Wm BARR AG 2 bak

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promote primary

aha enforcer deep state enemies list comey

gaffney the energizer bunny of anti-commie islamophobia?

bak 1219

nixon ford admin hatchet man?]

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thom

an 3 24 no lnx

Bill Barr laid the foundation for today’s MAGA movement

How Bill Barr laid the foundation for today’s MAGA movement

Thom Hartmann

March 11, 2024

With nepo-daughter-in-law Lara Trump taking over the GOP, Donald Trump has essentially declared the “old Republican Party” — the party of Reagan and Bill Barr — dead, arguing that it no longer exists in the form it’s taken since the 1970s.

At a Virginia rally a week ago Saturday, Trump said his neofascist MAGA movement has taken over the Republican Party, that it “represents 96%, and maybe 100%” of Republicans, and that, “We’re getting rid of the Romneys of the world. We want to get Romneys and those out.”

While many in the GOP love the nativist, authoritarian turn the party’s taken, others — like former Attorney General Bill Barr — are mourning the loss of the old guard, calling Trump’s actions “despicable” and “nauseating.”

But what is — or was — the old GOP that Bill Barr so loved?

While not as openly fascist as the MAGA movement, the Republican Party of the past five decades or so was frighteningly corrupt and based, itself, on lies and corruption.

Just this week, The New York Times revealed how Bill Barr apparently inserted himself into a Justice Department criminal investigation of a billion-dollar corporation for allegedly corruptly hiding their income offshore to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

As the Times notes:

“In the months leading up to the canceled interview in the Netherlands, Caterpillar had enlisted a small group of well-connected lawyers to plead the company’s case. Chief among those was William P. Barr, who had served as attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration.”

And, the Times reported, one of the lead investigators into Caterpillar’s tax avoidance scheme came right out and complained that because of Barr’s involvement:

“It appears that Caterpillar was given special political treatment that the average U.S. citizen cannot obtain.”

But helping out alleged tax cheats is just the tip of the iceberg of “old GOP” corruption and lies since the days of Nixon and Reagan.

— They lied that if we cut taxes on the morbidly rich, the benefits would “trickle down” to everybody else.

— They lied that if labor unions were destroyed, “job creators” would create “prosperity” and pay workers better.

— They lied that if “originalist” judges were put on the Supreme Court, the rights to vote, abortion, and birth control would be protected.

— They lied that Reagan’s 1983 decision to stop enforcing our anti-trust laws would make business “more efficient” and create opportunities for entrepreneurs and locally-owned businesses.

— They lied that if we forbade the federal government from negotiating drug prices, consumers and taxpayers would save money.

— They lied that if we privatized Medicare, like George W. Bush did in 2003 with his Medicare Advantage scam, the system would save money.

— They lied that racism was “over” in America with the election of Barack Obama, so if the Supreme Court simply let former Confederate states do whatever they wanted, there would be no more suppression and purging of Black voters.

Every one of those lies was intended to increase the wealth and power of the morbidly rich at the expense of average working-class Americans.

But most important, the Bill Barr old-school Republicans lied that they’d protect our democracy and bring honesty and integrity to American politics. Barr’s own history is probably the best example of how dangerous and destructive that lie has been.

The depth and breadth of Barr’s possible crimes against democracy while Attorney General for Trump are just now coming into clearer focus. We shouldn’t be surprised: like Ghostbusters, Bill Barr has been the “Who ya gonna call?” guy for Republican presidents committing treason for over 30 years.

Most people know that when the Mueller investigation was completed — documenting ten prosecutable cases of Donald Trump personally engaging in criminal obstruction of justice and witness tampering to prevent the Mueller Report investigators from getting to the bottom of his 2016 connections to Russia — Barr buried the report for weeks while lying to the American people about its content.

(Merrick Garland, Barr’s heir to the AG job, is still hiding large parts of the report from the American people, another reason President Biden should replace him.)

While shocking, this was not Bill Barr‘s first time playing cover-up for a Republican president who’d committed crimes that could rise to the level of treason against America.

He’s the exemplar of the “old GOP” that helped Nixon cut a deal to prolong the Vietnam War in 1968, worked with Reagan in 1980 to sell weapons to Iran in exchange for holding the hostages to screw Jimmy Carter, and stole the 2000 election from Al Gore in Jeb Bush’s Florida.

Instead of today’s GOP, exemplified by Nazi marches, white trash like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and racist rhetoric against immigrants, Barr’s “old GOP” committed their crimes wearing $2000 tailored suits and manipulating the law to their advantage.

For example, back in 1992, the first time Bill Barr was U.S. Attorney General, iconic New York Times writer William Safire referred to him as “Coverup-General Barr” because of his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s involvement in Reagan’s scheme to steal the 1980 election through what the media euphemistically called “Iron-Contra.”

On Christmas day of 1992, the New York Times featured a screaming all-caps headline across the top of its front page: Attorney General Bill Barr had covered up evidence of crimes by Reagan and Bush in the Iran-Contra “scandal.” (see the bottom of this article)

Earlier that week of Christmas, 1992, George H.W. Bush was on his way out of office. Bill Clinton had won the White House the month before, and in a few weeks would be sworn in as president.

But Bush Senior’s biggest concern wasn’t that he’d have to leave the White House to retire back to one of his million-dollar mansions in Connecticut, Maine, or Texas: instead, he was worried that he may face time in a federal prison after he left office, a concern nearly identical to what Richard Nixon faced when he decided to resign to avoid prosecution.

Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh was closing in fast on Bush and Reagan, and Bush’s private records, subpoenaed by the independent counsel’s office, were the key to it all.

Walsh had been appointed independent counsel in 1986 to investigate the Iran-Contra activities of the Reagan administration and determine if crimes had been committed.

Was the criminal Iran-Contra conspiracy limited, as Reagan and Bush insisted (and Reagan said on TV), to later years in the Reagan presidency, in response to an obscure hostage-taking in Lebanon?

Or had it started in the 1980 presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter with treasonous collusion with the Iranians, as the then-president of Iran asserted? Who knew what, and when? And what was George H.W. Bush’s role in it all?

In the years since then, the President of Iran in 1980, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, has gone on the record saying that the Reagan campaign reached out to Iran to hold the hostages in exchange for weapons.

“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan,” President Bani-Sadr told the Christian Science Monitor in 2013, “had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”

That wouldn’t have been just an impeachable and imprisionable crime: it was every bit as much treason as when Richard Nixon blew up LBJ’s 1968 peace talks with North and South Vietnam to win that November’s election against Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Walsh had zeroed in on documents that were in the possession of Reagan’s former defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, who all the evidence showed was definitely in on the deal, and President Bush’s diary that could corroborate it.

Elliott Abrams had already been convicted of withholding evidence about it from Congress, and he may have even more information, too, if it could be pried out of him before he went to prison. But Abrams was keeping mum, apparently anticipating a pardon.

This was the moment the “old GOP” was at the height of its power and prestige, and Bush and Barr weren’t about to let it be exposed for the criminal enterprise that the “party of Lincoln” had become.

Weinberger, trying to avoid jail himself, was preparing to testify that Bush knew about the deal to hold the hostages and even participated in it, and Walsh had already, based on information he’d obtained from the investigation into Weinberger, demanded that Bush turn over his diary from the campaign. He was also again hot on the trail of Abrams.

So Bush called in his attorney general, Bill Barr — the respectable scion of the “old GOP” — and asked his advice.

At that point Barr, along with Bush, was already up to his eyeballs in cover-ups of other shady behavior by the Reagan administration.

Safire had started referring to Barr as “Coverup-General” in the midst of another scandal — Bush illegally selling weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein — because the Attorney General was already covering up for Bush, Weinberger, and others in the Reagan administration with a scandal the newspapers called “Iraqgate.”

Ironically, that illegal sale of weapons to Saddam Hussein in the late 1980s and early 1990s was cited by George W. Bush, Bush’s son, as part of his justification for illegally invading Iraq in 2003.

On October 19, 1992, Safire wrote in The New York Times of Barr’s unwillingness to appoint an independent counsel to look into Iraqgate:

“Why does the Coverup-General resist independent investigation? Because he knows where it may lead: to Dick Thornburgh, James Baker, Clayton Yeutter, Brent Scowcroft and himself [the people who organized the sale of WMD to Saddam]. He vainly hopes to be able to head it off, or at least be able to use the threat of firing to negotiate a deal.”

Now, just short of two months later, Bush was asking Barr for advice on how to avoid another very serious charge in the Iran-Contra crimes they committed to defeat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. How, he wanted to know, could they shut down Walsh’s investigation before Walsh’s lawyers got their hands on Bush’s diary?

In April of 2001, safely distant from the swirl of D.C. politics, the University of Virginia’s Miller Center was compiling oral presidential histories, and interviewed Barr about his time as AG in the Bush White House. They brought up the issue of the Weinberger pardon, which put an end to the Iran-Contra investigation, and Barr’s involvement in it.

Turns out, Barr was right in the middle of it.

“There were some people arguing just for [a pardon for] Weinberger, and I said, ‘No, in for a penny, in for a pound,’” Barr told the interviewer. “I went over and told the President I thought he should not only pardon Caspar Weinberger, but while he was at it, he should pardon about five others.”

Which is exactly what Bush did, on Christmas Eve when most Americans were with family instead of watching the news. The holiday notwithstanding, the result was explosive.

America knew that both Reagan and Bush were up to their necks in the Iran-Contra hostages-for-weapons scandal, and Democrats had been talking about treason, impeachment, or worse.

The independent counsel had already obtained one conviction, three guilty pleas, and two other individuals were lined up for prosecution in the case that lost Jimmy Carter the White House. And Walsh was closing in fast on Bush himself.

The second paragraph of the Times story by David Johnston laid it out:

“Mr. Weinberger was scheduled to stand trial on Jan. 5 on charges that he lied to Congress about his knowledge of the arms sales to Iran and efforts by other countries to help underwrite the Nicaraguan rebels, a case that was expected to focus on Mr. Weinberger’s private notes that contain references to Mr. Bush’s endorsement of the secret shipments to Iran.” (emphasis added)

History shows that when a Republican president is in serious legal trouble, the “old GOP’s” go-to guy was Bill Barr.

For William Safire, Iran-Contra was déjà vu all over again. Four months earlier, referring to Iraqgate (Bush’s criminally selling WMDs to Iraq), Safire opened his article, titled “Justice [Department] Corrupts Justice,” by writing:

“U.S. Attorney General William Barr, in rejecting the House Judiciary Committee’s call for a prosecutor not beholden to the Bush Administration to investigate the crimes of Iraqgate, has taken personal charge of the cover-up.”

Safire accused Barr of not only rigging the cover-up, but of being one of the criminals who could be prosecuted.

“Mr. Barr,” wrote Safire in The New York Times in August of 1992, “...could face prosecution if it turns out that high Bush officials knew about Saddam Hussein’s perversion of our Agriculture export guarantees to finance his war machine.”

He added:

“They [Barr and colleagues] have a keen personal and political interest in seeing to it that the Department of Justice stays in safe, controllable Republican hands.”

Earlier in Bush’s administration, Barr had succeeded in blocking the appointment of an investigator or independent counsel to look into Iraqgate, as Safire repeatedly documented in the Times.

In December, Barr helped Bush block indictments from another independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, and eliminated any risk that Reagan or George H.W. Bush would be held to account for Iran-Contra.

Walsh, wrote Johnston for the Times on Christmas Eve, “plans to review a campaign diary kept by Mr. Bush.” The diary would be the smoking gun that would nail Bush to the scandal.

“But,” noted the Times, “in a single stroke, Mr. Bush [at Barr’s suggestion] swept away one conviction, three guilty pleas and two pending cases, virtually decapitating what was left of Mr. Walsh’s effort, which began in 1986.”

And Walsh didn’t take it lying down. The Times report noted that:

“Mr. Walsh bitterly condemned the President’s action, charging that ‘the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.’”

Independent Counsel Walsh added that the diary and notes he wanted to enter into a public trial of Weinberger represented:

“{E]vidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.”

The phrase “highest ranking” officials almost certainly included Reagan, Bush, and Barr himself.

“[F]orestalled impeachment proceedings against President Reagan” through a pattern of “deception and obstruction.”

Back in the 1990s, Barr successfully covered up the involvement of two Republican presidents — Reagan and Bush — in two separate and impeachable “high crimes,” one of them almost certainly treason committed just to win a presidential election.

And now we learn he apparently went so far as to cover up Trump’s involvement with Putin, leading to multiple opportunities for Trump to extort Ukraine and pass sensitive intelligence along to Russia.

Trump is proudly proclaiming that Barr’s old GOP is dead, replaced by the hateful, nativist MAGA movement. Old-school Republicans are wringing their hands, and some are even leaving the party.

But is the difference really that big?

The corrupt “old GOP” merely laid the foundation for today’s MAGA movement: in many ways Trump was the inevitable next step, after 50-plus years of catering to the morbidly rich while taking a meat-axe to voting rights and the rule of law.

Don’t be fooled: the crocodile tears of those like Bill Barr and the “ex-Republicans” who fill the cable airwaves daily longing for a return of their “Grand Old Party” are every bit the con of Iran-Contra, Bush v Gore, and Citizens United.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-and-barr-plan-actual-witch-hunt-targeting-key-players-in-the-mueller-probe/

no lnx

Trump and Barr plan actual witch hunt targeting key players in the Mueller probe

Written by Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos May 13, 2020

The federal judge handling the case of Michael Flynn took the unusual step Tuesday of allowing outside parties to argue against the Justice Department’s motion to drop its case against Trump’s former national security adviser.

Judge Emmet Sullivan now plans to set a schedule for hearing those arguments, the latest development in the continually unfolding saga of Attorney General William Barr’s efforts to entirely dismantle key elements of the Mueller probe, piece by piece. And although Barr has clearly abused his power as the nation’s top law enforcement officer to benefit Donald Trump’s friends and allies, it appears the worst is yet to come.

Barr has turned the Justice Department into nothing short of a political weapon. Once he finishes annihilating the Mueller probe that called into question the validity of Trump’s presidency from Day One, the next step could be targeting the key players in launching that probe.

That’s where former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi sees things heading. On MSNBC last week, Figliuzzi noted that Barr’s interference in the case of both Flynn and longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone was likely just the precursor to an effort to ultimately invalidate special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of the 26 Russian nationals who meddled in the 2016 U.S. elections, then turn the force of the law on Trump’s political enemies.

Among those enemies, first and foremost, are the people such as former CIA director John Brennan, fired FBI director James Comey, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, former national security adviser Susan Rice, former National Intelligence director James Clapper, and perhaps even former president Barack Obama and former vice president Joe Biden.

In recent weeks, Trump admitted to calling Russian President Vladimir Putin to gloat over the Flynn matter. Trump has also signaled several times that something big is in the pipeline. In the Rose Garden Monday, Trump labeled it “Obamagate” and called it “the biggest political crime in American history, by far.”

“Some terrible things happened, and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again,” he said. “And you’ll be seeing what’s going on over the next, over the coming weeks.”

Over the coming weeks, we may finally see the fruits of what the globetrotting Barr and his special investigator U.S. Attorney John Durham did during the third investigation into the origins of the Russia probe.

Whatever Barr has cooked up, expect it to be both exceedingly malevolent and gratifying to Trump, who has been nursing a gaping wound ever since both U.S. intelligence services and Mueller concluded Putin did indeed intervene in the 2016 elections to benefit Trump.

520 wa mon?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/bill-barrs-twisted-plot-to-use-the-doj-as-a-political-weapon-is-just-beginning/

no lnx

Bill Barr’s twisted plot to use the DOJ as a political weapon is just beginning

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly May 13, 2020

After the Trump administration stonewalled Congress on the release of any records or witnesses during the impeachment hearings, it is important to keep in mind that there is some material they are determined to make public.

Shortly after the attorney general assigned John Durham the task of investigating the Trump-Russia probe, the president announced that he had given Barr the authority to declassify any material pertaining to the investigation. That directive came the day before Trump accused FBI officials of treason and referred to Mueller’s investigators as “killers.”

Normally, it would be the director of national intelligence who would determine whether to release classified information. So before Barr could proceed, the administration needed to get rid of Dan Coates, who hadn’t demonstrated sufficient loyalty to Trump. With the president’s lackey, Richard Grenell, installed as acting DNI, the declassification process is now underway.

Last Thursday, Grenell released the transcripts of classified testimony before the House Intelligence Committee during their investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. That was the same day that the Department of Justice announced that they were dropping the charges against Michael Flynn. Thursday was a busy day. It is also when Grenell delivered a “satchel” of documents to Barr at the Department of Justice. ABC News is now reporting that they contain the names of “former Obama administration officials who were allegedly involved in the so-called ‘unmasking’ of former national security adviser Michael Flynn in his conversations with the former Russian ambassador during the presidential transition.” According to Fox News, Barr plans to release the names as early as Tuesday.

What we can expect from this news is a renewal of the attacks on Obama’s national security advisor Susan Rice. If you remember, back in March of 2017, shortly after Trump tweeted that the Obama administration had his “wires tapped at Trump Tower,” Devin Nunes went to the White House for a clandestine meeting after which, he held a press conference saying that he had seen intelligence reports that indicated Trump and his associates were included in electronic surveillance.

As it turned out, what he had seen were reports on electronic surveillance of foreign adversaries in which the names of Trump campaign staff had been “unmasked.” Soon all of the attention about that unmasking turned into attacks on Rice. But when the materials Nunes had seen at the White House were shared with members of the House Intelligence Committee, this is what CNN reported.

After a review of the same intelligence reports brought to light by House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers and aides have so far found no evidence that Obama administration officials did anything unusual or illegal, multiple sources in both parties tell CNN.

Their private assessment contradicts President Donald Trump’s allegations that former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice broke the law by requesting the “unmasking” of US individuals’ identities. Trump had claimed the matter was a “massive story.”…

One congressional intelligence source described the requests made by Rice as “normal and appropriate” for officials who serve in that role to the president.

What is about to happen is the same thing I reported on Monday about what right-wing news outlets did with Rice’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. Grenell and Barr are selectively leaking information (often with contradictory evidence redacted) that allows Trump’s enablers to cherry-pick statements to lie about the events surrounding the Russia probe and create what they’re calling the “Obamagate” narrative. These particular releases are a coordinated attempt to exonerate Michael Flynn and attack anyone who played a role in his prosecution.

If any of this sounds similar to what Barr did in the days before he released the Mueller report, it is probably because that is exactly what he is doing. He is twisting evidence to lay the groundwork for his coming actions with regard to the Durham investigation.

Back in May 2016, Benjamin Wittes warned us about all of this when he wrote about the fact that the least tyrant-proof part of the government is the Department of Justice. To demonstrate, he quoted Justice Robert Jackson.

If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his case, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm—in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.

With an assist from Grenell, that is exactly the sword that Barr is wielding in an attempt to exonerate Trump and smear the previous administration. The attorney general is using the Department of Justice to create a hall of mirrors and, as Peter Wehner suggested, asking us to live within Trump’s lies.

Those who have worked for the Department of Justice under both Republican and Democratic presidents are sounding the alarm. For example, Mary McCord, who served as acting assistant attorney general for national security at the Justice Department wrote a piece for the New York Times titled, “Bill Barr Twisted My Words in Dropping the Flynn Case. Here’s the Truth.” Former federal prosecutor Chuck Rosenberg shot down one of Barr’s lies by documenting “The long list of people who thought Flynn’s lies were material.” Jonathan Kravis, the federal prosecutor who resigned over Barr’s intervention in the sentencing of Roger Stone, wrote:

In both cases [Stone and Flynn], the department undercut the work of career employees to protect an ally of the president, an abdication of the commitment to equal justice under the law. Prosecutors must make decisions based on facts and law, not on the defendant’s political connections. When the department takes steps that it would never take in any other case to protect an ally of the president, it betrays this principle.

Indeed, the department chose to assign these matters to a special counsel precisely to avoid the appearance of political influence. For the attorney general now to directly intervene to benefit the president’s associates makes this betrayal of the rule of law even more egregious.

That betrayal of the rule of law is why over 2,000 Justice Department alumni (including our own Julie Zebrak) have signed a statement calling on Congress to hold Barr accountable.

My two cents on the matter would be that we are still in the early stages of how Barr and Grenell are planning to betray the rule of law. They’ll be dropping a bucket-load of twisted lies in the coming months.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/former-doj-ag-barr-took-my-words-out-of-context-to-justify-dropping-the-case-against-michael-flynn/

5/20

omfg

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/on-putins-payroll-what-the-corrupt-move-to-drop-the-case-against-michael-flynn-really-means

dcj dc reptr

In a major step toward establishing a Trump dictatorship, the Justice Department moved Thursday to drop the criminal case against confessed felon Michael Flynn, the retired Army general and secret foreign agent who was Trump’s first national security adviser.

Instead of seeking equal justice under law, an extraordinary court filing demonstrated that Trump has one standard of justice for his enemies and an entirely different one for his allies. The court action shows how fully Trump has turned our Justice Department into his personal protection agency.

The 108-page court filing is rife with falsehoods and tortured interpretations of established facts, a mendacious necessity since Flynn twice confessed to multiple crimes under oath in open court. It argues that the lies Flynn told FBI agents were not “material” to the case against him. The trial court judge has already dismissed that as nonsense.

Flynn was secretly a well-paid agent of foreign interests while serving as Trump’s national security adviser.

It also argues that there was no legitimate reason ever existed to investigate Flynn, an astonishing claim since Flynn was secretly a well-paid agent of foreign interests while serving as Trump’s national security adviser. The claim is all the more remarkable because it is made by an ostensibly Republican administration after decades of Republican clamor about Russian spies and influence peddling.

Based on all this and more we can now reasonably refer to Trump’sInjustice Department.

Trump could have pardoned Flynn. “He was an innocent man,“. “I’m very happy for General Flynn.”

But a pardon would not have allowed Trump to mark his territory, signaling to any who dare challenge his assertions that he is above the law.

From President to Dictator

By demonstrating unfettered control over our Justice Department, Trump has achieved a critical step required for a transition from a president with limited authority to de facto dictator.

The motion to drop the Flynn case fits Trump’s fact-free declaration last summer that “I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.”

Our Constitution allows no such thing. You might think that Trump, who has been saying since 1987 that he should be president, would have read Article II, which is only 1,023 words. But either Trump never read Article II or he doesn’t care about the limits it places on him including the requirement that he “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Attorney General William Barr—better and properly called Attorney Specific to Trump—lacks unilateral power to dismiss the case against Flynn. Dismissal requires court approval under Rule 48(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.

Admitted His Crimes

Eminent lawyers stood beside Flynn when he confessed twice in open court to felonies. He allocated to crimes for which charges were dropped in a plea deal. Given this robust record of criminality, the Injustice Department’s action raises obvious questions:

Will Republican senators, notably lawyers Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Lamar Alexander and Ted Cruz, at long last stand up for the rule of law or continue as moral jellyfish – blind, spineless and floating aimlessly in the waves of chaos and corruption flowing from the Trump White House?
Will Speaker Nancy Pelosi authorize House investigative hearings into Trump violating his oath to “faithfully execute” the duties of his office and endangering our national security?
If Trump persists with his refusal to cooperate with all House investigations, will Pelosi exercise the House’s Constitutional power to arrest recalcitrant witnesses, including Barr, and if appropriate to try them and upon conviction incarcerate them for contempt of Congress and other crimes?
Will Joe Biden pledge that if elected his Justice Department will fully pursue the Russian connections to Trump and his campaign until we find out why Team Trump has worked so diligently to hide the truth?

Justice Department Turmoil

The extraordinary court filing follows what must have been a ferocious, months-long fight inside Barr’s Injustice Department because some career prosecutors resignedfrom the case earlier to avoid sullying their reputations.

The Thursday motion was signed only by Timothy Shea, a Barr protégé installed three months ago as acting United States Attorney for the District of Columbia.

Missing from the latest court papers were the signatures of Jocelyn Ballentine, an assistant prosecutor, and Brandon Van Grack, a veteran espionage case prosecutor. Van Grack resigned from the case in a one-sentence filing just moments before the motion to dismiss was submitted to Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of U.S. District Court.

Judge Sullivan can order Justice and its lawyers to explain these unusual actions. He could refuse to allow the case to be dropped or allow it, but with leave to refile the charges in the future. That would make Flynn vulnerable if Trump does not get a second term.

On Putin’s Payroll

Flynn and his company were on Putin’s payroll and worked for Turkish interests with deep ties to the Kremlin. Flynn was paid at least $680,000, some of which he lied about. At the time he was the president elect’s designated national security adviser.

After the allocation, Judge Sullivan told Flynn “arguably you sold out your country.” (Trump, on Thursday, called Flynn “a hero.”)

“All along, you were an unregistered agent of a foreign country while serving as the national security advisor to the president of the United States,” Sullivan told Flynn. “That undermines everything this flag over here stands for,” Sullivan said.

“This is a very serious offense… A high ranking senior official of the government making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation while in the White House, very serious crime.”

That the Trump administration would shield a secret foreign agent who was the White House intelligence chief shows how important it is to Trump that he keep Flynn in his fold. Flynn made himself susceptible to blackmail by taking Russian money and lying about it, but it is not known if Flynn engaged in unquestionably traitorous conduct.

More Kremlin Connections

The Flynn case has its roots in Russian interference to help Trump win the 2016 election. So do other allies. Among these are the felony prosecutions of Roger Stone, Trump’s dirty tricks specialist, and campaign Manager Paul Manafort, a longtime foreign agent for dictators and Russian-speaking criminals and politicians.

Trump denies the Russians helped him become president. But America’s intelligence agencies, the bi-partisan chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the 418-page Mueller report and emails from none other than Donald Trump Jr. all make clear the Kremlin helped Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. The only issue on which the facts are not complete was whether Trump was a passive beneficiary or he knowingly worked with the Kremlin, whether obliquely or hand-in-glove.

The president’s eldest son was told in writing in June 2016 that the Kremlin wanted to help his father become president. Trump Jr. replied enthusiastically “love it” and then met at Trump Tower with Kremlin agents. The son then lied and denied, telling both Fox News and ABC News that no such contact took place. More than a year later, as The New York Times was about to expose these lies, the namesake son released the damning emails.

Economic Collapse and Riots

Trump has openly talked six times about being president for life.When criticized for such assaults on American Constitutional principles, Trump lamely claimed he was joking. He also said last June that he anticipates that after completing the maximum of two terms his supporters will “demand that I stay longer.”

Trump campaigned on a promise to destroy our government, an issue that has disappeared from the news after getting almost no attention during his campaign.

‘Country Goes to Total Hell’

That promise came after Trump told Fox News in 2014 how to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. “When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell, and everything is a disaster… you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great,” he said.

On Wednesday, as the pandemic death toll surpassed 75,000 Americans he renewed his demand that the law be made history. Repeal would leave at least 20 million Americans with no health insurance.

Just weeks after assuming office Trump held an unannounced meeting in the Oval Office with Russia’s foreign minister and Russian ambassador and a “photographer” for the Kremlin-owned Tass news agency. The Russians revealed the meeting. They also disclosed that Trump gave them “sources and methods” intelligence, which is closely guarded to protect human and technological assets.

Trump Places Trust in Putin

In 2018 in Helsinki Trump declared that he trusts Putin fully, but not America’s intelligence agencies.

Trump has met alone with Putin and Putin subordinates through his presidency. He ripped up the notes of his translator after one meeting, a crime under federal law. He met alone with Putin for at least one lengthy conversation using Putin’s interpreter.

These actions demonstrate Trump’s disloyalty and unfitness to be president, yet Senate Republicans refused to hear testimony after the House impeached him last year. Senate Republicans then voted twice not to convict except for one vote by the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, now the junior senator from Utah.

This latest abuse of power to protect a criminal crony who was on Vladimir Putin’s payroll and a secret foreign agent is more than an impeachable offense. Trump, Barr and Shea also sent a clear message: Team Trump harbors no regard for the rule of law, the foundation of our liberties and democratic freedoms.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/a-senate-committee-dropped-a-bombshell-on-bill-barr-and-the-right-wings-favorite-russia-probe-conspiracy-theories

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/it-sure-looks-like-bill-barr-gave-trump-the-absurd-idea-he-has-total-authority-to-force-states-to-reopen/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/top-democrats-call-on-justice-department-watchdog-to-investigate-bill-barr

420 slander atkinson

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/bill-barr-pressed-australian-officials-for-dirt-on-mueller-probe-while-doj-was-assisting-in-hostage-negotiations-report/

no lnx

Bill Barr pressed Australian officials for dirt on Mueller probe while DOJ was assisting in hostage negotiations: report

Fox News

Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story April 15, 2020

According to a report at the Daily Beast, Attorney General William Barr pressed officials in Australia for information on William Mueller’s Russia investigation at the same time members of his Justice Department were assisting the Australians with hostage negotiations with Tehran.

In the exclusive report from Erin Banco and Lachlan Cartwright, they reveal that the conversations took place back in September before House Democrats sent articles on impeachment to the GOP-controlled Senate related to Donald Trump quid pro quo dealings with Ukraine while searching for dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden.

According to the report, “In a series of conversations last September, senior Department of Justice officials worked with representatives of the Australian government to hammer out an arrangement to win the release of a pair of Australian bloggers imprisoned in Tehran,” at the same time Barr was making inquiries about the genesis of Robert Mueller’s investigation into the president’s ties to Russia at the time of the 2016 election.

“Barr, like his boss, President Donald Trump, had long had a view of the Russia probe that bordered on hostile, and his review has been widely seen as an attempt to discredit the Mueller investigation, which led to the indictment of multiple Trumpworld associates. Just days before the culmination of talks in September—which coincided with an official Australian state visit—Trump himself pushed Prime Minister Scott Morrison to help Barr with this inquiry,” the report states. “Barr followed up about the Mueller re-investigation, two U.S. officials and a third individual familiar with the matter told The Daily Beast, even as American and Australian officials finalized their arrangement to try to free the pair jailed in Iran. According to four sources—including those two U.S. officials and one former U.S. official—the American government agreed to help facilitate the release of the Australian bloggers, in part by agreeing to pull back from pursuing the extradition of an Iranian scientist held in Australia.”

The report continues, “The discussions between Washington and Canberra raise questions about why the Department of Justice engaged in a behind-the-scenes effort to help win the release of Australian hostages from Iran and whether the president’s request to have the country assist in Barr’s Russia inquiry influenced the department’s decision-making.”

According to Claire Finkelstein, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, “This story suggests that the president is continuing to use the authority of his office to pressure foreign leaders into assisting him in covering up Russia’s assistance with his 2016 victory. This is the same conduct for which Trump was impeached, and the reporting suggests that he is undeterred.”

She added, “If the administration engaged in this swap as part of a deal with the Australian government in which it would support Trump’s counter-narrative to the Mueller Report, then department officials are actively using U.S. diplomacy to undermine our U.S. national security interests.”

You can read more here.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-the-real-reason-bill-barr-has-re-emerged-to-give-us-a-double-dose-of-crazy/

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Here’s the real reason Bill Barr has re-emerged to give us a double dose of crazy

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon April 10, 2020

New White House chief of staff Mark Meadows announced this week that onetime Trump campaign spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany will become the White House press secretary. The campaign is looking for a replacement and it seems that Attorney General William Barr may be auditioning for the role. Judging from his two-night interview with Laura Ingraham, he is as enthusiastic about the boss as one of the famed Mar-a-Lago Trumpettes.

We hadn’t heard much from Barr since he was scathingly chastised by a federal judge last month for his “lack of candor” in public descriptions of the Mueller report, saying that Barr had “distorted the findings” of the April 2019 report in his notorious press conference and a letter to lawmakers. The judge demanded a full copy of the Mueller report to review in order to decide whether to reveal the entire document, without redactions.

It’s not every day that the attorney general of the United States is personally castigated by a federal judge. But it was obviously too much to hope that Barr had taken his criticism to heart and had decided to play it straight. His return to the spotlight this week showed that while he may not have contracted the coronavirus, his Fox News brain rot is still raging out of control.

Ingraham has two main hobbyhorses at the moment. She believes that the response to the virus is an attack on civil liberties and that the quick cure for the disease is Dr. Trump’s magic elixir, hydroxychloroquine. She also believes that anyone who disagrees with this is part of a plot to take down her beloved president. So it was within that framework that Barr gave his interview, and he did not disappoint.

Under intense questioning about whether freedom of religion was being infringed by the shutdown, he managed to say that public health measures are acceptable for a short period and then went on to parrot Trump’s maxim that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease,” and even suggesting that more people will die of cancer because researchers are unable to continue their work during the shutdown. He made it clear that he thinks the government should be opened sooner rather than later:

I think we have to be very careful to make sure this is — you know, that the draconian measures that are being adopted are fully justified, and there are not alternative ways of protecting people. And I think, you know, when this — when this period of time is — at the end of April expires, I think we have to allow people to adapt more than we have and not just tell people to go home and hide under the bed,

The “adaptations” he had in mind were unclear, recommending vague “protocols” for restaurants and throwing around terms like “PPE” as if he were the head epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health.For all his alleged concern with civil liberties he seemed to indicate that he thinks restrictions on travel would be a positive consequence of this crisis. At least that’s what it sounded like, since he talked about stricter border laws being a good way to prevent pandemics. After all, viruses don’t recognize citizenship or nationality. If you can’t let people come in, in an attempt to protect yourself from infection, you can’t let people out either. Otherwise, they might bring it back.

It was obvious that Barr has been spending a lot of time watching Fox News. Unprompted, he let loose with a hydroxychloroquine rant worthy of Sean Hannity himself:

Acyn Torabi

@Acyn

Barr says he’s disappointed about partisanship during the pandemic because the President has acted statesmanlike and worked with all the governors while dealing with gotcha questions from the media.He goes on to accuse the media of leading a jihad against Hydroxychloroquine

Embedded video

Barr apparently missed this exchange on his favorite channel the other day in which Dr. William Haseltine, a renowned biologist and retired Harvard professor, took Fox News host Dana Perino to task for pushing this drug with little evidence to back it up.

Lis Power

@LisPower1

Fox anchor: Can you tell me your thoughts on the drug that is used normally to treat malaria.

Dr. Haseltine: It's sad to me that people are promoting that drug.

Anchor: But what about the anecdotal evidence?

Haseltine: That's complete and utter nonsense. Irresponsible.

Embedded video

The blowback over this alleged miracle cure being relentlessly touted by Trump and his friends at Fox News isn’t coming from the press or the Democrats. It’s coming from the medical community, which is appalled that the president of the United States would use his platform to push unproven drugs based on the recommendation of TV quacks and his own “feelings.”

I guess everyone’s an armchair epidemiologist these days, but the Fox News coronavirus coverage is actually dangerous. The fact that the president and the attorney general consider their blather as a basis for policymaking is kind of terrifying.

But Barr did make some more serious news when he went on a tirade about the Russia investigation. Last December, when the inspector general of the Justice Department released his report that took the FBI to task for its FISA process in pursuing a onetime Trump campaign adviser, Barr declared it would be a travesty “to spy on political opponents, but also to use them in a way that could affect the outcome of the election.” He said he would withhold his judgment until the “investigation of the investigation” by special counsel John Durham was complete.

Durham has filed no report, but Barr’s not waiting any longer to say what’s on his mind. He told Ingraham that “what happened to [Trump] was one of the greatest travesties in American history. Without any basis, they started this investigation of his campaign, and even more concerning actually is what happened after the campaign — a whole pattern of events while he was president … to sabotage the presidency — or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency.”

That directly contradicts his own inspector general’s conclusions. And it comes with a serious threat:

Praying Medic

@prayingmedic

AG Barr on Durham investigation:

"We're going to get to the bottom of it. And if people broke the law & we can establish that with the evidence, they will be prosecuted."

Embedded video

There’s a reason Barr came out of his bunker now. Times are tough, people are getting nervous and the Trumpian base needs some inspiration. What could be better than some sweet, sweet revenge?

As the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake points out, this should come as no surprise. Before Barr was even a gleam in Trump’s eye, he wrote a long unsolicited memo to the White House explaining that he didn’t believe the Russia investigation was justified. He even told a reporter later that the predicate for pursuing the supposed scandal around Hillary Clinton and Uranium One was far stronger than that for the Russia probe.

His mind was made up about this long before he became attorney general. It’s why he was hired as Donald Trump’s main legal henchman in the first place.

durham rept?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/bill-bar-makes-it-clear-that-the-durham-investigation-is-a-sham/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/zero-credibility-legal-experts-blast-bill-barr-for-espousing-political-conspiracy-theories-in-the-midst-of-global-pandemic/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/ag-barr-denounces-stay-at-home-orders-as-draconian-suggests-trump-should-reconsider-social-distancing-guidelines-at-end-of-the-month/

Federal judge rules Bill Barr can’t be trusted — and concludes he ‘distorted’ Mueller’s findings

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton ruled in a scathing decision…

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/william-barr-promotes-christian-tyranny-in-latest-speech/

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William Barr promotes Christian tyranny in latest speech

Written by Chrissy Stroop / Religion Dispatches February 29, 2020

I’ve said it before, and if you’re reading this, you’ve very likely heard the same thing darkly muttered among liberals and progressives if you haven’t said it yourself: I never thought anything could possibly make me miss Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. And yet, with his willingness to throw away our norms, checks, and balances, to politicize the Justice Department, to sacrifice the rule of law itself on the altar of Trump—current Attorney General William Barr has done it. As authoritarian as he was, invoking Romans 13 to defend the Trump administration’s indefensibly inhumane policy of caging children separated from their asylum-seeking parents, Sessions had at least enough genuine concern for the rule of law to recuse himself from the Mueller investigation, against the tweeter-in-chief’s explicit wishes.

In other ways, however, Sessions and Barr are clearly cut from the same cloth.Sessions, a Methodist, has asserted that without belief in God it is impossible to believe in truth, suggesting that non-believers are unfit to serve in government. In recent months, Barr, a Catholic, has expounded the same views much more forcefully and at much greater length, including in a speech he delivered Wednesday at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville. NRB is an international evangelical organization whose board members include John Fuller of far-right powerhouse Focus on the Family and Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association, a Southern Poverty Law Center designated anti-LGBT hate group.

Featuring predictable dog whistles about “federalism” (i.e., “states’ rights”) and “the corporate—or ‘mainstream’—press,” Barr’s speech to NRB was divided into sections focusing on “religion, the decentralization of government power, and the free press,” all of which, Barr claims, have “have eroded in recent decades.” But today I’ll focus largely on Barr’s view of religion and its ideal place in society and the public sphere.

Barr’s exposition weaves together a variety of reactionary tropes, many of which have roots in the nineteenth century. (While it would be impossible to tease them apart and trace their relationships and genealogies in a short commentary, for those interested in an academic unpacking of Barr’s rhetoric, “The Russian Origins of the So-Called Post-Secular Moment: Some Preliminary Observations,” which I wrote for State, Religion and Church, will provide a helpful overview.)

The attorney general’s speech was likewise full of so many tensions, contradictions, and weak arguments that it resembles the “Gish gallop” style of debate, making it difficult to believe that they were all offered in good faith. In typical Christian nationalist form, Barr quoted American Founding Father John Adams: “We have no government armed with the power which is capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

Asked to comment, Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Andrew Seidel, author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American, maintained, “Barr is misreading Adams.” To substantiate the point, he observed, “Adams, like the other founders, thought religion and morality were two separate entities; Barr thinks they are one and the same. The founders thought religion could be a substitute for morality. We now know that they were wrong on this point.”

What Seidel means here, as he details in his book, is that as Enlightenment elites, the Founding Fathers believed that they were educated and cultivated enough to be moral without religion, but that the masses were too uncultivated to do the same. The masses would therefore require religion. Seidel maintains that the founders were wrong on this point, and we can admit as much while still admiring their positive achievements.

Seidel adds, “If the founders believed that religion was important to ensure moral behavior for the masses but not for themselves, that means that the founders were moral without religion. It also means they founded the American government on their own morality, not religion,” concluding that “Barr is inadvertently refuting his entire argument by trying to co-opt Adams.”

Seidel’s work can also help us see that Barr is twisting Tocqueville in his attempt to marshal the nineteenth-century French observer of American democracy in support of his view that moral behavior is impossible without religion. A claim, by the way, that is entirely fact-free.

And Seidel is certainly correct that Sessions and Barr go much further than the Founding Fathers in claiming, as Barr did in his NRB speech, that moral values “must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.” Despite Barr’s whiggish praise of “the Anglo-American political system” and his espoused disdain for Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, his views on the necessity of an external, transcendent source of morals in order for humans to achieve virtue is much more prominent in Continental European thought than in the English-speaking world.

But Barr is a smooth gaslighter, and he represents his argument for theocratic authoritarianism as a defense of “liberal democracy.” Barr’s European (and sometimes American) antecedents were often more honest, admitting that they viewed liberal democracy, due to its supposed godlessness and concomitant lack of truth, as a failure that would have to be replaced with either “totalitarianism” (the “ersatz religions” of fascism or Communism) or “a religious society.”

Indeed, Barr’s claim that “the right way to transform the world is for each of us to focus on morally transforming ourselves” is almost a direct quote from the early twentieth-century anti-Communist Nikolai (Nicholas) Berdyaev, who might well have influenced the attorney general, if not directly, then through Berdyaev’s profound influence on late Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom he cites. While Solzhenitsyn’s bravery in exposing the brutal Soviet GULAG system of prison camps should never be forgotten, Solzhenitsyn was no fan of the West.

In 1978, he gave a famous speech lambasting the West’s supposed decline in terms that would surely be congenial to Sessions and Barr. And later Solzhenitsyn, who had been expelled from the USSR, voted with his feet, accepting Russian citizenship from Vladimir Putin’s government and returning to his homeland, pleased with the way that Christian nationalist authoritarianism had replaced Communism as the Russian state’s guiding ideology. The closeness of Putinist Russians and American right-wingers that has come to light in recent years should not surprise us. But we should be very clear that what both parties want is neither democracy nor pluralism, however much Barr may claim to support both.

Barr claims he supports separation of church and state, but the claim is clearly disingenuous: “While most everyone agrees that we must have separation of Church and State, this does not require that we drive religion from the public square and affirmatively use government power to promote a culture of disbelief.” The tell here is that the attorney general conflates the idea of a religiously neutral public square with “using government power to promote a culture of disbelief.” The notion that there’s no religious neutrality, and that therefore,if public institutions are not promoting religion, they are promoting secular humanist ideology by default, is a hallmark of dominionist Christian thinking. His NRB audience would have no trouble getting the message.

Like authoritarians, narcissists, and abusers of all kinds, Christian extremists seek to paint themselves as victims,and Barr’s speech is a prime example of this powerful rhetorical tactic. In it, the attorney general blames supposedly nefarious secularists for the contentious state of American politics when, in fact, data shows us that precisely the opposite is true—America’s polarization has been driven by our radicalized, mostly Christian, Right.

Trump’s toady of an attorney general may wax poetic about his fear of the potential tyranny of a secular majority, but he is transparently trying to promote Christian tyranny, only in the guise of “liberal democracy.” It doesn’t take much digging beneath the surface to see that Barr’s authoritarian approach to religion derives from a very dark view of human nature. Authentic supporters of democracy, by contrast, understand that despite our human limitations—which are quite real but not nearly so severe as those posited by the toxic doctrine of “original sin”—it’s possible to build a society around a shared social contract grounded in the simple recognition of our shared human condition, and on that basis to foster functional institutions and a healthy respect for pluralism.

ref

https://www.academia.edu/5949640/The_Russian_Origins_of_the_So-Called_Post-Secular_Moment_Some_Preliminary_Observations

The Russian Origins of the So-CalledPost-Secular Moment: Some PreliminaryObservations

Christopher Stroop

—

Senior Lecturer at the Russian Presidential

Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (Moscow,

Russia). cstroop@gmail.com

This piece argues that there are a number of paths through which we might investigate Russian connections to the emergence of post-secularism, with the collapse of the

USSR

and the post-Soviet revival

of Russian Orthodoxy representing only the most obvious. A thus far less developed but important approach involves unravelingan intellectual-historical trajectory by focusing on the influenceof anti-Bolshevik Russian religious philosophers in the West. The

article shows that after the founding of the Soviet Union, the anti-Bolshevik Russian emigration emerged as a signi?cant vehicle forthe transmission of Russian ideas in the West, contributing to thedevelopment of an anti-secular discourse with roots in the 20?th

century that was able to achieve some prominence thanks to theCold War. This discourse associated religiosity with freedom andatheism with unfreedom. Stroop argues that this discourse, in thedevelopment of which Russian intellectuals played an important role, emerged in reaction against the perceived cultural threat of

nihilism, and he suggests that it is a similar concern over the possible

consequences of nihilism that has led to the emergence of the post-secular moment.

Keywords:

religious, secular, post-secularism, nihilism, atheism,

Communism, Russian Orthodoxy, Russian religious philosophy, Russia

and the West, Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Lev Shestov, Russian emigration, Cold War, anti-secular discourse...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/ag-barr-and-betsy-devos-rail-against-secularism-and-a-culture-of-disbelief-at-religious-broadcasters-convention/

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AG Barr and Betsy DeVos rail against secularism and a ‘culture of disbelief’ at religious broadcasters convention

Written by Alex Henderson February 27, 2020

President Donald Trump views his alliance with the Christian right as essential to his 2020 campaign, and two Trump loyalists — Attorney General William Barr and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — were clearly pandering to religious conservatives this week during a speech at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention, which is being held in Nashville, Tennessee and continues through this Friday, February 28.

Barr’s speech was sponsored by the nonprofit group Save the Persecuted Christians, which is headed by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. — a far-right conspiracy theorist and Islamophobe who has claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to infiltrate the U.S. government and impose sharia law. Before Barr spoke at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention, Gaffney stressed that he was not sponsoring a panel that would be held later and feature attorney Asma Uddin (who he smeared as a “sharia supremacist”).

During his speech, Barr (who is a Catholic, not a Protestant evangelical) railed against secularism in the United States — telling the crowd, “While most everyone agrees that we must have separation of church and state, this does not require that we drive religion from the public square and affirmatively use government power to promote a culture of disbelief.”

Barr also made the tired claim that liberals and progressives want to encourage dependency on the government — even though, truth to be told, there is a difference between giving someone a hand up (as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren recommend) and giving someone a handout.

“The tacit goal of this project is to convert all of us into 25-year-olds living in the government’s basement,focusing our energies on obtaining a larger allowance rather than getting a job, and moving out and taking responsibility for ourselves,” Barr told the crowd.

DeVos (the sister of Blackwater mercenary Erik Prince) spoke at the convention earlier in the day and called for more government support for religious schools. Attorney Jay Sekulow, who was part of Trump’s defense team during his impeachment trial before the U.S. Senate, was scheduled to appear on the same panel as DeVos but had to cancel his appearance due to illness.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/this-is-a-nightmare-trump-accused-of-weaponizing-doj-with-new-task-force-for-stripping-citizenship/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/ag-barr-and-betsy-devos-rail-against-secularism-and-a-culture-of-disbelief-at-religious-broadcasters-convention/

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AG Barr and Betsy DeVos rail against secularism and a ‘culture of disbelief’ at religious broadcasters convention

Image via Screengrab.

Written by Alex Henderson February 27, 2020

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5 ways William Barr is turning America into a dictatorship: Robert Reich

Robert Reich / Robert Reich's BlogFebruary 26, 2020

William Barr was installed as Attorney General specifically to turn the Department of Justice into an arm of the Trump Coverup.

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attorneys are wondering if AG Barr was merely ‘nonsense posturing’ when he claimed Trump’s tweets made his job ‘impossible’

Alex HendersonFebruary 26, 2020

Attorney General William Barr recently complained that President Donald Trump makes it “impossible” for him to do his job when he tweets about cases that are still making their way…

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/bill-barr-has-thrown-doj-into-a-tailspin-and-prosecutors-have-felt-under-siege-for-months-report/

an 220

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/civil-libertarians-explain-why-lindsey-grahams-new-internet-bill-is-a-nightmare-that-would-empower-bill-barr/

Legal experts shocked as DOJ lawyers rebel against Barr’s new Roger Stone sentencing guidelines

Sarah K. Burris / Raw Story February 20, 2020

The new prosecutors in the Roger Stone case still seem to be ignoring the re-write of the sentencing memo, according to those watching the trial unfold.

barr using back channels to djt aids to get him to stop screwing up interference in doj by making it public (part of scam that if he breaks law openly he must not be breaking law?!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/federal-judges-postpone-emergency-meeting-on-barrs-political-interference-after-trump-tweets-at-them/

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Federal judges postpone emergency meeting on Barr’s political interference after Trump tweets at them

Written by David Edwards / Raw Story February 20, 2020

A group of judges have reportedly cancelled an emergency meeting on possible political corruption at the Justice Department after President Donald Trump tweeted about the event.

The Federal Judges Association was set to discuss political interference by Trump and Attorney General William Barr. According to CNN, a decision was made on Wednesday afternoon to postpone the meeting.

A spokesperson for the group did not offer an immediate explanation and did not say if a new meeting had been scheduled.

The cancellation came after the president addressed the meeting on Twitter.

I hope the Federal Judges Association will discuss the tremendous FISA Court abuse that has taken place with respect to the Mueller Investigation Scam, including the forging of documents and knowingly using the fake and totally discredited Dossier before the Court. Thank you!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 18, 2020

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Barr installs outside prosecutor to scrutinize Michael Flynn case

Jake Johnson / Common Dreams

Attorney General William Barr has reportedly installed an outside prosecutor to scrutinize the criminal case against President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Pence chief of staff rants wildly about anti-Trump conspiracy at DOJ — gets promptly shut down on CNN

Tom Boggioni / Raw Story

Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” with fill-in host Dana Bash, the chief of staff for Vice President Mike Pence argued the Justice Department is rife with officials who are biased against Donald Trump.

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Over 1,100 former DOJ officials demand Barr’s resignation in scathing letter

According to a report from the New York Times, over…

an220

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/plausible-deniability-experts-warn-on-barrs-carefully-staged-pr-pushback

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/the-roger-stone-debacle-is-a-true-crisis-and-the-house-must-force-bill-barr-to-testify/

an 220 vengeance

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/lindsey-graham-says-barr-has-process-for-biden-probe-russian-investigators-going-to-jail/

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/attorney-general-william-barr-again-slams-militant-secularists/

Attorney General William Barr appeared this week on SiriusXM’s The Catholic Channel,where he was interviewed by Cardinal Timothy Dolan and his co-host Father Dave Dwyer. Barr’s attack on “militant secularists,” whom he portrayed as enemies of religious freedom, echoed remarks he made in a now-notorious speech at Notre Dame in October, in which he exhorted his listeners to launch a “moral renaissance.”

America’s founders, Barr said this week, believed that religion was “essential to maintaining a free country” and that limited government could work only because people were religious. Barr claimed that he believes in the separation of church and state, but then launched into a diatribe against “militant secularists”:

But what permits a limited government and minimal command and control of the population and allow people to have freedom of choice in their lives, and trust in the people, is the fact that they are a people capable of disciplining themselves according to moral values. And I feel today religion is being driven out of the marketplace of ideas, and there is an organized, militant secular effort to drive religion out of our lives. To me, the problem today is not that religious people are trying to impose their views on nonreligious people, it’s the opposite. It’s that militant secularists are trying to impose their values on a religious people, and they’re not accommodating the freedom of religion of people of faith.

Given that the Trump administration is aggressively turning the religious right’s agenda into law and policy, and filling the federal judiciary with judges who embrace Barr’s right-wing ideology, it is beyond ridiculous for Barr to claim that religion is being “driven out of the marketplace of ideas.”

Religious-right activists are running federal agencies, being named to lifetime federal judgeships, and serving in Congress and state legislatures. They have built a vast political and cultural infrastructure of universities, law schools, radio and TV networks, and political organizations. They dominate the Republican Party and write its platform. Joining white evangelicals and Pentecostal Christians in Trump’s amen corner is an influential network of right-wing Catholics of which Barr is a part.

And they are in fact working hard and all too successfully to impose their views on people who disagree: they are trying to criminalize abortion and many forms of birth control. They continue to resist marriage equality and are plotting to get the Supreme Court to reverse that landmark ruling so that they can strip legal recognition and protection from same-sex couples and their families. They have prevailed upon the Trump administration to reverse, by decree, legal protections for transgender people.

In the name of religious freedom, the Trump administration and its religious-right allies are trying to dramatically undermine the separation of church and state and require state and federal governments to fund religious schools and nonprofit organizations. They have granted a waiver from federal prohibitions on religious discrimination to allow taxpayer-funded evangelical foster-care and adoption agencies to refuse to place children with Catholic, Jewish, or Muslim parents—or with anyone who doesn’t meet their narrow religious test.

Meanwhile, White House aide Paula White, along with the president’s supporters in Christian media, regularly portray the president as anointed by God and denounce his political opponents as embodiments of the demonic agenda of Satan.

link to rnc chair ronna? ~ bolton

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/heres-a-revealing-glimpse-of-bill-barrs-vision-for-the-future-of-law-enforcement/

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Here’s a revealing glimpse of Bill Barr’s vision for the future of law enforcement

Written by Filter January 27, 2020

by Rory Fleming

President Trump threw US Attorney General William Barr a big bone in the form of a January 22 executive order to establish a Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice. As Filter reported, the framing of this venture promises to undermine criminal justice reform.

AG Barr has been all over the news lately, complaining about the handful of reform-minded elected prosecutors working to incrementally decarcerate their jurisdictions.

Now, through the composition of his Commission, we are getting a clear look at the kind of law enforcement official Barr deems laudable.

Most of the 18 commissioners are rural white southern sheriffs or police chiefs, while a handful are heads of federal law enforcement agencies, like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). There’s David Bowdich, the FBI’s deputy director, whose bio notes that he “served as a SWAT Team operator and sniper.” The lawyers on the list include Commission Vice Chair Katharyn Sullivan, a senior official in Barr’s own office, whose resume includes presiding over a drug court.

The dominance of cops over prosecutors in the commission is inappropriate because cops are not decision-makers in terms of the bigger criminal justice picture. However, it’s informative to look at the prosecutors who are present, because Barr knows them personally, so it shines light on who he really likes.

Here are three of the commissioners whose records I find particularly telling.

Chesapeake City, Virginia Commonwealth’s Attorney Nancy Parr

Nancy Parr, the elected prosecutor of Chesapeake, Virginia, is the president-elect of the hopelessly out-of-touch National District Attorney Association, which champs fake forensic science in court and continues to argue that marijuana legalization will cause its underage use and use while driving to skyrocket. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t know Washington, as she was an honored speaker at a 2015 hearing on “America’s growing heroin epidemic,” held by the House Subcommittee On Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations.

There, Parr told the Congressional body that, “For the past 30 years as a prosecutor, I have learned a lot about distributing drugs, and I have learned about simply possessing drugs. There is a big difference.” Specifically, in her view, that difference is “Dealers should be incarcerated”—demonstrating her ignorance of the reality that people who sell and use drugs are commonly the same people. She also furthered the false and harmful stereotype that people who use drugs tend to be thieves.

Parr did say, “I also know that we all want to save lives,” but harm reductionists who help people stay safe while using drugs would immediately call her bluff.

In one of her cases, Parr obtained a felony drug possession conviction for a woman whose boyfriend called 911 after he found her unconscious on a motel room floor from what turned out to be a fentanyl overdose. Prosecutions like these cause people who use drugs together not to call for help, which leads to death.

When not working to persecute people who use drugs, Commonwealth’s Attorney Parr is doing things like waiting until members of Congress demand accountability to charge security guards for slaying unarmed, elderly Chinese immigrants for playing Pokémon Go. Or illegally registering homeless people as “habitual drunkards” to enable their incessant harassment by police.

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody

Just in case anyone still thought Trump was serious about rolling back the drug war after signing the First Step Act, consider the appointment of Commissioner Moody. As a former federal prosecutor who was individually praised by the Drug Enforcement Agency for her “excellence” (she’s also married to a DEA agent), Moody shares many of that agency’s regressive views.

After becoming Florida’s youngest criminal court judge, Westlaw Edge search results show that Moody convicted and sentenced a man for a burglary he pleaded guilty to in 2012, but without first checking if his plea was voluntary and competent. While the burglary was a part of a robbery spree and this count would not have likely affected his overall sentence, it raises professionalism issues and caused the Court of Appeal to reverse the decision.

Fitting with the trend that Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” defense really only works if the shooter is white and the victim is a person of color, Judge Moody also gave incorrect jury instructions that led to a conviction for manslaughter for Trevor Dooley—a Black man who shot a white man when the latter tried to grab his gun during a physical scuffle on a basketball court in 2010 (Dooley later won the right to a retrial, which has yet to happen). That decision is particularly notable when Moody has extremely close ties with the NRA.

Currently, as Florida’s Attorney General, Moody is using taxpayer dollars to protest letting recreational marijuana legalization go to a popular vote. She also recently opposed letting people with nonviolent felony convictions regain their right to vote, which almost 65 percent of Florida voters approved. And as if taking a cue from Breitbart, her office runs an official website dedicated to “Black-on-Black” crime.

Pinellas County, Florida Sheriff Bob Gualtieri

Another resident of the Sunshine State, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri is a far-right conservative who apparently moved to the South to self-actualize as another Joe Arpaio. The sheriff demonizes immigrants by cherry-picking rare stories of undocumented people committing sexual assault.

In 2018, Gualtieri refused to arrest a white man—described by a prominent civil rights lawyer as a “self-appointed cop wannabe”—after he shot and killed a Black man, in another example of the curiously differing applications of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law. When Reverend Al Sharpton came to town to talk to locals about that situation, Gualtieri told him to “go back to New York.” Gualtieri himself is from New York.

Sheriff Gualtieri is also known for posting mugshots on Twitter like they’re a badge of guilt?—even for children.

Ultimately, Gualtieri seems to want to treat America like a war zone, rather than a country that, like any other place on Earth, experiences some violent crime. Should we arm teachers? To the sheriff, the answer is a resounding yes.

This article was originally published by Filter, a magazine covering drug use, drug policy and human rights. Follow Filter on Facebook or Twitter.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/lev-parnas-is-afraid-of-bill-barr-he-should-be

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Lev Parnas is afraid of Bill Barr. He should be.

Written by Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute January 24, 2020

Lev Parnas recently told Rachel Maddow that he’s more afraid of Attorney General Bill Barr than he is of the mobbed-up foreign oligarchs he has betrayed. Barr, after all, can weaponize our prisons to punish Parnas.

“Am I scared?” he said. “Yes, because I think I’m more scared of our own Justice Department than these criminals right now.”

An attorney general willing to bend or even break the law—and certainly willing to conceal crimes and lie to the American people—can be a corrupt president’s last line of defense.

When a whistleblower in the White House reported that Trump was bribing and extorting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, that report first went to Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who thought it was evidence Trump had committed a serious crime. Atkinson deemed it an “urgent concern” and then gave it to Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire. Under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, Maguire was supposed to then hand it over to congressional intelligence committees. Instead, he made a pit-stop at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which handed it over to Bill Barr’s office.

Which is where it died, until ICIG Atkinson reached out to the House Intelligence Committee to let them know about Barr’s cover-up.

The whistleblower’s complaint is quite specific. “The whistleblower implicates Barr directly in the opening lines of the complaint,” Tessa Berenson wrote for Time magazine on September 26, 2019. She then quoted from the whistleblower:

“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.

“The President’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort.

“Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.”

The language the whistleblower uses calls to mind the 1972 press reports of Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell hiring former FBI Agent Stephen King to physically assault and mollify Mitchell’s own wife to keep her quiet about his and Nixon’s crimes. (King, now 78, was richly rewarded for his lifetime of service to the GOP in a breathtaking way by Donald Trump; more about that in a minute.)

Like Mitchell before him, Barr has long experience covering up the crimes of a corrupt Republican president. We know, because Barr has done it before.

How Barr Earned the Moniker ‘Coverup-General’

The week of Christmas, 1992, George H.W. Bush was on his way out of office. Bill Clinton had won the White House the month before, and in a few weeks would be sworn in as president.

But Bush’s biggest concern wasn’t that he’d have to leave the White House to retire back to Connecticut, Maine, or Texas (where he had mansions) but, rather, that he might end up in a federal prison. Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh was closing in fast on him, and Bush’s diary was a key to it all.

Walsh had been appointed independent counsel in 1986, to investigate the Iran-Contra crimes of the Reagan administration, and he’d already secured several convictions. The entire criminal enterprise was beginning to unravel, and the American people were watching with horror and fascination.

Did the plot start in the spring of 1980 during the Reagan vs. Carter election, as a way of having the Iranians hold the hostages long enough to humiliate President Carter and cost him the election? Did Bush campaign manager Bill Casey do it all himself, or, as with Nixon/Agnew in 1968, did the presidential candidate and his former CIA director and then-VP candidate, George H.W. Bush, participate?

The president of Iran during the hostage crisis, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, wrote for the Christian Science Monitor in 2013 that:

“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”

Or was the Iran-Contra conspiracy limited, as Reagan and Bush insisted (and Reagan confessed on TV), to later years in the Reagan presidency, in response to a hostage-taking in Lebanon? Who knew what, and when?

Walsh had zeroed in on Iran-related documents that were in the possession of Reagan’s former defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, who all the evidence showed was definitely in on the deal, and Bush’s diary that could corroborate it.

Weinberger was preparing to testify that Bush knew about the deal with Iran and even participated, and Walsh had already, based on information he’d obtained from the investigation into Weinberger, demanded that Bush turn over his diary from the campaign.

Bush was panicked. And he only had three more weeks of safety in office before Bill Clinton was to be sworn in.

So Bush called in his attorney general, Bill Barr, and asked his advice.

Barr was already in trouble for covering up another crime committed by Reagan and Bush a few years earlier: the selling of weapons of mass destruction to Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein, in violation of federal law. Why not double down?

On October 19, 1992, iconic New York Times columnist William Safire referred to Barr not as “Attorney General” but, instead, as “Coverup-General,” noting that Barr was already covering up for Reagan and Bush—and, apparently, himself.

Safire wrote of Barr’s unwillingness to appoint an independent counsel to look into “Iraqgate” (what the newspapers were calling the Reagan/Bush administration’s illegal sale of WMDs to Iraq):

Just two months later, Bush was asking Barr for advice on how to avoid a second very serious charge in the Iran-Contra crimes. How, Bush wanted to know, could they shut down Walsh’s investigation before Walsh’s lawyers got their hands on Bush’s incriminating diary that they’d subpoenaed?

The story came out almost a decade later, although few seemed to notice; politics had moved on, Barr was in private practice, and a new Bush was president.

Turns out, Barr was right in the middle of it.

Which is exactly what George H.W. Bush did, on Christmas Eve, 1992, when most Americans weren’t checking the news. The holiday notwithstanding, the result was explosive.

Americans knew that both Reagan and Bush were up to their necks in the Iran-Contra crimes, and both could be facing prison time as a result. The independent counsel had already obtained one conviction and three guilty pleas, and two other individuals were lined up for prosecution. And Walsh was closing in fast on Bush himself, who would lose his immunity in three weeks.

So, when Bush shut the investigation down by pardoning not only Weinberger, but also the five others known to be involved in the crime, destroying Walsh’s ability to prosecute anybody, the New York Times freaked out.

The headline of a story by David Johnston ran all the way across four of the six columns on the December 25, 1992, front page of the Times, screaming in all-caps: BUSH PARDONS 6 IN IRAN AFFAIR, ABORTING A WEINBERGER TRIAL; PROSECUTOR ASSAILS ‘COVER-UP.’

Bill Barr had struck.

Johnston’s second paragraph laid it out:

It was déjà vu all over again, as can be seen in William Safire’s coverage. Four months earlier, referring to Iraqgate, Safire opened his article, titled “Justice [Department] Corrupts Justice,” by writing:

Safire accused Barr of not only rigging the cover-up, but of being one of the criminals who could be prosecuted.

“Mr. Barr,” wrote Safire in August of 1992, “could face prosecution if it turns out that high Bush officials knew about Saddam Hussein’s perversion of our Agriculture export guarantees to finance his war machine.” He added, “They [Barr and colleagues] have a keen personal and political interest in seeing to it that the Department of Justice stays in safe, controllable Republican hands.”

In August and September of 1992, Barr had succeeded in blocking the appointment of an investigator or independent counsel to look into Iraqgate. In December, Barr helped Bush shoot down another independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, and eliminated any risk that George H.W. Bush would be prosecuted for his Iran-Contra crimes.

Independent Counsel Walsh, wrote Johnston for the Times on Christmas Eve in 1992, “plans to review a 1986 campaign diary kept by Mr. Bush.” The diary would be the smoking gun that would nail Bush to the crimes.

“But,” noted Johnston, “in a single stroke, Mr. Bush swept away one conviction, three guilty pleas and two pending cases, virtually decapitating what was left of Mr. Walsh’s effort, which began in 1986.”

Walsh didn’t take it lying down, even though he knew the cover-up was now finalized.

Johnston noted that, “Mr. Walsh bitterly condemned the President’s action, charging that ‘the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.’”

As Johnston reported, Walsh added that the diary and notes he wanted to enter into a public trial of Weinberger represented, “evidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.”

Walsh had been fighting to get those documents ever since 1986, when he was appointed and Reagan still had two years left in office. Bush’s and Weinberger’s refusal to turn them over, Johnston noted in the Times, could have, in Walsh’s words, “forestalled impeachment proceedings against President Reagan” through a “pattern of ‘deception and obstruction.’”

Barr successfully helped Bush decapitate the investigation into Bush’s crimes.

Now it appears that Barr is doing the same sort of cover-up work for Trump.

Part of a Pattern Among Republican Attorneys General

It’s amazing the power that an attorney general has, particularly when wielded by a man who thinks himself above the law and immune to public opinion.

Back in Nixon’s day, for example, Jeb Magruder told reporters Nixon had ordered his own attorney general, John Mitchell, to cover up parts of the Watergate break-in. (Magruder later went to prison for his actions.)

John Mitchell’s wife Martha learned about it and was in the process of telling United Press International reporter Helen Thomas the story over the phone when one of John Mitchell’s men burst in as she was saying, according to Thomas, “You just get away.”

Stephen King, then an ex-FBI agent whom Mitchell had assigned to watch his wife, had, according to Newsweek’s account of how veteran crime reporter Marcia Kramer heard it from Martha Mitchell, broken into the room, pulled the phone out of her hands and out of the wall, and then beat her black-and-blue and sedated her with an injection.

James McCord, who was convicted of conspiracy and burglary in the Watergate affair on behalf of Attorney General Mitchell and President Nixon, told a reporter: “Martha’s story is true—basically, the woman was kidnapped. … they kept her locked up and she began to be afraid for her life.”

Earlier, I mentioned that King would be repaid for his involvement in Mitchell’s cover-up: Today, King is the U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic, a post Donald Trump appointed him to in July of 2017 and Mitch McConnell’s Senate confirmed him to on October 5, 2017.

John Mitchell went to prison for his work for Nixon, although he continued to pull political strings from inside his prison cell. There’s something about Republican attorneys general that makes this kind of rulebreaking a pattern.

Barr’s Latest Cover-Up

Even more brazen than John Mitchell, Barr may today be pushing the Justice Department to use its investigative power to punish the president’s political enemies and cover up Trump’s crimes.

First, Barr lied to the American press and public about the contents of Robert Mueller’s report on at least 10 instances of criminal obstruction of justice by Trump, and multiple efforts to collude with foreign governments to become president. Barr is still hiding grand jury testimony that many speculate could land Trump and his co-conspirators in prison.

Barr’s Justice Department conducted investigations of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, and James Comey, and Barr had one of his prosecutors dig into the whistleblowers’ sources who spoke to Robert Mueller about Trump’s multiple attempts to collude with foreign governments, including Russia, to steal the 2016 election.

Lev Parnas, like Hitchcock’s “man who knew too much,” apparently fears that he’s going to be next and, because he actually participated in well-documented crimes at Trump’s request, he may end up with a long and particularly brutal prison term—or worse.

Barr also appears to be the key to Trump’s power at the moment. He covered up the gravity of the Muller investigation, nearly successfully hid the whistleblower’s report, and could be covering up dozens of other things that we don’t know about because… he’s covering them up.

As Parnas said to Maddow, “The difference between why Trump is so powerful now, and he wasn’t as powerful in ’16 and ’17… [is that] he became that powerful when he got William Barr.”

Democrats in the House who are considering where to next turn their investigation lens may well find a rich vein to mine in looking at Barr.

That is assuming, of course, that potential anti-Trump, anti-Barr witnesses like Parnas don’t start dying in federal custody like the man Bill Barr’s dad hired, Jeffrey Epstein. Were that to happen, congressional investigators may be left with no witnesses to interrogate.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 25 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/lev-parnass-lawyer-declared-open-war-on-ag-bill-barr-during-maddow-interview-attorney/

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Lev Parnas’s lawyer declared ‘open war’ on AG Bill Barr during Maddow interview: attorney

Written by Bob Brigham / Raw Story January 25, 2020

The attorney for Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas appears to be using a novel legal strategy, attorney Luppe Luppen explained on Friday.

Joseph Bondy, the attorney for Parnas, was interviewed Friday evening by Rachel Maddow, following the day’s end of the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

Luppen, who offers legal analysis on his popular @nycsouthpaw Twitter account, came to a conclusion that seemed to surprise him after watching the interview.

“I’ve never seen a lawyer sit on a cable panel show and make that much news,” Luppen wrote.

CNN reporter Shimon Prokupecz had a question for Luppen.

“What is the ultimate strategy here?” Prokupecz asked. “It’s clear from his interview SDNY has no interest in him. He is suggesting Fruman behind the smear campaign against Yovanovitch. I can’t see SDNY being happy with any of this.”

“I feel foolish saying it, but it seems like he’s trying to change the leadership of the Justice Department,” Luppen replied.

“Barr shouldn’t be his main concern here,” Prokupecz replied. “He should be more concerned with the career public corruption prosecutors and the tenacious public corruption FBI team in NY investigating the case.”

“I agree, but so far he’s filed a request for Barr’s recusal, orchestrated a media campaign insinuating some dark ‘conflict’ is keeping SDNY from coming to the table with him, contributed evidence to the impeachment, and openly talked about a downward departure for helping congress,” Luppen noted.

“I don’t know what else it adds up to if not basically an open war on Barr and his boss. But again, I feel a bit foolish saying so,” he added.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/watchdog-group-files-formal-doj-complaint-against-bill-barr-for-his-abuse-of-power-for-trump/

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National Security

Barr’s review of Russia investigation wins Trump’s favor. Those facing scrutiny suspect he’s chasing conspiracy theories.

Matt Zapotosky,

Josh Dawsey,

Shane Harris and

Rosalind S. Helderman

Oct. 6, 2019

Attorney General William P. Barr has taken an interest in a mysterious European professor whose conversation with an adviser to President Trump’s 2016 campaign helped launch the FBI investigation into possible coordination with Russia — and who has since become the focal point of an unproven conservative theory that the entire inquiry was a setup, people familiar with the matter said.

Those involved in the FBI investigation said they are mystified by the attorney general’s activities and interest in the professor, Joseph Mifsud, and they suspect that Barr might be using Justice Department resources to validate conjecture that Mifsud was deployed against a Trump adviser by Western intelligence to manufacture a basis to investigate the campaign.

“It just seems like they’re doing everything they can to delegitimize the origins of that investigation,” said one person involved with the Russia probe, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the politically sensitive matter that is still being reviewed. “I just don’t think there’s any real basis to disparage it.”

But Barr’s inquiry has heartened Trump and his conservative allies. Trump, who at times has inquired about the origins of the Russia investigation and the professor in particular, has bragged that Barr will get to the bottom of the case and is doing a good job as the country’s top law enforcement official, a White House official said.

‘The enigma of the entire Mueller probe’: Focus on origins of Russian investigation puts spotlight on Maltese professor

Barr’s defenders assert that he is exploring what he views as possible problems.

“He’s not a conspiracy theorist. He’s a realist,” said George Terwilliger, a former deputy attorney general and longtime friend of Barr’s. “And I’m confident that if he has a concern that justifies his personal involvement, it’s based on fact, not conjecture.”

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Unproven or vague allegations about impropriety in the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe have long been passed between Trump, his conservative allies on Capitol Hill and the conservative media ecosystem — with the country’s top law enforcement official and conservative lawmakers sometimes helping to fuel them.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) wrote in recent days to Australian, Italian and British officials, asking them to cooperate in Barr’s review of the Russia investigation and asserting that the attorney general was “simply doing his job.” Graham said in an interview that he expected Mifsud to be a significant part of the investigation.

“He’s a curious character in this whole deal, and we need to know more about him,” Graham said, adding that he had not talked to Barr about the matter.

“Whatever Barr finds is fine with me,” he said. “If there’s nothing there, there is nothing there. I trust him.”

Attorney general says he believes ‘spying did occur’ in probe of Trump campaign associates

Barr has never spoken specifically about his view on the theories surrounding Mifsud, though people familiar with his thinking say he is interested in the professor and the broader work of the U.S. intelligence community surrounding the Trump campaign. The Washington Post recently reported that Barr had been traveling abroad — to the United Kingdom and Italy, in particular — to ask his foreign counterparts to aid in the Justice Department’s review of the matter.

Barr has long harbored suspicions about the Russia probe, which began before the 2016 election and was later overtaken by then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III after Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey early in his tenure as president. Even before he was nominated, Barr had written a letter to Justice Department leaders asserting that the special counsel’s theory of how Trump might have obstructed justice in the Russia probe seemed “fatally misconceived.” At a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing in April, Barr said he believed “spying did occur” against the Trump campaign — using a term some feel has a negative connotation, and one which FBI Director Christopher A. Wray later said he would not use.

In May, it was revealed that Barr had assigned U.S. Attorney John H. Durham to determine if the U.S. government’s “intelligence collection activities” related to the Trump campaign were “lawful and appropriate.” Barr told CBS News that month that some of the facts he had learned “don’t hang together with the official explanations of what happened,” but he declined to be more specific.

“That’s all I really will say,” Barr said. “Things are just not jiving.”

The unproven theory about Mifsud is that the Maltese professor was working to set up the Trump campaign. Mifsud was undeniably critical to the FBI’s decision to open an investigation. He boasted to Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos about having “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails” — before Russia’s hacking of Democrats was publicly known. When the FBI learned of that conversation some months later, it opened a case.

Mueller’s team wrote that Mifsud “had connections to Russia,” and Comey has described him more bluntly as a “Russian agent.”

James Baker, who was the FBI’s general counsel when the bureau opened the counterintelligence probe, defended the investigation. “It’s critically important that the American people have confidence in the intelligence community,” he said. “I’m confident that there was no attempted coup and that nothing was done for political reasons.”

Baker said that after Durham was appointed, he contacted the prosecutor and offered to cooperate with the review. Durham has yet to contact Baker, Baker said.

David Laufman, a former Justice Department counterintelligence official involved in the early stages of the Russia investigation, said on Twitter that Barr’s “spearheading of a Justice Dept. investigation to pursue conspiracy theories about the 2016 election is cause for alarm at the hijacking of a great institution to vindicate partisan political grievances.”

Mifsud was never accused of crimes and last surfaced two years ago for an interview with a reporter in Italy. That has fueled speculation, particularly from those who want to discredit the Russia probe, that he is not what the FBI says he is.

Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani told The Washington Post that he was interested in Mifsudbecause it “seems to me it was a counterintelligence setup .?.?. a rather typical CIA plot to create a basis for the investigation.”

Giuliani noted that he had not talked to Barr or Durham about the matter. A person familiar with Barr’s thinking said Barr has questioned the wisdom of Giuliani’s attempts to get foreign nations, especially Ukraine, to pursue investigations of interest to the president because Giuliani is operating outside normal government channels.

Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with Mifsud, has tweeted that Mifsud was “an Italian intelligence asset who the CIA weaponized.”

Caroline Polisi, a lawyer for Papadopoulos, declined to say whether he has been contacted by Durham or Barr as part of the Justice Department’s review.

Attempts to locate Mifsud were unsuccessful. Stephan Roh, a Swiss lawyer who purports to represent him, has called accusations that Mifsud was a Russian asset “defamatory.”

In Roh’s 2018 book, which postulates that Mifsud was working with Western intelligence, Roh indicated that he interviewed Mifsud about his interactions with Papadopoulos that same month.

Roh did not respond to questions about when he was last in contact with the professor or where he is located. In an email, he declined to comment on any interactions Mifsud has had with the Justice Department “or if there were any.”

According to a former Italian government official, Barr first met with Gennaro Vecchione, the head of Italy’s Security Intelligence Department, on Aug. 15, essentially to establish contact, and returned Sept. 27 for a second meeting with the heads of Italy’s domestic and foreign intelligence services.

Barr, the official said, “asked if Italian intelligence knew anything about Mifsud and if the Italians were aware of his role” in the Russia investigation “in terms of being involved in Italian intelligence itself or if he was politically tied with Italian political leaders allied with the Democrats.” The Italians, the official said, “explained that there is no involvement by the Italian intelligence services in this — and the fact that we don’t have any evidence of this plot.”

“They confirmed no connections, no activities, no interference,” the official said.

The Justice Department inspector general is also examining aspects of the FBI’s Russia probe, but some who have been questioned in it said that Mifsud has not seemed to be a key focus of investigators.

Barr’s critics say his efforts to investigate the investigators are meant to placate Trump — even if that means casting aspersions on U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Barr personally asked foreign officials to aid inquiry into CIA, FBI activities in 2016

Trump had virtually no relationship with Barr when he chose him to be attorney general in late 2018, and conservative and liberal lawyers alike hoped that Barr might restore independence to the Justice Department that they felt had been eroded in the first years of Trump’s presidency. Barr had been attorney general before, in the George H.W. Bush administration, and was widely respected in conservative legal circles.

Some analysts said Barr disappointed quickly. His characterization of the Mueller report, they noted, hewed closely to Trump’s favored talking point — no collusion, no obstruction — and Mueller felt it so misleading that he complained in a letter that the attorney general “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the special counsel’s work.

“Like most Republican lawyers or most lawyers in Washington, I expected that Bill Barr would be a very by-the-book sort of attorney general, especially since he had done it before and certainly knows the job,” said Greg Brower, a former U.S. attorney now in private practice at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. “Unfortunately, many people in town now think he is playing politics, or he’s running the department in a way that he’s too political.”

Other analysts, though, noted that Barr had essentially telegraphed the type of attorney general he would be before he was nominated. In addition to writing a memo critical of Mueller, Barr had opined to a New York Times reporter in 2017 that the basis for investigating alleged wrongdoing by the Clinton Foundation, as well as the controversial sale of a uranium company to Russia while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, was stronger than the basis for launching the Russia investigation.

“I have long believed that the predicate for investigating the uranium deal, as well as the [Clinton] Foundation, is far stronger than any basis for investigating so-called ‘collusion,’ ” Barr wrote.

Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman when Eric H. Holder Jr. was attorney general, said that when he first saw Barr’s comment, “I thought, this is someone who’s had his brain warped by a couple decades of Fox News, and that’s not the type of person that should be leading the Justice Department.”

“I think Trump basically got what he wanted at the Justice Department — which is someone that would define his job as protecting the president first and foremost,” said Miller, who is an analyst for MSNBC.

Terwilliger, the former deputy attorney general, disputed that assessment, saying Barr “remains as straight an arrow and middle of the road as he can be.”

“If he thinks that there was malfeasance in some aspect of the way the government operated in a way that was designed to hurt the presidency, I think he has every right — indeed, a responsibility — to uncover that,” Terwilliger said.

Barr’s critics and defenders alike note that he has long believed in a strong executive branch, and that is likely to inform some of his interest in protecting Trump and the office he holds.

“When you pair someone with that view of executive authority with this particular president,” said Matt Axelrod, a Justice Department official when Loretta E. Lynch was attorney general, “it’s a recipe for disaster.”

Barr’s defenders, though, note that he has generally enjoyed a good reputation and — given this job might be his last — he is unlikely to want to ruin it over causes in which he doesn’t believe.

“Throughout his career, both in public life and in the corporate world, he’s always been viewed as an individual of tremendous integrity and honesty and always beyond reproach,” said Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the conservative Federalist Society legal organization. “I just don’t see him — at the twilight of his career, given everything he’s done, and given his faith-based and spiritual life — coming off the rails at this point.”

Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.

Federal prosecutors in the District of Columbia have embraced politically fraught cases under the United States attorney, Jessie K. Liu, an ambitious prosecutor who has angled for bigger jobs in the Trump administration.

She aggressively pushed for the prosecution of Mr. McCabe on suspicion of lying to investigators about sensitive law enforcement information provided to a reporter. Mr. McCabe was accused of misleading investigators conducting an administrative review, not a criminal inquiry; typically, such cases are not referred for prosecution.

The relatively straightforward case against Mr. McCabe has dragged on for more than 20 months. Prosecutors have refused to tell Mr. McCabe’s lawyers whether they intend to bring charges.

Ms. Liu’s office also charged Gregory B. Craig, a onetime White House counsel in the Obama administration, after prosecutors in New York passed on the case. Mr. Craig was charged with lying to the F.B.I. about his work for the Ukrainian government, but a jury last year quickly acquitted him, handing Ms. Liu an embarrassing defeat.

Mr. Trump nominated Ms. Liu last month to be the Treasury Department’s under secretary for terrorism and financial crimes. He had previously tapped her to be the No. 3 spot in the Justice Department, but she withdrew from consideration after Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, raised concerns about her conservative credentials.

ww.nytimes.com › politics › leak-investigation-james-comey

Justice Dept. Investigating Years-Old Leaks and Appears ...

2 days ago - James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, has been a frequent target ... leak of classified information about a Russian intelligence document, ...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/bill-barr-has-been-covering-up-lev-parnas-explosive-evidence-for-the-past-three-months/

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Bill Barr has been covering up Lev Parnas’ explosive evidence for the past three months

Lev Parnas and his attorney appear on The Rachel Maddow show.

Written by Joshua Holland January 16, 2020

Among the eye-popping revelations from Lev Parnas, a low-level Republican hustler and associate of Rudy Giuliani who has been thrust into the spotlight of Trump’s impeachment, is that the president* “knew exactly what was going on” as his flunkies tried to coerce the Ukrainian government into opening a sham investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter–as did Vice President Mike Pence–and that Attorney General Bill Barr “was basically on the team” along with Giuliani, Parnas, his associates Igor Fruman and Semyon Kislin, and lawyers (and frequent Fox News guests) Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova, among others.

It is important to understand that not only did Parnas implicate Barr in the corrupt scheme, but Barr’s Justice Department has been in possession of the trove of documents and recordings that Parnas just turned over to House investigators for several months. Parnas was arrested by federal agents back in October with six electronic devices, and authorities confiscated another eight from his Florida home shortly thereafter.

Democrats requested documents from Parnas, Fruman and Kislin back in September, prior to their arrests. Barr’s Justice Department has fought those efforts tooth-and-nail–including Congressional subpoenas of Giuliani and subsequently of Parnas himself–according to Barr’s theory that the president and his advisors enjoy absolute immunity from Congressional probes. Parnas’s attorneys had to ask a federal judge to allow their client to comply with Congressional document requests.

If Parnas’s allegations are true, then Barr was a participant in a conspiracy to violate the law and has been actively covering up evidence of that scheme. But it’s important to note here that while Parnas has documentary evidence to support much of what he has said on the record, the claim that Barr was personally “on the team” has yet to be corroborated.

A Justice Department spokesperson issued a denial, but there are some aspects of Parnas’s narrative that fit with what we know from previous reporting.

On Wednesday night, Parnas told Rachel Maddow that he and Giuliana had cut a deal with Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch who has been holed up in Vienna for six years fighting extradition to the US on corruption charges. According to Parnas’s account, they promised Firtash that the Justice Department would make the charges against him disappear in exchange for fodder to use against Biden. “We had to promise Firtash something,” he told the MSNBC host. “It was basically telling him we knew his case is worthless here and that he’s being prosecuted for no reason and basically it could get taken care of….It was all connected At the end of the day, the agenda was to make sure that the Ukrainians announced the Biden investigation.” He added that Barr was “in the loop” on this offer.

Last September, Firtash deposited $1 million into Parnas’s wife’s account for unknown purposes. Parnas subsequently retained Rudy Giuliani’s firm despite the fact that he was working for Giuliani. This was just days before Parnas departed for Kyiv on his “secret mission” for Trump, and The New York Times reports that having Rudy represent both Trump and Parnas was “a move that might afford their shared mission the confidentiality of attorney-client privilege.” Giuliani denies this account but Firtash’s payment to Parnas was established when prosecutors asked a judge to revoke the latter’s bail for failing to disclose it.

Although Barr ultimately decided not to intervene in the case, The Washington Post reported that Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova “secured a rare face-to-face meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr and other Justice Department officials to argue against the charges” last summer. The DOJ also refused to respond to repeated questions over an 18-month period by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) about why Firtash had not yet been extradited, according to NBC.

Of course, everything about Barr’s past would be consistent with his covering up Trump’s extortion scheme, if not actively participating in it. Recall that last September it was reported that “Barr has held private meetings overseas with foreign intelligence officials seeking their help in a Justice Department inquiry that President Trump hopes will discredit U.S. intelligence agencies’ examination of possible connections between Russia and members of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/bill-barr-warrior-for-theocracy-why-didnt-we-know-about-this/

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Bill Barr, warrior for theocracy: Why didn’t we know about this?

Written by HeatherDigby Parton / Salon January 3, 2020 see 12/11

It has long been an article of faith (no pun intended) among some on the left that the culture war was simply a cynical tool of the conservative movement to fool the rubes into voting against their economic interests. In this reading, right-wing leaders had no intention of ever following through on culture-war issues. They would string the voters along forever, promising to deliver on abortion or gay rights or guns but never really getting the job done, the assumption being that they could keep the conservative base’s intensity at full throttle if those voters believed they were on the cusp of getting their agenda passed. Meanwhile, as the marks were distracted by endless culture-war skirmishes, the big money conservatives would pass laws that benefited themselves and harmed their own voters.

As it happens, it did indeed go down that way. The conservative movement benefactors made out like bandits while Republican voters got screwed economically.But the notion that the rich men in charge would never have to deliver on their culture-war promises was always wrong. Eventually, they would have to pay the piper.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell signaled that they were ready when he withheld the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland during Barack Obama’s last year and then confirmed the Federalist Society’s darling, true blue social conservative Neil Gorsuch, as soon as Donald Trump took office. Evangelical leaders rushed to Brett Kavanaugh’s defense when he was under fire for his decadent youthful behavior and was accused of sexual assault during the confirmation hearings because they had been assured he would hew to the party line.Kavanaugh’s threats to take revenge on all who opposed him probably reassured the religious right that he would vote the right way on the cases they care about.

McConnell’s Job No. 1 was to get a Supreme Court majority that would protect the interests of the wealthy and ensure the government didn’t burden business with inconvenient regulations. But he also made sure he got justices who would give the social conservatives what they had been demanding. The lower courts are now packed with the most far-right extremists he could find.

This week 38 U.S. senators and 168 House members filed an amicus brief in an abortion case the Supreme Court is hearing, urging it to “reconsider” Roe v. Wade as well as Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which barred states from placing an undue burden on access to abortions. They are ready to reward the religious right for their years of loyalty. If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, I have a feeling any cracks in the Republican coalition will miraculously mend right up.

As it happens, some very important people in legal circles are true believers themselves. The man most responsible for putting Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the court as well as more than 100 lower court judges, is the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo. He is a member of the ultra-conservative Catholic organization Opus Dei and has served on the board of its affiliate, the Catholic Information Center, whose goal is to influence and convert members of the political elite. (Among the converts are Larry Kudlow, Trump’s economic adviser, and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.)

Leo is not the only one. White House counsel Pat Cipollone is also a member, as is the attorney general of the United States, William Barr. Just as the political and media establishment conveniently overlooked Barr’s long-term commitment to the “unitary executive theory” in its most extreme form, they didn’t seem to know that he was even more committed to far-right social conservatism. It wasn’t until Barr gave a speech at Notre Dame last October that everyone finally understood to what degree he is a religious crusader.

In that speech he said many things, blaming “secularists” for causing immense pain and suffering and “moral chaos.” He suggested that “the law is being used as a battering ram to break down traditional moral values and to establish moral relativism as a new orthodoxy” and went on to detail how he was counteracting that as attorney general. His views are what Katherine Stewart and Caroline Fredrickson identified in a New York Times op-ed as “religious nationalism,” which basically implies either a theocratic state or a single-religion state.

Barr made his beliefs explicit:

Judeo-Christian moral standards are the ultimate utilitarian rules for human conduct and religion helps frame moral culture within society that instills and reinforces moral discipline. The fact is that no secular creed has emerged capable of performing the role of religion.

Apparently the law and the Constitution are just wallpaper, which is an unusual thing for a U.S. attorney general to imply.

As Stewart and Fredrickson point out, this explains why Barr is so willing to lie and cover for the libertine Trump:

Within this ideological framework, the ends justify the means. In this light, Mr. Barr’s hyperpartisanship is the symptom, not the malady. At Christian nationalist gatherings and strategy meetings, theDemocratic Party and its supporters are routinely described as “demonic” and associated with “rulers of the darkness.” If you know that society is under dire existential threat from secularists, and you know that they have all found a home in the other party, every conceivable compromise with principles, every ethical breach, every back-room deal is not only justifiable but imperative. And as the vicious reaction to Christianity Today’s anti-Trump editorial demonstrates, any break with this partisan alignment will be instantly denounced as heresy.

Bill Barr may be the most unvetted attorney general in history, which is strange since he had served as AG under George H.W. Bush and was well known in DC circles. How could he have been confirmed as the nation’s top law enforcement official when nobody knew that he was a far-right religious extremist on a mission to use the law and the executive power to enforce a moral code? How many others like him are buried within the Trump administration, protecting this licentious president in order to Make America Christian Again?

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

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Historian breaks down why AG Barr’s ‘anti-democratic’ rhetoric recalls crackdowns on civil rights activists in the 1960s

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/william-barr-is-on-a-theocratic-mission-to-use-the-power-of-the-doj-to-deliver-america-from-eternal-damnation-columnists/

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William Barr is on a theocratic mission to use the power of the DOJ to deliver America from eternal damnation: columnists

Written by Matthew Chapman / Raw Story December 30, 2019

Attorney General William Barr is worse than a simple right-wing partisan, wrote religious nationalism biographer Katherine Stewart and former American Constitutional Society president Caroline Fredrickson for The New York Times.

Rather, they argued, he is best understood as a fanatical theocrat who believes America is damned to burn in hell — and seeks to use the powers of his office to course correct the nation’s sinful ways.

“Why would a seemingly respectable, semiretired lion of the Washington establishment undermine the institutions he is sworn to uphold, incinerate his own reputation, and appear to willfully misrepresent the reports of special prosecutors and inspectors general, all to defend one of the most lawless and corrupt presidents in American history? And why has this particular attorney general appeared at this pivotal moment in our Republic?” they wrote. “A deeper understanding of William Barr is emerging, and it reveals something profound and disturbing about the evolution of conservatism in 21st-century America.”

“At least since Mr. Barr’s infamous speech at the University of Notre Dame Law School, in which he blamed ‘secularists’ for ‘moral chaos’ and ‘immense suffering, wreckage and misery,’it has become clear that no understanding of William Barr can be complete without taking into account his views on the role of religion in society,” they wrote. “For that, it is illuminating to review how Mr. Barr has directed his Justice Department on matters concerning the First Amendment clause forbidding the establishment of a state religion.”

“In Maryland, the department rushed to defend taxpayer funding for a religious school that says same-sex marriage is wrong,” they noted. “In Maine, it is defending parents suing over a state law that bans religious schools from obtaining taxpayer funding to promote their own sectarian doctrines. At his Department of Justice, Mr. Barr told law students at Notre Dame, ‘We keep an eye out for cases or events around the country where states are misapplying the establishment clause in a way that discriminates against people of faith.’”

“When religious nationalists invoke ‘religious freedom,’ it is typically code for religious privilege,” they wrote. “The freedom they have in mind is the freedom of people of certain conservative and authoritarian varieties of religion to discriminate against those of whom they disapprove or over whom they wish to exert power … Mr. Barr has a long history of supporting just this type of ‘religious liberty.’ At Notre Dame, he compared alleged violations of religious liberty with Roman emperors forcing Christian subjects to partake in pagan sacrifices. ‘The law is being used as a battering ram to break down traditional moral values and to establish moral relativism as a new orthodoxy,’ he said.”

As they pointed out, Barr has been espousing this worldview long before Trump. “In a 1995 article he wrote for The Catholic Lawyer, which, as Emily Bazelon recently pointed out, appears to be something of a blueprint for his speech at Notre Dame, he complained that ‘we live in an increasingly militant, secular age’ and expressed his grave concern that the law might force landlords to rent to unmarried couples. He implied that the idea that universities might treat ‘homosexual activist groups like any other student group’ was intolerable.”

And while Barr is one of the most visible and powerful elements of the administration seeking to impose Christian supremacy under law, he is not alone.

“Mr. Trump’s presidency was not the cause of this anti-democratic movement in American politics. It was the consequence,” they concluded. “He is the chosen instrument, not of God, but of today’s Christian nationalists, their political allies and funders, and the movement’s legal apparatus. Mr. Barr did not emerge in order to serve this one particular leader. On the contrary, Mr. Trump serves a movement that will cynically praise the Constitution in order to destroy it, and of which Mr. Barr has made himself a hero.”

reagan-era FBI director drops the hammer on Trump and Bill Barr for conspiring to trash agency

Tom Boggioni / Raw StoryDecember 16, 2019

In a blunt-talking op-ed for the New York Times, former FBI Director William Webster took Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr to task for their attempts to destroy the department in order to save the president from impeachment.

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...So what, exactly, does Barr think he’s doing? Why is the attorney general acting like the personal attorney of the president? In a new interview this week, Barr finally gave a clear reason why, from his perspective, he acts the way he does.

NBC News’ Pete Williams asked Barr about why he is so aggressively pursuing Trump’s “investigation of the investigators” — now a criminal probe of the Russia investigation run by U.S. Attorney John Durham — even after the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a lengthy report on the subject. The answer, like the whole interview, was revealing.

Williams noted that critics say: “‘Well, that’s just Bill Barr defending Trump.’ Your concern about the investigation is… what? Civil libertarian?”

“I think our nation was turned on its head for three years I think based on a completely bogus narrative, that was largely fanned and hyped by an irresponsible press,” Barr said, referencing the Mueller probe and the resulting press coverage. “And I think that there were gross abuses of FISA and inexplicable behavior that was intolerable in the FBI. And the attorney general’s primary responsibility is to protect against the law enforcement and intelligence apparatus and make sure that it doesn’t play an improper role in our political life. That’s my responsibility, and I’m going to carry it out.”

In this answer, Barr revealed that the animating force behind his crusade is the media coverage of Trump, not the law.He was particularly incensed the media coverage of the Russia investigation. He’s clearly angry, like Trump is, that it dominated so much of the president’s first term in office. He is, it seems, seeking to get retribution and to set things right.

At other points in the interview, he made clear that he is preoccupied with the media. Asked why he Durham put out statements contradicting Horowitz’s finding that the Russia investigation was properly predicated, he said:

It was sort of being reported by the press that the issue of predication was sort of done and over, even though it was a very limited look at that issue by the IG given the narrowness of the evidence available to him. And I think it was important for people to understand that Durham’s work was not being pre-empted and that Durham was doing something different. … I think it was perfectly appropriate so the public understood the relationship between the two exercises. [emphasis added]

Again, he made clear that what’s he’s concerned with is public perception and press reporting, not law and procedures....

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/justice-department-ig-tells-kamala-harris-hes-barred-from-investigating-bill-barrs-potential-wrongdoing-but-that-has-to-change/

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Justice Department IG tells Kamala Harris he’s barred from investigating Bill Barr’s potential wrongdoing — but that ‘has to change’

PBS NewsHour

Written by Cody Fenwick December 11, 2019

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) elicited an important and revealing response from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz on Wednesday when she raised the prospect of Attorney General Bill Barr’s potential wrongdoing.

Harris noted that one of Barr’s ongoing investigations was “launched to do the bidding of President Trump, [and] has two objectives: One, to undermine the integrity of our intelligence community; the goal, to cast doubt on the finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in order to benefit the Trump campaign. And two: to intimidate the men and women of our intelligence committee by suggesting that our national security professionals will face serious consequences if they investigate wrongdoing on the part of this president or his operatives.”

She said that Horowitz has an obligation “to investigate misconduct committed by the attorney general of the United States, who is doing the bidding of the president to undermine our intelligence community. I trust you take that duty seriously.”

Horowitz said that he takes it seriously but that he’s legally prevented from looking at the misconduct of DOJ lawyers, which includes the attorney general himself.

“The law has to change, senator,” Horowitz said. ”

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Bill Barr: Donald Trump’s one-man wrecking crew has big dreams

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon December 11, 2019

I must have heard the words “historic day” uttered a hundred times on Tuesday and it wasn’t hyperbole. The Democratic leadership announced that they have decided to charge President Donald Trump with two articles of impeachment, one for abuse of power and one for obstruction of Congress. The process is proceeding at a breakneck speed and should be concluded within the next month or so. I have no idea what any of the players intend to do after that, but I have a sneaking suspicion Trump will be happy to carry on with his own “impeachment” of the Democrats and he’s got a very powerful collaborator ready to do all he can to help: Attorney General William Barr.

Barr almost certainly choreographed the release of the long-awaited Department of Justice inspector general’s report into the FBI’s handling of the Russia investigation to drop during this eventful week, particularly since the report was not very favorable to the right’s preferred storyline. Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that while there were low-level errors and some serious impropriety in the handling of the FISA application for former Trump adviser Carter Page after he’d left the campaign, the FBI had an adequate factual basis (or “predication,” in legal terminology) to begin the investigation. He also found that there was no bias, political or otherwise, that affected the process.

Unable to use his preferred method of sending a letter weeks in advance of the report mischaracterizing the investigator’s conclusion in order to mold public opinion before anyone has a chance to read it, Barr was forced instead to release a statement immediately after the report’s release saying that he disagreed with it, which isn’t nearly as effective. In fact, Barr ended up on a different page than the White House, which simply lied outright saying the report backed up Trump’s repeated insistence that the FBI leadership was a bunch of “dirty cops” who tried to destroy his campaign and overthrow his presidency.

Again, that is the opposite of what the report said.

Barr then apparently felt the need to sit down with journalists and explain that his previous comments only meant to say that Horowitz was prevented from doing a more thorough job due to pesky DOJ rules.

This explains why his hand-picked special prosecutor, John Durham, broke every rule in the book by issuing his own statement saying he also disagrees with the IG’s conclusions, hinting broadly that he’s onto something big. If you can’t remember a federal prosecutor ever talking about an ongoing investigation this way, it’s because it simply isn’t done. Well, it hasn’t been done. But at least it clarified that Durham is either a Rod Rosenstein-esque toady, afraid to stand up for himself, or another Trump partisan. A straight shooter wouldn’t have broken that rule. Now we know.

In the astonishing and chilling interview with NBC’s Pete Williams on Tuesday, Barr made it clear that he was not prepared to stop until he found a way to nail someone in the government for having the temerity to be suspicious of the fact that dozens of Russians and Americans with Russian connections were crawling all over Trump’s campaign, at the same time as the Russians were hacking into the computers of his political opponents and running a blatant propaganda campaign on social media. How outrageous of the FBI to think that might be worth looking into! (One imagines they will certainly think twice about doing that over the next year, no matter how flagrant the interference might be.)

Barr explained that his main reason for pursuing the investigation is his deep concern about the government using “the apparatus of the state, principally the law enforcement agencies and the intelligence agencies, both to spy on political opponents, but also to use them in a way that could affect the outcome of the election.” Strangely, he wasn’t the least bit concerned about the two investigations the FBI conducted into Hillary Clinton while she was running for president. Indeed, he even personally weighed in on one of them, the Uranium One and Clinton Foundation investigation, which was “predicated” on a right-wing oppo hit by the man who later became the Trump campaign CEO, Steve Bannon. Barr told the New York Times before he came back to government that he had “long believed that the predicate for investigating the uranium deal, as well as the [Clinton] foundation, is far stronger than any basis for investigating so-called ‘collusion.’”

While Barr claims to know nothing about this Ukraine business, he doesn’t seem to have a problem with Trump using “the apparatus of the state” in the amount of almost $400 billion in military aid, to try to affect the outcome of the next election.

But that’s no surprise. As I pointed out a while back, Barr himself is implicated in a scheme to use the “apparatus of the state” to affect the outcome of an election. I quoted Gene Lyons of the Arkansas Times writing back in 2016:

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, specifically to September 1992, when Attorney General William Barr, top-ranking FBI officials and — believe it or not — a Treasury Department functionary who actually sold “Presidential Bitch” T-shirts with Hillary Clinton’s likeness from her government office, pressured the U.S. attorney in Little Rock to open an investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Whitewater investment.

Back in those days, there were still a few Republicans with integrity, but Bill Barr was not one of them. That U.S. attorney, Charles Banks, refused to do what Barr and his associates wanted him to do. But as you no doubt remember, Republicans in the Congress grabbed the baton and ran with it. It’s clear that Barr suspects the FBI was running a biased, partisan investigation because that’s what he would have done in their position.

Williams asked Barr if his reasoning was based upon civil liberties concerns, and despite his earlier vacuous hand-wringing over abuse of government power, he didn’t say yes. This was his answer:

I think our nation was turned on its head for three years. I think, based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by an irresponsible press. And I think that there were gross abuses of FISA. And inexplicable behavior that is intolerable in the FBI.

In other words, his “concern” is political.

As I mentioned, Barr claims to know nothing about the Ukraine scandal. But according to Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, the president has asked him to brief the AG and Republican senators on all the “evidence” Giuliani collected during his recent trip to Kyiv. He’s got an elaborate new conspiracy theory involving Barack Obama and Adam Schiff, featuring a brand new investigation with the DOJ and some Ukrainian crackpots. Once this pesky impeachment is dispensed with it’s entirely possible that Barr will get right on it. If there’s one thing that he and Trump cannot abide it’s political corruption.

barr disputes IG report on FBI looking a russia collusion (did find minor problems, fake docs?!) 12/19

Horowitz report severely undermines Barr’s conspiracy theories

It is the attorney general that has launched a witch…

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-justice-department-report-on-russia-probe-origins-is-actually-a-damning-indictment-of-trump-in-the-ukraine-scandal

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The Justice Department report on Russia probe origins is actually a damning indictment of Trump in the Ukraine scandal

Written by Cody Fenwick December 9, 2019

It’s a tale of two investigations. Neither is pretty, but one is, in the end, appropriate and warranted; the other is a grotesque sham. And the story of each investigation illuminates key aspects of the other.

The two investigations I’m discussing are, of course, the Russia investigation and the Ukrainian investigation of Vice President Joe Biden, which, as far as we can tell, never actually existed, despite Trump’s efforts.

Both stories, though, were front and center on Monday in a spectacular concurrence of American political news. The Justice Department inspector general released its review on the origins of the Russia investigation that targeted four members of the 2016 Trump campaign and their potential ties to the Kremlin. At the same time, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing about the report from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) on the Ukraine scandal, which focused on President Donald Trump’s effforts to induce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch investigations of Biden and the Democratic National Committee.

The central findings of the IG report were precisely what had been reported in recent days. While IG Michael Horowitz found significant errors and omissions in the FBI’s conduct and policies during the investigation, he determined that the Russia investigation was properly predicated and therefore not launched as a politically motivated hoax to take down Trump.

In some ways, this is to be expected. There was never any real indication that the Russia probe was an improper attempt to undermine Trump. And we should expect that any thorough review of any large project of an organization like the FBI will find errors and mistakes and will likely offer recommendations for improvement.

But Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr had repeatedly fed wild speculation that the Russia probe was a “hoax” — and apparently the IG report won’t even change their mind. Since they’ll continue to push this conspiracy theory, it’s significant that the IG has clearly concluded that it’s unfounded.

The errors that the IG found, however, are similarly quite signficant. Not because they prove Trump was perniciously targeted in a corrupt conspiracy (the IG also found issues in the Clinton email probe), but it shows that the FBI’s procedures warrant serious reform, which FBI Director Christopher Wray said Monday he is undertaking. It also emphasizes that inspector general investigations of this kind should be welcomed, and the fact that such errors can be uncovered by a thorough review should give us confidence that oversight mechanisms can provide some real accountability. Everyone, regardless of partisan affiliation or opinion about the Trump-Russia matter, should welcome that.

However, these key findings and conclusions from the report also shed light on what was so disturbing, wrong, and impeachable about Trump’s plot for Ukrainian investigations of Biden and the DNC.

Consider, first, the IG’s finds about the origins of the investigations into four Trump campaign officials. Horowitz found “that the quantum of information articulated by the FBI to open the individual investigations on Papadopoulos, Page, Flynn, andManafort in August 2016 was sufficient to satisfy the low threshold established by the Department and the FBI.” The report adds: “We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions to open the four individual investigations.”...

DOJ says Congress can’t stop Trump Org from taking foreign payments — despite Constitution’s emoluments clause

Brad Reed / Raw StoryDecember 9, 2019

The so-called emoluments clause has been the center of a case that many legal scholars have been making that President Donald Trump is regularly violating the Constitution by continuing to…

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/ag-barr-warns-trump-that-giuliani-has-become-a-serious-liability-for-his-administration-report/

1219 trms respect cops or they won't be there for you exagerated?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/why-trumps-plot-to-investigate-the-investigators-is-going-up-in-a-puff-of-smoke/

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Why Trump’s plot to ‘investigate the investigators’ is going up in a puff of smoke

Written by Jefferson Morley / Independent Media InstituteDecember 6, 2019

For months, the names of Michael Horowitz and John Durham have figured in the pounding rhythms of right-wing media in which a heroically afflicted president faces down his perfidious enemies. A steady drumbeat of reports from Fox News, echoed by President Trump and Republican loyalists in Congress, proclaimed these two obscure Justice Department officials would get to the bottom of an alleged conspiracy against the Trump presidency.

They would, in Trump’s words, “investigate the investigators.” It was oh so promising.

“I will tell you this,” Trump blustered on October 25. “I think you’re going to see a lot of really bad things,” he said. “I leave it all up to the attorney general and I leave it all up to the people that are working with the attorney general who I don’t know. … I think you’ll see things that nobody would’ve believed.”

Horowitz, as the DOJ inspector general, had the narrower assignment. He was tasked with investigating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants issued to intercept the communications of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Horowitz had to answer the question: Was Page targeted for political reasons, perhaps based on the famous “Steele Dossier”?

Durham, a senior U.S. attorney in Connecticut, has a broader brief: to review the FBI’s decision to open an investigation of the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russians in 2015. Durham was selected for the job by Barr.

For those inclined to believe Fox News and the president, the “deep state cabal” that allegedly targeted Trump was running scared. In early October, Fox News reported that “Barr and Durham traveled to Italy recently to talk to law enforcement officials there about the probe and have also had conversations with officials in the U.K. and Australia about the investigation.” From this report, the Daily Caller imaginatively extrapolated that Durham’s probe had expanded to include “looking at the activities of foreign intelligence agencies.” (One British official told the Independent that Barr and his minions asked, “in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services.”) On October 22, the Washington Examiner said Durham was “scrutinizing four key figures”; the Spectator, a right-wing British magazine, claimed former CIA director John Brennan was in “Durham’s crosshairs.”

And so on.

‘Things That Nobody Would’ve Believed’

Trump’s words, ironically, are coming true. Horowitz, it is now reliably reported, found that the Trump/Fox News talking points about a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump are, in fact, “things that nobody would’ve believed.”

Horowitz’s report, says USA Today, is “expected to conclude the FBI was justified in launching its two-year inquiry into the Trump campaign and possible ties to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.”

The Washington Post reports that Durham has already disappointed Trump. In the course of Horowitz’s investigation, Durham declined to endorse one key Republican talking point: that one witness, Joseph Mifsud, was actually a CIA or FBI agent deployed to undermine and defeat Trump’s presidential bid.

Durham, according to the Post, has “said he could not offer evidence to the Justice Department’s inspector general to support the suspicions of some conservatives that the case was a setup by American intelligence.” (The Post describes its source as “people familiar with the matter.”)

Horowitz’s Letter

Those pundits expected Horowitz to side with the president could be detained by mere facts, no matter how public. Remember a couple of hundred news cycles ago—mid-October—when right-wing media was filibustering about the identity of the CIA whistleblower who first brought Trump’s Ukraine pressure campaign to light?

At the time, Horowitz was engaged in a more substantive matter. As inspector general, Horowitz played a leading role in an extraordinary letter, signed by about 70 inspector generals, about the Justice Department’s handling of the whistleblower’s allegation. Although the letter never mentioned the attorney general’s name, its message was a broad rebuke of Barr.

The legal question was far too intricate to generate pleasurable repartee on Twitter. The whistleblower complained in August to the inspector general in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The DNI is legally bound to pass to Congress only whistleblower complaints of “urgent concern.” Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, passed the buck and asked the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) for guidance. In a secret memo, dated September 3, the OLC decided the whistleblower’s complaint was not an “urgent” matter that had to be passed to Congress.

The OLC, beholden to Barr, took the position that there was no need to tell Congress of the possibility that Trump was withholding congressionally appropriated funds from the beleaguered Ukraine armed forces in order to force the Ukraine president to investigate Joe Biden’s son. The legal logic was fallacious and tortured.

Horowitz’s name topped the list of roughly 70 inspectors general who declared:

“the OLC opinion [written at Barr’s behest] could seriously impair whistleblowing and deter individuals in the intelligence community and throughout the government from reporting government waste, fraud, abuse, and misconduct.”

Of course, the letter was a dud on social media, cable TV, and Fox News. Who cares what a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington think? Horowitz, the hoped-for savior of Trump, had rebuked his boss, along with almost six dozen other senior civil servants in public. His real-world actions were ignored by conservative news outlets hyping imaginative reports on his investigation.

The Question

Will John Durham follow Barr’s lead? Or Horowitz’s?

“The modus operandi of this administration is that when they cannot dismiss somebody else’s fact-based conclusions, they create a parallel narrative,” Joel Brenner, a former inspector general at the National Security Agency in the George W. Bush administration, told USA Today.

What kind of narrative will Durham write?

One clue can be heard in “The Report,” a new movie starring Adam Driver about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 report on torture. The name “Durham” is heard exactly once in the movie. And yes, it is a reference to the same John Durham.

Durham is a career Justice Department prosecutor in Connecticut. In 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder assigned him to investigate the CIA’s torture program. It was a delicate assignment. On the one side, he had to poke into the dirty business of a $15 billion-a-year agency that believed it had legal and presidential sanction for “enhanced interrogation techniques.” On the other side, he was working for a popular new president who said the program was abhorrent and a host of lawyers who said it might well be criminal.

Durham, in short, walked into a legal and political minefield. Two years later, he emerged unscathed with a supple, if not evasive, reading of the law. His investigation exonerated the CIA on 99 out of 101 incidents of torture.

Whatever you make of Durham’s report legally and morally, it was politically adroit. The report pleased Obama and Holder, who dodged the need to take on the barons of the national security agencies. His report pleased the CIA, which dodged the bullet of indictments of senior officials who had approved the torture regime, including John Brennan. As a narrative, Durham’s torture report shows that he implicitly shares the worldview of Brennan and other senior national security managers.

He’s also a career prosecutor sure to consider all the facts brought to his attention.

Trump was enraged and threatened by national security leaks, even before he took office. Did Brennan et al commit any technical violations of the Espionage Act in talking to reporters about the president-elect’s Russian contacts? Quite possibly. Would John Durham go out on a legal limb to prosecute former top U.S. officials on behalf of Barr and Trump, who will be gone from Washington in five years at the maximum? That seems highly unlikely.

As Trump sails into the high seas of a Senate impeachment trial, Durham’s report on the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation is not likely to be a lifeline.

Jefferson Morley is a writing fellow and the editor and chief correspondent of the Deep State, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has been a reporter and editor in Washington, D.C., since 1980. He spent 15 years as an editor and reporter at the Washington Post. He was a staff writer at Arms Control Today and Washington editor of Salon. He is the editor and co-founder of JFK Facts, a blog about the assassination of JFK. His latest book is The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster, James Jesus Angleton.

This article was produced by the Deep State, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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House committee sues AG Barr in wake of judge’s ruling that declared ‘presidents are not kings’

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement November 26, 2019

The House Oversight Committee wasted no time in filing a lawsuit against Attorney General Bill Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, suing both Trump appointees for failure to respond to subpoenas demanding documents.

Declaring “President Trump and his aides are not above the law,” Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney on Tuesday announced, “I am filing this enforcement action today because the Trump Administration’s brazen obstruction of Congress must not stand.”

Politico reports Maloney is seeking documents related to the 2020 Census, and the Trump administration’s attempts to add a citizenship question to the constitutionally-mandate survey.

That question was the brainchild of a Republican strategist, now deceased, who wrote it would depress participation in the Census by minorities, effectively granting Republicans greater representation in the House and other areas – including where $675 billion in federal funds are spent.

One federal judge declared if the citizenship question made it onto the census, “hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of people will go uncounted.”

The Trump administration has ignored many subpoenas from House Democrats. On Monday a federal judge ruled former White House Counsel Don McGahn could not ignore a subpoena and must testify before Congress.

“Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings,” Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her 118-page ruling Monday.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/fundamentalism-and-authoritarianism-how-the-party-of-law-and-order-become-the-party-of-crooks-and-crime

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Fundamentalism and authoritarianism: How the party of ‘law and order’ became the party of crooks and crime

Written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon November 24, 2019

Whatever happened to the Republicans as the “party of law and order”? True, Richard Nixon, who first branded the party that way, was lying when he famously said, “I am not a crook.” Both Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal rank among the most notorious examples of executive branch lawlessness in our nation’s history. But through it all, the narrative commitment to the brand never wavered. It was a source of moral and political strength, always to be contrasted with “soft on crime” Democrats, however contrary the front-page facts might be.

But not anymore. As noted here by Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of rhetoric whose book, “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump” (table of contents here), will be published next year, it’s the Democrats who are the party of law and order in the impeachment drama, while the GOP is the party of conspiracy:

Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are betting that public opinion will move toward impeachment and removal once more information is made public. To try to shape public opinion they are relying on a law-and-order frame that tells Americans that the impeachment inquiry is legitimate and legally justified.

Democrats are positioning themselves as the only ones willing to uphold the rule of law and the Constitution.

Republicans, led by President Trump, are counting on their power to frame reality to prevent the public from moving toward impeachment.

The GOP is relying on a conspiracy frame that tells Americans that the impeachment inquiry is illegitimate and part of a plot to destroy America.

Of course the rhetoric of conspiracy isn’t entirely synonymous with that of crooks and criminals — but when you start to insist that career law-enforcement officials are all in on it, and you’ve abandoned the “law and order” frame to the Democrats, the crooks and criminals stench is difficult to dispel. And it’s not happening in isolation, either — above and beyond the plethora of scandals Trump generates, and the lockstep support Republicans are giving him.

That lockstep support is perhaps the most striking difference between now and Watergate-a difference most readily understood via the role of asymmetric polarization and negative partisanship, which cautions us not to expect the kind of gradual but inexorable opinion shift seen 45 years ago in response to the buildup of evidence.

In turn, dramatically increased polarization is a predicted result of historical trends described by structural demographic theory (SDT), which I wrote about previously in October 2016, reviewing “Ages of Discord,” an analysis of American history by evolutionary anthropologist Peter Turchin. SDT identifies three underlying factors contributing to increased levels of political instability: mass immiseration (stagnant or falling wages, worsening health, declining well-being), elite overproduction (increased competition for wealth and power), and fiscal distress (a product of both public debt and trust in public institutions). Mass immiseration helps fuel elite overproduction, since stagnant or falling wages leaves more money for elites, and the increased competition that results reduces broad cooperation and intensifies elite fragmentation (which also contributes to fiscal distress). In America, political polarization is a prime indicator of that fragmentation.

The fact that polarization has been asymmetric deserves special attention, as it’s not yet implicated in SDT. But it can be credibly explained. In “The AuthoritarianDynamic,” Karen Stenner presented compelling evidence that expressed intolerance resulted primarily from two factors: an innate predisposition to intolerance, demanding obedience and conformity, (“authoritarianism”) interacting with increased societal threat, particularly dissension in public opinion and loss of confidence in political leaders. Thus, there is both a logical reason for the expression of authoritarianism to increase as political instability rises, and motivation for either authoritarian or opportunistic elites to strategically manipulate conditions to intensify this process.

One can read “The Long Southern Strategy” (Salon interview with co-author Angie Maxwell here) as a coherent history of how GOP-affiliated elites have pursued just such a strategy over the past 50-plus years.

“Authoritarian attitudes peak not only when social conditions change, but also if folks are made to feel like social conditions are changing (even if they aren’t),” Maxwell said. “The threats are recycled, renewed with a sense of urgency, stoking a fire that is always smoldering. It isn’t a natural rise in authoritarian attitudes, it is an orchestrated rise in authoritarian attitudes.”

SDT suggests that it may be both, but without the orchestration it would be much more manageable, and much less prone to produce lawless behavior.

One can also view conservative legal activism as a key component in that process, as well as a profound influence on elite politics as a whole. At the time of Watergate, authoritarians were more evenly divided between the parties, but they’ve become much more concentrated in the GOP since then. As their experience of threat has risen, they’ve become more inclined to lawlessness — although it’s not tolerated on the part of others, of course!

In short, the lawlessness at the top of the GOP isn’t new — just vastly more blatant than it was during Watergate. But the infrastructure supporting, defending and excusing it is dramatically more powerful and robust, and the authoritarian mass base is much more consolidated within their voter base.

Aside from impeachment itself, three other developments this month underscores the GOP’s broader embrace of lawlessness, in contrast to its decades-long self-branding. First, there is Trump’s pardoning of three war criminals, burnishing his brand of support for official lawlessness and thuggish brutality. He may mistakenly believe this endears him to the military — which wants nothing to do with them — but it’s also meant to hype authoritarian support among his most rabid supporters.

Second, hisRoy Cohn-style attorney general, William Barr, delivered a widely criticized authoritarian screed to the Federalist Society, portraying the impeachment inquiry as dangerous to the rule of law, rather than warranted by Trump’s self-professed crimes. Third, legal scholar Steven Calabresi, chair of the Federalist Society’sboard of directors, wrote a pair of opinion articles accusing Democrats of violating Trump’s rights, one of which, according to Steven Mazie, the Economist’s Supreme Court correspondent, “reads like the first draft of an op-ed by a MAGA middle-schooler who was inspired by Jacob Wohl’s erstwhile Twitter account.”

The combination of Trump’s blatant endorsement of lawlessness and the double-whammy high-profile embarrassments of Calabresi and Barr reflects something much broader and profoundly troubling. The latter two offer striking indicators of just how seriously this is impacting establishment conservatism, in a way that can’t be fobbed off on Trump alone, while Trump’s pardons of war criminals — following earlier pardons, including that of ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio — not only enable brute lawlessness in uniform, but points towards outright valorization in the future, especially if performed in direct support of Trump himself.

To better understand the role of the conservative legal movement, I turned to two law professors I’ve interviewed before: Eric J. Segall, author of “Originalism as Faith,” to help illuminate the role that faith has played in this process, and David Pozen, co-author (with Joseph Fishkin) of the paper, “Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball,” which starts making sense of how the political asymmetry discussed above impacts norm-violating practices, with profound systemic results. In that paper, Fishkin and Pozen write:

The “restorationist” constitutional narratives and interpretive theories promoted by Republican politicians and lawyers, [this] Essay suggests, serve to legitimate the party’s use of constitutional hardball.

While this has surely been the elite focus of the actors involved, movement conservatives have also made remaking the Supreme Court and the entire judicial branch central to their politics in ways progressives have not, and this means engaging in authoritarian mobilization via threat manipulation, as described in “The Long Southern Strategy.”

Originalismplays a key role in this, but the meaning of that term shifted sharply in the process. At first, Segall told me, the originalist position argued that judges shouldn’t be engaged in moral reasoning:

It’s not for judges to select the best moral position for a country, it’s for people who are elected to do it. Unless judges can point to something in the text of the Constitution or something clear in the history, then judges should say look, the Constitution doesn’t speak to this, vote on it.

Originalism, at first, “was inextricably tied to deference. That’s the only way that works.”

But that all changed when conservatives gained control of the court in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Segall says: “After 12 years of Reagan-Bush judges, the people who embraced originalism dropped the deference part.” That meant a return of moral reasoning, “because history cannot answer modern problems,” and while conservatives won’t admit that, “it’s true and they act that way.” The Constitution is silent about the rights of transgender people or the definition of marriage, to cite obvious examples....

quite long]

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Barr is the most dangerous Trump official — and it could put him on a collision course with Chief Justice Roberts

thru looking glass?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/16/attorney-general-barr-accuses-democrats-using-oversight-powers-try-cripple-executive-branch/

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Attorney General Barr accuses Democrats of ‘war’ on Trump in speech decried as partisan

Attorney General William P. Barr described a “war” against a “duly elected government” at a conference of the Federalist Society. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

Hannah Knowles

November 16, 2019

Attorney General William P. Barr accused Democrats on Friday of using their oversight powers to sabotage the executive branch, criticizing the “resistance” to President Trump and what he called a broader erosion in the commander in chief’s rightful authority.

The Trump appointee described a “war” against a “duly elected government” at a conference of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group that has played a key role in the administration’s efforts to seat record numbers of right-leaning federal judges.

“The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of resistance against this administration,it is the left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law,” Barr told his audience of lawyers at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel.

To critics, the speech was overly partisan and even “authoritarian.” It prompted some calls for Barr’s impeachment from lawyers and legal scholars, many of whom believe his views of presidential power are too expansive. Barr says the Constitution’s creators envisioned a strong executive.

His speech came amid a newly public, high-stakes phase of Democrat-led investigations into the White House, as impeachment hearings examine whether Trump abused his office to secure a foreign country’s probe of his political rival. Barr recently declined Trump’s request that he hold a news conference defending Trump in the inquiry by saying the president broke no laws in a call to Ukraine’s president, individuals familiar with the situation told The Washington Post.

But the attorney general was vociferous Friday in his defense of Trump’s actions in office, saying legislators are the ones who have overstepped their bounds. Judges, too, have interfered with the president’s authority in recent years, he said.

“I don’t deny that Congress has some implied authority,” he said. “But the sheer volume of what we see today, the pursuit of scores of parallel investigations through an avalanche of subpoenas, is plainly designed to incapacitate the executive branch and indeed is touted as such.”

Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics attorney in the George W. Bush administration, called the attorney general’s statements “authoritarian,” comparing the Federalist Society talk to another Barr speech that criticized “radical secularists.”

Barr’s talk was “an attack on our Constitution and on the rule of law,” the University of Minnesota law professor tweeted.

The speech drew praise, however, from Trump supporters who have long said the administration has been unfairly attacked. Inside the Mayflower Hotel, Barr got enthusiastic applause.

The attorney general has been warning for decades of “legislative encroachments” on the president’s power, as he put it in a 1989 memo that his Democratic successor quickly replaced with one that recognized a bigger role for Congress.

Speaking Friday, Barr traced a “steady grinding down” of executive authority to the mid-1960s, saying the trend had quickened after the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

Barr emphasized the president’s purview over policy and diplomacy and argued for the executive branch’s ability to keep its conversations secret from what he called a meddling Congress. For the attorney general, the so-called resistance to the president implies a “dangerous” notion of insurgency against a military occupation.

He pointed to Trump’s election as a mandate for his actions.

“While the president has certainly thrown out the traditional Beltway playbook and punctilio, he was up front about what he wanted to do, and the people decided they wanted him to serve as president,” Barr said.

The attorney general defended specific Trump administration policies such as a travel ban aimed at citizens of mostly majority-Muslim countries, pointing to court victories. The Supreme Court upheld that policy last year in a close ruling that found Trump can bar travelers for national security reasons.

Barr contended the Obama administration wielded executive power more aggressively than its successor — for example, through its creation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protects certain undocumented immigrants known as “Dreamers” from deportation.

Barr’s speech reiterated views that were controversial during his confirmation earlier this year, too.

His “vision of presidential power is contrary to the constitutional system of checks and balances that lies at the heart of our Constitution,” Neil Kinkopf, a law professor at Georgia State University, testified at hearings on Barr’s nomination.

Democrats were especially wary of how Barr would handle special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of the president, pointing to a 2018 memo Barr wrote arguing that Mueller was interpreting obstruction of justice too liberally. In hearings, Barr would not promise to release the special counsel’s report.

Barr was confirmed in a 54-45 vote falling mostly along party lines.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/the-unbearable-wrongness-of-william-barr-professor-of-secular-studies-explains-why-secularism-doesnt-destroy-moral-order/

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The unbearable wrongness of William Barr: Professor of secular studies explains why secularism doesn’t destroy moral order

William Barr image by U.S. Department of Justice

Written by Phil Zuckerman / Salon November 10, 2019

Last month, in what Jeffrey Toobin called “the worst speech given by an Attorney General of the United States in modern history,” Attorney General William Barr offered a lecture at Notre Dame Law School in which he denounced secularism as a “social pathology” that destroys the “moral order.” After blaming secularists for a host of contemporary problems — including depression, drug overdosing, and violence — Barr explained that without belief in a “transcendent Supreme Being” and adherence to “God’s eternal law,” the “possibility of any healthy community life crumbles.” Unless we follow “God’s instruction manual,” he sermonized, there will be “real-world consequences for man and society” — consequences that are not pretty, but quite grim. For without religion, there can be no “moral culture” and society will inevitably fall prey to humanity’s “capacity for great evil.”

Such hackneyed assertions are not new. Pious people of power have been scapegoating the non-religious for centuries, characterizing non-believers as threats to the nation, and declaring that without religion, there can be no moral social order. And like those before him who have made such claims — from Newt Gingrich to the prophet Muhammed — William Barr is wrong.

When lots of people in a given society stop being religious of their own accord, such organic secularization does not result in the evaporation of morality in society, nor national decay. For instance, the most secular countries in the world today fare much better on nearly every measure of peace, prosperity, and societal well-being — including infant mortality, life expectancy, educational attainment, economic prosperity, freedom, levels of corruption, and so forth — than the most religious countries. In fact, those countries with the highest murder rates — such as Jamaica, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, and Brazil — are extremely religious, while those countries with the lowest murder rates — such as Iceland, Canada, Slovenia, Norway, and the Netherlands — are among the most secular nations in the world. Heck, Singapore and the Czech Republic are among the least religious nations on earth, while Brazil and the Philippines are among the most God-worshipping, yet the latter’s murder rates are over ten times higher than the former’s, and the crime rate of never-been-Christian, strongly secular Japan is 80 times lower than El Salvador’s, a Catholic nation neck-deep in worship of Barr’s “Supreme Transcendent Being.”

Similar correlations hold within our own country: on almost every measure of societal well-being — from poverty rates to STD rates to DUIs — the most secular states tend to fare the best, while the most religious tend to fare the worst. For example, among the states with the highest gun violence and murder rates, many are among the most religious — e.g., Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Arkansas — while among those with the lowest gun violence and murder rates, many are among the least religious states, such as New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, New York, Washington, Massachusetts, and Minnesota.

Of course, such correlations don’t prove that secularism causes these more positive outcomes experienced by less religious societies. But they do knock the knees out of Barr’s thesis that secularism is a destructive force. For if secularism resulted in moral deterioration, then highly secular societies would be decaying bastions of crime and misery, while the strongly religious would be shining beacons of liberty and harmony. But we find just the opposite reality: the nations with the best overall quality of life are among the most secular countries in the world. And while numerous factors account for the differing degrees of societal well-being — factors that have nothing to do with religion or secularism — that’s exactly the point. Societies thrive or fail because of their social policies, laws, economic opportunities, civil institutions, and government regulations — not because of their faith in God, or lack thereof.

Historical analysis is also relevant. The so-called “rise of the nones” has occurred over the last five decades, with both God-belief declining and the percentage Americans claiming no religious affiliation skyrocketing, from less than 5% up to 26% today. And yet, over the course of those same decades, America’s poverty rate has precipitously declined, and the national violent crime rate has gone down by 51%! Clearly, secularism isn’t the hindrance to moral social progress Barr would have us believe.

At the individual level, while religiously-active people do volunteer and donate more money to charity than their secular peers — at least in the US, if not elsewhere — secular people are notably moral in other ways; they are, on average, less racist, less ethnocentric, less homophobic, less militaristic, less authoritarian, and less likely to hit their children than their religious peers; they are also more likely to support women’s equality, reproductive rights, sane gun control, death with dignity, animal welfare and efforts to fight climate change. Finally, atheists are significantly under-represented in prison.

But how can secular people be moral if they don’t believe in God? Easy. Contrary to Barr’s perspective, morality did not start with the Bible. Human communities began constructing ethical codes of conduct long before the world’s major religions arrived on the scene. And that’s because morality first developed during our long evolutionary past, when cooperation, honesty, and altruism increased group survival. Concomitantly, our brains long ago developed neurological pathways and peptides that enhanced our ability to be empathetic and compassionate — the two fundamental cornerstones of a moral orientation. We’ve also learned how to treat others through socialization and enculturation. And our innate ability to think, reflect, and reason has consistently led most of us to the basic, universal ethical principle that we ought to treat people the way we ourselves would like to be treated.

Although religion preaches many moral precepts, it by no means holds a monopoly on them. Ethical life abounds well beyond the confines of church, Bible, and belief in gods. Those who actively scapegoat the secular as pathologically immoral are purposefully spreading fear, and division — and in so doing, violate the very moral orientation they claim to champion.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/heres-why-roger-stones-upcoming-trial-could-deal-a-major-blow-to-trump-at-a-perilous-time/

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Here’s why Roger Stone’s upcoming trial could deal a major blow to Trump at a perilous time

Written by Alex Henderson October 31, 2019

The Ukraine scandal and the U.S. House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump have been drawing so much media attention that previous Trump-related scandals haven’t been in the news as much — for example, the looming criminal trial of the president’s long-time associate and self-described “dirty trickster” Roger Stone. But the U.S. Department of Justice hasn’t forgotten about Stone, who will appear in court beginning on Tuesday, November 5. And Stone, journalists David Corn and Dan Friedman report in Mother Jones, could still be problematic for Trump.

Stone is facing federal charges that include obstruction of justice and witness tampering. And when he goes to trial on November 5, Corn and Friedman note, he will also be “facing charges that he lied to Congress about his interactions with WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign as the organization was publicly disseminating Democratic material stolen by Russian hackers.”

Explaining what Stone’s trial could mean for Trump, they add: “Though the trial will determine whether Stone tried to bamboozle a congressional investigation, it could answer two bigger questions about the president: did Trump use or try to use Stone as a conduit to WikiLeaks, and did Trump lie to Special Counsel Robert Mueller? The former might not be illegal; the latter could be a crime.”

Earlier this year, Attorney General William Barr publicly released, in redacted form, former Special Counsel Mueller’s final report for the Russia investigation — and most of the references to Stone in the report were redacted, Corn and Friedman point out, “because his trial was pending.” However, the journalists add that the Mueller Report “contains clues suggesting that the full story of Stone’s involvement in the Trump-Russia scandal goes beyond what’s publicly known — and that it implicates Trump.”

In 2016, Democratic e-mails were stolen by Russia hackers and given to WikiLeaks, which published them online — and Stone, in 2016, was in touch with both the Trump campaign and the Russian hacker known by the assumed identity Guccifer 2.0.

Corn and Friedman explain, “If Trump or his senior campaign aides thought Stone was communicating with WikiLeaks — whether or not he actually was — and they were receiving information from him related to WikiLeaks, that would mean they believed then that the Trump campaign had a back-channel contact to WikiLeaks as it participated in the Russian operation. Trump has long shouted there was ‘no collusion,’ but perhaps Trump thought at the time that he and his campaign were colluding. After all, a significant Trump adviser consorting with WikiLeaks at this point could be construed as some sort of collusion.”

And as journalist Marcy Wheeler argued on Sept. 6., pre-trial documents indicate that Trump was in closer contact with Stone in 2016 than he told Mueller during the Russia investigation. Trump told Mueller he spoke to Stone “from time to time during the campaign,” but the documents indicate that Trump “spoke to Stone a lot.”

Trump denied recalling any discussions with Stone on a number of fronts, saying: “I do not recalldiscussing WikiLeaks with him, nor do I recall being aware of Mr. Stone having discussed WikiLeaks with individuals associated with my campaign, although I was aware that WikiLeaks was the subject of media reporting and campaign-related discussion at the time.”

However, as Wheeler notes, the evidence for the Stone’s trial included seven different phone numbers for Trump — four for him personally and three for his assistants and bodyguard — suggesting they talked quite frequently. And though he didn’t charge the president for any lies, Mueller did indicate in his testimony to Congress that Trump’s answers to the special counsel were not all truthful. Stone’s trial could shed more light on this claim.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment strategy has clearly focused on the Ukraine scandal, largely leaving aside the Mueller Report. But as Corn and Friedman point out in their Mother Jones article, there is a connection between the two.

“In a way,” the Mother Jones journalists explain, “the Russia affair led to the Ukraine scandal, with Trump pressing the Ukrainian president to investigate — and prove — a nutty conspiracy theory that claimed Moscow did not hack the 2016 election.”

Stone’s trial, they add, will bring back memories of the Russia investigation at a time when the House will be weighing whether or not Trump’s Ukraine-related activities should result in articles of impeachment against him.

“This trial of a conniving Trump confidante who specializes in the political dark arts will be a reminder of the original scandal of the Trump Administration that has tainted and undermined his presidency,” Corn and Friedman report, “and it could add another big lie — and a possible crime — to Trump’s long record of wrongdoing.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trump-and-bill-barr-are-still-working-to-cover-up-vladimir-putins-campaign-against-democracy/

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Trump and Bill Barr are still working to cover up Vladimir Putin’s campaign against democracy

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon October 25, 2019

During his otherwise subdued testimony before Congress this summer, former special counsel Robert Mueller did turn to more dramatic language when discussing one issue: Russia’s efforts to undermine American democracy.

“Over the course of my career, I’ve seen a number of challenges to our democracy. The Russian government’s effort to interfere in our election is among the most serious,” Mueller said in his opening statement. “This deserves the attention of every American.”

Well, two Americans who have decided to give it their attention are Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr. But instead of trying to stop such efforts, their plan is quite clearly to use the power of the United States government to cover up the Russian conspiracy — and intimidate any law enforcement officials who might feel the urge to fight similar criminal conspiracies going into the 2020 elections.

As the New York Times reported late Thursday, the Justice Department, which Barr took over after Trump ran out previous Attorney General Jeff Sessions for failing to fully evacuate himself of all remaining traces of integrity, has opened a criminal investigation into the origins of the Russian investigation run by Mueller.

Remember this: Mueller uncovered a vast Russian conspiracy that pulled off something the Watergate burglars never could. Russians or their allies successfully stole information from Democratic Party officials that was used to bolster conspiracy theories that eventually cost the Democratic nominee the election. Mueller also discovered that Trump knew about this conspiracy, encouraged it publicly, and attempted to get involved but apparently failed —probably because the Russians concluded he was unreliable, and involving him was more trouble than it was worth. Mueller also discovered that Trump conducted a lengthy campaign to cover up the Russian conspiracy, resulting in a list of 10 incidents that, if Trump were not protected by his office, could result in federal charges of obstruction of justice.

Just because the Mueller investigation is over doesn’t mean Trump’s efforts to cover up for Vladimir Putin’s campaign against democracy have ended. On the contrary, the obstruction of justice campaign has expanded. Now, under the guidance of Barr, it’s being run by the Department of Justice itself.

It’s quite clear what’s going on here. Barr almost certainly doesn’t really believe that DOJ officials, under Mueller’s guidance, broke any laws in investigating the Russian criminal conspiracy or Trump’s efforts to protect it. Instead, by opening this phony investigation, he intends both to shore up Trump’s conspiracy theories claiming that the Russia scandal is all a Democratic hoax, and to use the threat of criminal charges to intimidate any government officials who might have a hankering to protect the 2020 election from any future such conspiracies, involving the Russians or anyone else.

There’s good reason to fear this phony investigation could lead to human rights abuses. Both Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe were fired from the FBI as part of Trump’s efforts to shore up his conspiracy theories denouncing the Russia investigation. Both men are no doubt aware that Trump may seek seeking to arrest them under false pretenses, as part of his scapegoating campaign.

Another interesting point here is that Barr is doing is exactly what Trump, using the threat of withheld military aid, tried to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to do: Open up a phony investigation in order to smear Democrats and deny that the Russian government was behind the criminal attack on the 2016 election.

The difference is that Zelensky resisted, even under great pressure from the twin threats of soldiers dying and the possibility of further Russian invasion. Barr, on the other hand, is choosing to be a scumbag of his own accord, using lies and threats of imprisonment to intimidate those who would stand up for democracy.

(It’s worth noting here that Barr takes time out of his busy schedule of undermining democracy to give lectures implying that societal morality is being undermined by adults having consensual sex in the privacy of their own homes. I’d call him out regarding his hypocrisy around Trump, but it’s safe to say the president’s thing isn’t consensual sex. Sexual assault probably falls right into what Barr calls the “customs and traditions which reflect the wisdom and experience of the ages.”)

As Heather Digby Parton noted at Salon, Barr’s in this because he’s a true ideological opponent of democracy, and sees his role as continuing to promote a “long-term project to transform the U.S. into an undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian plutocracy” that goes back at least to the 1980s. In this, Barr’s views are complementary to Putin’s goal of undermining democracy around the world, in order to demoralize the hopes of Russians at home who are getting sick of living under his authoritarian rule.

Trump, on the other hand, is in this for the same reason he does anything: Pure self-interest. Why he has such unwavering enthusiasm for the authoritarian Russian government, and such eagerness to help realize Putin’s goals in the U.S., remains something of a black box. One day, perhaps, his tax returns will finally be released and shed some light on the situation. But there can be little doubt that finances have something to do with it, as Mueller’s investigation revealed. In addition, Trump clearly has the idea that discrediting the Mueller investigation, even if that means trying to prosecute former government officials under false pretenses, will help him in the 2020 election.

Ultimately, this is one more reason that Democrats should stop trying to contain the impeachment inquiry to the Ukraine scandal. After all, what Trump tried to do in Ukraine — use that government’s resources to open phony investigations of his opponents and discredit evidence of his own corruption — is the same thing he is trying to do here. The only difference is, here at home he’s succeeding. The attorney general should not be allowed to use the DOJ as a legal hit squad for the president, devoted to gutting democracy. It’s time to open an impeachment inquiry into Bill Barr, as well.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/bill-barrs-alternate-universe-investigation-has-a-goal-right-wing-authoritarian-rule

no lnx

Bill Barr’s alternate universe ‘investigation’ has a goal: Right-wing authoritarian rule

Written by Heather DigbyParton October 25, 2019

Students of the modern conservative movement often date the recent supercharged radicalization of the Republican Party to the rise of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution in the early 1990s. It’s true that the GOP went seriously off the rails during that period and the craziness has been picking up speed ever since. But in reality, the conservative movement has been radical from its beginnings, starting with the anti-communist crusade after World War II all the way through Goldwater to Reagan, Gingrich and now Trump. Now it has finally shed all trappings of a sophisticated political ideology, culminating in this surreal parody of a presidency in 2019. The conservative “three legged stool” of small government, traditional values and global military leadership has completely disintegrated.

But one aspect of that earlier conservative movement has continued to chug along with its long-term project to transform the U.S. into an undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian plutocracy. That would be the group of far-right lawyers who started the Federalist Society,with the goal of packing the judiciary with true believers, along with a certain group of Reagan-era legal wunderkinds who came to believe that the GOP could dominate the presidency for decades to come. They developed the theory of the “unitary executive,” originally advanced by Reagan’s odious attorney general Ed Meese ( recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom)which holds that massive, unaccountable power is vested in the president of the United States.

Attorney General William Barr was one of those lawyers, along with White House counsel Pat Cipollone, former appeals court judge Michael Luttig and others who encouraged Barr to take the job, particularly after his famous memo declaring that what any normal person would see as obstruction of justice doesn’t apply to the president. (In a nutshell, Barr agrees with former President Richard Nixon, who said, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.”)

Barr is described as supremely confident in his beliefs, which is to say that his overweening arrogance is not an act put on someone who is overcompensating to hide insecurity. He believes in this theory and when it became obvious that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was not long for the job, Barr and his legal cabal appear to have seen the clueless and corrupt Donald Trump as a perfect instrument to test their theory, and perhaps set legal precedents that would enable future right-wing presidents to use the full power of the presidency to dominate American politics without regard to democratic norms or congressional checks and balances.Indeed, they had been setting the stage for such a man for decades.

It’s also obviously the case that Barr, and perhaps his Reaganite cronies as well, are suffering from the malady known as Fox News Brain Rot, the symptoms of which are an extreme susceptibility to absurd right-wing conspiracy theories and an inability to believe anything that contradicts them. (Barr once said that there was more evidence for the bogus Uranium One charges than the Russian interference in the 2016 election, which confirms the diagnosis.)

That is the toxic combination of views has the Attorney General of the United States running all over the world seeking evidence to back up a ridiculous conspiracy theory in which Ukraine, the “deep state,” the Intelligence agencies of Italy, the U.K. and Australia, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee all conspired to frame Russia and Donald Trump in the 2016 election. They call this an investigation into the “origins” of the Russia investigation, which is also being handled by the Department of Justice’s inspector general and special counsel John Durham, appointed by Barr.

Barr’s personal intervention is outside the boundaries of the normal procedures, but that is yet another example of his “unitary executive” theory: He works for the president and the president has the power to assign him to any task, including being an international man of mystery. So far, Barr appears to be coming up goose eggs with the foreign intelligence services. The Wall Street Journal reported that he is “sparking discord in several foreign capitals, going outside usual channels to seek help from allies in reviewing the origins of a U.S. counterintelligence investigation begun during the 2016 presidential campaign.”

On Thursday night the Times set the political world aflame with a report that Durham has officially opened a criminal investigation into the matter.No one is sure what basis there is for this, but reports over the past week or so suggest Durham’s team is focusing intently on the people Donald Trump often rails against in his public statements, including former FBI agent Peter Strzok and possibly high-level intelligence community personnel such as former CIA chief John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper.

The timing of the story is obviously designed to counter the very bad news coming out of the House impeachment investigation in the House on a daily basis. This isn’t surprising. We’ve been expecting that Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., would hold parallel hearings into the origins of the Russia investigation, as promised. Graham is now balking because the Senate rules would require that he allow Democratic participation. (The fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee has released two substantial reports on the 2016 election, making clear that they came to the same conclusions as the FBI and the intelligence community regarding Russian interference on Trump’s behalf, also complicates matters for him.)

So Graham has been reduced to introducing a meaningless resolution saying that the House is being unfair, obviously hoping to appease Trump and keep his homegrown followers happy. According to the Daily Beast, it’s not working. In fact, TrumpWorld wants Graham to call House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff to testify before Graham’s Senate committee, which would be a serious violation of congressional norms. He seems reluctant for the moment, but who knows what he’ll be willing to do as time goes on?

So for the moment the task of bringing the Fox News alternate-universe conspiracy theory to the mainstream falls to Barr and Durham. They have both reportedly been to Ukraine in recent weeks, presumably searching for that elusive “DNC server” that Trump constantly babbles about. Maybe they will manage to delight the Trump base by trying to prosecute some FBI and CIA personnel. Barr seems willing to push the boundaries beyond anything we could have imagined, so that’s not as outrageous as it sounds.

The only remedy for this is for Congress to reassert its own prerogatives and impeach the president and, if necessary, his henchmen. If they fail to hold him accountable for the vast abuse of power and corruption of his office, the precedents will be set and the “unitary executive” will become the working model for all Republican presidents, just as Barr intends. The next one will no doubt be more efficient at using it than Donald Trump.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/god-help-us-nobel-laureate-paul-krugman-explains-how-trump-and-barr-are-using-religious-bigotry-to-distract-from-presidents-unsuitability-for-high-office/

no lnx

‘God help us’: Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman explains how Trump and Barr are using ‘religious bigotry’ to distract from president’s ‘unsuitability for high office’

Written by Alex Henderson October 16, 2019

Donald Trump’s presidency has brought one scandal after another, and this week, he is coping with a growing impeachment inquiry as well as widespread criticism over his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northeastern Syria and abandon the United States’ Kurdish allies. But according to liberal economist and veteran New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, Trump has a way of coping with multiple scandals — resorting to “religious bigotry” — and he is doing it with the help of Attorney General William Barr.

Last week, Krugman notes, Barr gave a “fiery speech” at the Notre Dame University Law School in which he railed against “militant secularists” who are out to destroy the “traditional moral order” and are to blame for everything from violence to drug addiction in the United States. And according to Krugman, such speeches are meant to distract Americans from Trump’s corruption.

“Pardon my cynicism, but I seriously doubt that Barr, whose boss must be the least godly man ever to occupy the White House, has suddenly realized to his horror that America is becoming more secular,” Krugman asserts. “No, this outburst of God-talk is surely a response to the way the walls are closing in on Trump — the high likelihood that he will be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Trump, Krugman writes, is “taking shelter behind bigotry — racial, of course, but now, religious as well.”

Krugman emphasizes:

Trump’s response to his predicament has been to ramp up the ugliness in an effort to rally his base. The racism has gotten even more explicit, the paranoia about the deep state more extreme. But who makes up Trump’s base? The usual answer is working-class whites, but a deeper dive into the data suggests that it’s more specific: it’s really evangelical working-class whites who are staying with Trump despite growing evidence of his malfeasance and unsuitability for high office.

Not only was Barr’s speech at Notre Dame a cynical effort to shelter Trump from all the terrible headlines that have come from the Ukraine scandal, Krugman writes — it was also horribly misleading in its critique of secular societies. The Times journalist explains, “Barr’s claim that secularism is responsible for violence happens to be empirically verifiable nonsense.”

No matter how much Trump and Barr play the Culture War card, Krugman stresses, the Ukraine scandal won’t be any less repulsive.

“The efforts of Trump’s henchmen to use the specter of secularism to distract people from their boss’ sins probably won’t work,” Krugman asserts. “But I could be wrong. And if I am wrong — if religious bigotry turns out to be a winning strategy — all I can say is, God help us.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/william-barrs-corruption-tour-continues-with-secret-rupert-murdoch-meeting/

...Trump’s top cop, Attorney General William Barr, had a private meeting in New York with none other than the ogre of media, Rupert Murdoch.According to *The New York Times*, Murdoch and Barr met Wednesday at Murdoch’s residence. Whether or not there were any others in attendance is not clear, and what the two men discussed over eye of newt and goblets of blood is also unknown. What is known is that Murdoch is powerful and he represents a lot of right-wing propaganda outlets, and Barr is suspected of having involved himself in high crimes and treason.

Fox News has been a poisonous beacon of Trump’s misinformation campaign against the world and reality for the past few years but in recent months, the cable network’s unwavering support of the president has shown some cracks. This has been coupled with random attacks from the sputtering orange white supremacist himself, unhappy at the network for what he has seemingly perceived as a betrayal...

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this is the inverse of mueller as savior?

Following the confirmation of William Barr to the position of attorney general in February, Sean Hannity pushed one message: Investigate the president’s political enemies, or suffer the consequences. It appears Hannity got his wish.

This week, Trump’s campaign press secretary Kayleigh McEnany gave up the game. In an interview on his radio show, Hannity stated that Trump is opposed by “pretty much everybody except for like me” and subsequently asked McEnany to assess the impact that“the media mob” would have on the 2020 election. McEnany responded,“Yeah, the work that you do every night, Sean, is going to go a long way. It already has. We now have the Justice Department looking into the misdeeds of the Obama administration."

Hannity and Fox have long shilled for the president, attacking his enemies and shielding him from criticism at every turn. However, attributing a federal investigation to Hannity takes the network’s influence to a new level.

As Media Matters’ Matt Gertz pointed out this week, “It was inevitable for Hannity’s pro-Trump commentary to become the foundation of the president’s reelection campaign. That the campaign acknowledges that messaging might come via a federal investigation is an ominous sign.”

Barr’s ‘suspicious’ decision to ignore a federal judge’s order over the release of Flynn transcripts put the AG in major jeopardy: legal scholars

In interviews with a constitutional law scholar and a former…

Trump’s Roy Cohns: William Barr has the power, but Rudy Giuliani slings the mud

While he was in Japan, Donald Trump demanded that the…

Trump just issued a sweeping order to give Bill Barr expanded authority to review the Russia probe’s origins

Trump just issued a sweeping order to give Bill Barr expanded authority to review the Russia probe’s origins Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead

written by Cody Fenwick May 24, 2019

President Donald Trump issued a sweeping order to the intelligence community on Thursday, directing it to comply with Attorney General Bill Barr’s efforts to probe the origins of the Russia…

President Donald Trump issued a sweeping order to the intelligence community on Thursday, directing it to comply with Attorney General Bill Barr’s efforts to probe the origins of the Russia investigation that has hung over his presidency. It also expanded Barr’s declassification authority.

Press Secretary Sarah Sanders released the following statement:

Today, at the request and recommendation of the Attorney General of the United States, President Donald J. Trump directed the intelligence community to quickly and fully cooperate with the Attorney General’s investigation into surveillance activities during the 2016 Presidential election. The Attorney General has also been delegated full and complete authority to declassify information pertaining to this investigation, in accordance with the long-established standards for handling classified information. Today’s action will help ensure that all Americans learn the truth about the events that occurred, and the actions that were taken, during the last Presidential election and will restore confidence in our public institutions.

News reports recently revealed that Barr had directed a U.S. attorney to examine the origins of the investigation, despite the fact that another U.S. attorney and the Justice Department inspector general have already been reviewing the case. Because of the president’s obvious hostility toward the investigation and Barr’s fealty to Trump, it appears to be a blatant effort to feed suspicions about the “deep state” and potentially to find reasons for targeting the president’s perceived enemies.

“Whoa,” said Matthew Miller, a former DOJ spokesman, in reacting to the announcement. “So Barr has the sole authority to declassify info related to the Trump investigation over the objections of the original classifying authority – CIA, NSA, etc. A huge accumulation of power and discretion to the AG that I believe is unprecedented.”

“National security takes a back seat to Trump demands that Barr gin up an investigation into public servants at DOJ & FBI. Also today, Trump called prosecutors killers & accused people by name of treason after a reminder the punishment is execution,” said Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor. “There’s no way this ends well.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/devin-nunes-planned-secret-meeting-with-bill-barr-to-launch-investigation-against-mueller-probe/

According to a report from Politico, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) is making plans to meet behind the scenes with newly appointed Attorney General Bill Barr to set the stage for launching investigations into Justice Department officials who took part into the inquiry into President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The report states Democrats are furious with the GOP lawmaker who ran interference for the president when Republicans controlled the House.