partially unsealing the document, no precedent is created that would allow a conservative judge to order the complete unsealing of documents from Merrick Garland’s DOJ (or other future administrations) for political reasons. And yet, the part that is unsealed is in and of itself still damning enough.

[fraurosena]

Popcorn time. 

POGO Calls for Inspector General Investigation of Potential Justice Department Lies

I've only quoted POGO's cover letter. You can find the detailed discussion mentioned in the letter by following the link.

Quote

Dear Inspector General Horowitz:

The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) urges you to investigate whether four lawyers for the Department of Justice (DOJ) committed perjury or other crimes to conceal the role that DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) played in helping former Attorney General William Barr sell lies to the public about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

POGO is a nonpartisan independent watchdog that investigates and exposes waste, corruption, abuse of power, and when the government fails to serve the public or silences those who report wrongdoing. We champion reforms to achieve a more effective, ethical, and accountable federal government that safeguards constitutional principles.

In a scorching May 3, 2021, opinion, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson reprimanded DOJ for misleading her about the contents of a secret OLC memorandum at issue in a Freedom of Information Act case. Filings in the case by four DOJ lawyers—Paul Colborn, Vanessa Brinkmann, Elizabeth Shapiro, and Julie Straus Harris—created the false impression that OLC wrote its memorandum to help Barr decide whether to prosecute then-President Donald Trump. But Judge Jackson discovered that Barr never considered prosecuting Trump. “What the writers [of OLC’s memorandum] were actually discussing,” she wrote, “was how to neutralize the impact of the [Mueller] Report in the court of public opinion.”

Judge Jackson’s opinion describes representations these lawyers made in terms that would not be a credit to any lawyer, much less supervisors and a senior trial lawyer in DOJ’s headquarters:

• “bad faith”;
• “lack of candor”;
• “disingenuous to this court”;
• “the omission … served to obscure”;
• “misleading and incomplete explanations”;
• “so inconsistent with evidence in the record, they are not worthy of credence”;
• “a strategic decision to pretend as if the first portion of the memorandum was not there”;
• “redactions and incomplete explanations obfuscate the true purpose of the memorandum”
• “serious questions about how the Department of Justice could make this series of representations to a court”;
• “while [the plaintiffs in this case] had never laid eyes on the document, its summary was considerably more accurate than the one supplied by the Department’s declarants”; and
• “The flourish added in the government’s pleading that did not come from either declaration … seems especially unhelpful since there was no prosecutorial decision on the table.”

These shocking findings cry out for those responsible to be fired and prosecuted, unless they can offer a defense presently unknown to the public. Though DOJ’s litigators deny that they intended to mislead the judge when they claimed Barr made a “prosecution decision,” they now admit he never considered prosecuting Trump. It is imperative that you uncover the truth behind the apparent conspiracy to suggest otherwise and its full reach through DOJ’s ranks.

An investigation is needed to ascertain if the conduct at issue violated any of the criminal laws on perjury, false declarations, subornation of perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy. The investigation should be conducted by your office and not DOJ’s notoriously lax Office of Professional Responsibility, which may lack objectivity in this matter. Your office has jurisdiction to investigate any potential criminal liability of DOJ lawyers and is best equipped for the job.

Enclosed is a detailed discussion of the facts and law, with citations to sources supporting the statements we make in both this cover letter and the enclosure.1 We respectfully request that you consider this discussion carefully and initiate an investigation. Having lied so brazenly and for so long, DOJ has shattered its credibility and undermined the rule of law. The only hope for restoring public faith in DOJ is to hold those responsible accountable.

If, as Judge Jackson appears to have found is the case, these four lawyers misled a federal court, they have done incalculable harm to the public’s trust in government. It would mean senior officials in the nation’s highest law enforcement agency concealed a matter of national concern relating directly to the integrity of the office of the president. If it turns out that they committed crimes in the process of doing so, they will have magnified the harm to the department’s already damaged reputation and compounded the effect of Barr’s lies to the American people.

 

[fraurosena]

Originally I wanted to post this in the Michael Cohen thread, but I was four pages deep and found this one first, so here it goes. For those of you who may not have heard, Michael Cohen has filed a lawsuit claiming that Donald Trump retaliated against him for writing a tell-all memoir, saying his abrupt return to federal prison last year endangered his life and amounted to punishment for criticizing the president. As part of the case, Cohen is suing Trump, federal prison officials, and former Attorney General Bill Barr.

2

[Cartmann99]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Joyce tells it like it is:

 

[Cartmann99]

Barr told Savannah Guthrie yesterday that he'd still vote for Trump in 2024.

 

[Howl]

This is Barr adjacent.  Barr appointed John Durham as a special counsel to carry out an "investigation" whose true purpose would be to debunk accusations that Russia helped Trump win.    I've linked below to Maddow blog, which has a succinct recap of the whole thing, but start here: 

Maddow blog: After an extended period of apparent inactivity, the prosecutor [John Durham] last September indicted cybersecurity attorney Michael Sussmann for allegedly having lied to the FBI. Soon thereafter, evidence emerged that Durham’s indictment was misleading, relying on selective quotes and omitting relevant details from their proper context. In December, Sussman’s lawyers disclosed evidence that raised additional doubts about the reliability of Durham’s charges.

So why did this ever go to trial? 

According to CNN, "John Sussman pled not guilty to one count of lying to the FBI during a September 2016 meeting, where he passed along a tip about a potential communications backchannel between Donald Trump and a Kremlin-linked bank. He isn’t accused of inventing the tip, which the FBI later dismissed, but he was charged with lying about whether he brought the tip on Clinton’s behalf."

So, this did go to trial, final arguments wrapped up today and the jury returned a "oh, hell no, this guy's not guilty" verdict within two hours.  According to the jury forewoman, it was a f**king waste of time.  I'm obviously paraphrasing, because she actually said, “I think we could have spent our time more wisely.” 

Maddow blog: In a major setback for Durham, jury acquits former Clinton lawyer

 

[Howl]

 

[Howl]

Heather Cox Richardson's post on facebook yesterday (Tuesday) has more context about Durham's "investigation" and what Republican political ends were accomplished.   This is likely why Sussman was charged in the first place: "But it was not until September 2021, days before the statute of limitations ran out, that Durham announced a grand jury indictment of Michael Sussman, a lawyer working for the Clinton campaign, for lying to the FBI. Sussman worked for the same law firm that represented the campaign, and he took to the FBI the information that cybersecurity security experts had uncovered a possible computer link between Russia’s Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank and Trump Tower."

Final paragraph of Heather Cox Richardson's post: "But the Durham investigation did accomplish what it set out to. It lasted a year longer than the Mueller probe, and in that time, it manufactured an alternative narrative for right-wing media that undermined the reality Mueller’s report set out: that the Trump campaign worked in tandem with Russian operatives."

Full post under spoiler: 

Spoiler

After six hours of deliberation, a federal jury today acquitted Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman of making a false statement to the FBI. This is the outcome of the Trump administration’s attempt to discredit the investigation into the ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.

In May 2019, then–attorney general William Barr appointed John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation to see if it was “lawful and appropriate.” This was a pretty transparent attempt to salt the media with stories about how Trump was being persecuted by Democrats and how the connections between his campaign and Russian operatives were, as he said, a “hoax.”

Using “investigations” to sway public opinion has been a Republican tactic since House Speaker Newt Gingrich ran investigations about "voter fraud" in the 1990s. Those investigations never turned up any evidence, but the constant news coverage convinced many voters that voter fraud was a huge problem. Ditto with Benghazi, and Hillary's emails. Trump tried to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to say he was investigating Hunter Biden's work in Ukraine.

Durham’s investigation seemed to be in this vein. Although a Department of Justice inspector concluded that the investigation had been begun properly and the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee endorsed that conclusion, in summer 2020, Barr publicly disagreed, saying that the Russia probe was “one of the greatest travesties in American history” and that Durham’s job was not to “prepare a report” but to establish criminal violations that would lead to prosecutions. Trump supporters expected that Durham’s report would help Trump in 2020, and although DOJ policy is to avoid roiling the country in the 60 days before an election, Barr said that he would feel free within that period to release the results of Durham’s investigation.

In September 2020, then–White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo that he had seen “additional” documents from Durham’s investigation that spell “trouble” for former FBI officials who began the inquiry into the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. "Additional documents that I’ve been able to review say that a number of the players, the Peter Strzoks, the Andy McCabes, the James Comeys, and even others in the administration previously are in real trouble because of their willingness to participate in an unlawful act and I use the word unlawful at best, it broke all kinds of protocols and at worst people should go to jail as I mentioned previously," Meadows said.

That month, a top aide to Durham resigned from the investigation, allegedly out of concerns about political pressure. A Republican congressional aide told Axios: “This is the nightmare scenario. Essentially, the year and a half of arguably the number one issue for the Republican base is virtually meaningless if this doesn't happen before the election.”

But it was not until September 2021, days before the statute of limitations ran out, that Durham announced a grand jury indictment of Michael Sussman, a lawyer working for the Clinton campaign, for lying to the FBI. Sussman worked for the same law firm that represented the campaign, and he took to the FBI the information that cybersecurity security experts had uncovered a possible computer link between Russia’s Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank and Trump Tower.

Durham said Sussman had lied to the FBI by saying he was not working for a client when he alerted them to the issue. Sussman denies he said he did not have a client, and identified himself as working for the cybersecurity experts. In his indictment, Durham said the cybersecurity experts did not believe their own suggestion of connections between Alfa Bank and Trump Tower and were trying to hurt candidate Trump. They responded by accusing Durham of editing their emails misleadingly and stood behind their earlier conclusions. In any case, the DOJ inspector general concluded that the FBI investigation started over something completely different: a boast from a member of the Trump campaign to an informant that the campaign had dirt on Hillary Clinton.

In a court filing in February 2022, Durham chummed the waters by vaguely suggesting that one of the cybersecurity experts, who was working for the White House as part of a cybersecurity contract, “exploited” his access there to find “derogatory information” about Trump. This was false, and Durham quickly walked it back, but Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) told the Fox News Channel: “They were spying on the sitting president of the United States…. And it goes right to the Clinton campaign,” and the former president claimed that Durham had provided “indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia.… In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”

And today, a jury found Sussman not guilty. Asked if the prosecution was a good idea, the foreperson of the jury said: “Personally, I don’t think it should have been prosecuted because I think we have better time or resources to use or spend [on] other things that affect the nation as a whole than a possible lie to the FBI. We could spend that time more wisely.”

But the Durham investigation did accomplish what it set out to. It lasted a year longer than the Mueller probe, and in that time, it manufactured an alternative narrative for right-wing media that undermined the reality Mueller’s report set out: that the Trump campaign worked in tandem with Russian operatives.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Barr is such an asshole:

 

[Howl]

7 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Barr is such an asshole:

Succinct and 100% accurate.  Also, smirking arrogant dick. 

[Howl]

Barr is out on a rehab tour putting distance between himself and Trump by making statements that will get Trump's attention, piss Trump off and then cable news has him on again to discuss Trump calling him a RINO and that's the main thing, and not that Barr spent his time as AG covering for Trump.  

Barr never gave a shit about Trump; however, he was there to do damage control to keep Republicans in power and carry out the Federalist  Society mandate and cover the extent of Russian influence on Trump and the US electoral process.  We've still not seen the unredacted Mueller Report, have we. 

I'm finishing Sarah Kendzior's book Hiding in Plain Sight and I think I'll go back to the beginning and read it again before her new book, They Knew, comes out in a week or two.  It's hard to process the extent of Russian influence and how well it's been camouflaged.  I can't recommend enough following Sarah Kendzior on Twitter and on her podcast Gaslit Nation.  She does not hold back. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Maybe if Barr hadn’t undermined and lied about Muller, we wouldn’t be dealing with all this crap now:

 

[Becky]

49 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Maybe if Barr hadn’t undermined and lied about Muller, we wouldn’t be dealing with all this crap now:

 

Exactly! Bill Barr was happy to prop Trump up so long as it served his purposes - stacking the courts. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Sadly, BTs won't listen.

 

[Xan]

Empty Gee was just on X white knighting for Trump about Bill Barr.  She thinks that Barr is responsible for not prosecuting Biden when he had the chance.

(Incidentally, people were discussing the X name replacing Twitter.  Someone suggested that the X in Chinese has a "sh" sound so instead of Twitter we should call it "Shitter".  I like that.)

[GreyhoundFan]

Barr is a fucking asshole.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I wonder what dirt Putin has on Barr. 

[WatchingTheTireFireBurn]

I was actually shocked when he came out and said that. Like - how could you say that?   Either somebody has some dirt on him or people are well and truly insane now.

[Becky]

Soooo….  turns out Bill Barr is a gutless sycophant without a moral compass. Who knew, right? 🙄

I hope every network and every journalist ignores Barr from here on out, let him rot in obscurity for all time, except for historical references to his spinelessness.