barr 3 bak
5/20
bak 920 html unmask names
node expansion rate // djt? rivals AN 1 day total?
remember auditioned for gig (document? on fox?) that prez = exec. "l'exec c'est-moi"
doj defends against rape charge
https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/bill-barr-should-be-disciplined/
https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/barr-burning-man/
no lnx twt
Appeals court orders release of secret memo Barr 'used to undercut the Mueller report'
Jessica Corbett and Common DreamsAugust 21, 2022
A federal appeals court on Friday ordered the release of a 2019 memorandum about whether then-President Donald Trump obstructed Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election....
https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/barr-burning-man/
no lnx twt
Appeals court orders release of secret memo Barr 'used to undercut the Mueller report'
Jessica Corbett and Common DreamsAugust 21, 2022
A federal appeals court on Friday ordered the release of a 2019 memorandum about whether then-President Donald Trump obstructed Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
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Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)—the watchdog fighting to reveal the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) memo prepared for then-Attorney General Bill Barr—celebrated the ruling as a win.
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"Attorney General Barr cited this memo as a reason not to charge President Trump with obstruction of justice," said CREW spokesperson Jordan Libowitz in a statement. "The American people deserve to know what it says. Now they will."
The unanimous ruling from three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed a lower court's opinion about the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel memo—a redacted version of which was made public last year.
D.C. Circuit Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, joined by Judges Judith Rogers and David Tatel, outlined how the DOJ tried to conceal most of the memo "based on the deliberative process privilege, which protects records documenting an agency's internal deliberations en route to a governmental decision," but the lower court judge, Amy Berman Jackson, rejected that argument.
Jackson determined the DOJ failed to show that the privilege applied—specifically, she found that the department "had not identified a relevant agency decision as to which the memorandum formed part of the deliberations," Friday's ruling highlights.
"The department's submissions, the court explained, indicated that the memorandum conveyed advice about whether to charge the president with a crime. But the court's in camera review of the memorandum revealed that the department in fact never considered bringing a charge," it continues. "Instead, the memorandum concerned a separate decision that had gone entirely unmentioned by the government in its submissions to the court—what, if anything, to say to Congress and the public about the Mueller report."
As Bloomberg detailed:
Srinivasan... wrote that any analysis in the memo about bringing obstruction charges was more like a "thought experiment."
Srinivasan noted that the department expressed "regret" about leaving a "misimpression that an actual charging decision was under consideration," but he wrote that it missed opportunities to address the true purpose of the memo.
The court rejected the government's request for another chance to make the case for keeping the full memo secret. Srinivasan wrote that the Justice Department might have successfully argued to keep the memo sealed if it had revealed the public messaging purpose from the beginning and then tried to invoke what's known as the deliberative process privilege, but that it was too late now.
The DOJ has a week to consider appealing the latest decision. The Washington Post reported that spokespeople for the department and Barr declined to comment.
Politico noted Friday:
Trump was never charged in Mueller's probe and the special prosecutor's final report declined to opine on whether what he did in response to the investigation amounted to a crime.
However, some Trump opponents have called on the Attorney General Merrick Garland to reconsider the issue now that Trump is no longer president. Release of the long-sought DOJ memo could fuel those calls and draw more unwanted attention to Trump's potential criminal liability at a time when he is besieged by a slew of other legal woes relating to his handling of classified government records, his role in inspiring many of those involved in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and his broader efforts to overturn Joe Biden's win in the 2020 presidential election.
As Common Dreams reported Thursday, a federal judge gave the DOJ a week to propose redactions to the warrant affidavit containing the information that led to last week's search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump's Florida home.
Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020: In White House meetings, Meadows and President Trump express displeasure with Barr for telling news media the Justice Department had found no election fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election.
In the early afternoon, the Associated Press publishes an :{interview:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: with Barr, in which the Attorney General said, “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Barr attends a previously scheduled meeting with Meadows at 3:00 PM. Pat Cipollone joins the meeting. “Surprisingly to Barr, Meadows hated” the news story, but the chief of staff also seemed to acknowledge the election outcome, Leonnig and Rucker report.
President Trump hears Barr is in the White House and asks to see him. According to Leonnig and Rucker, President Trump yells at Barr about the AP report while Meadows is present. Present in the meeting as well are Will Levi, Barr’s chief of staff; Eric Herschmann, senior White House adviser (who earlier served as a personal attorney on Trump’s first impeachment team); and Pat Cipollone, White House Counsel. :{Bender described:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: President Trump’s reaction in the meeting as a “volcanic eruption.”
Barr responds in the meeting by stating that Trump’s allegations of election fraud are completely false. Barr calls the allegations, “bullshit,” and that Trump’s legal team is a “clown show” (reporting by Leonnig and Rucker; Bender, :{Jonathan Karl:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:). “No self-respecting lawyer is going anywhere near it. It’s just a joke. That’s why you are where you are,” Barr :{says:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}: in the meeting.
Leonnig and Rucker also report the following part of the exchange:
“Bill, did you say this?” Trump said, his voice sharp and quick. “Yeah,” Barr said. “I said it.”
“How could you say that?” Trump asked.
Barr replied that his statement was true, and that he was merely answering the reporter’s question.
“Why didn’t you just not answer the question?” Trump said.
Then the president, his voice getting higher, switched oddly to speak of himself in the third person.
“There’s no reason for you to have said this!” he said. “You must hate Trump!”
“We’ve looked into these things, and they’re nonsense,” Barr says in the meeting.
On the specifics, “It’s complete nonsense,” Barr says about an allegation that Pennsylvania ballots had been backdated, and that there was no evidence of ballot stuffing in Georgia. Barr also explains in detail why Trump’s allegations of fraud in Wayne County, Michigan were false. “There’s no evidence of substantial fraud that would change the election,” Barr reiterates.
“Meadows sat silently on the opposite side of the dining room, with his arms crossed, a posture that seemed to say, This is DOJ’s problem,” Leonnig and Rucker report (see also Karl). Cipollone, in contrast, “at one point interjected to tell the president that Barr’s department had been dutifully investigating the fraud claims.”
After Barr leaves the room, the president tells Meadows he had every reason to and should fire Barr (Leonnig and Rucker).
As indicated, the meeting is reported in three different books. “The details of this meeting were described to me by several people present,” Karl :{writes:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:.
Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2020: Meadows asks Attorney General Barr to stay until the end of the term.
Meadows calls Barr early in the morning to ask him to stay until the end of the term. :{According to Bender, :(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box"):}:“Barr agreed, and immediately regretted it.” Barr resigned on Dec. 14 and was replaced by Jeffrey Rosen.
Karl reports the following exchange:
“I think there’s a way through this,” Meadows told him. He could prevent Trump from firing him, but he wanted an assurance from Barr that he wouldn’t resign. “Are you willing to stay?” Meadows asked.
“I’m not going to sandbag you,” Barr said. “I will give you a warning if I’m going to leave, and No. 2, I’ll stay as long as I’m needed.”
Friday, Dec. 11, 2020: Trump decides not to fire Gina Haspel, despite Meadows’ attempts to have her removed.
hunter kos ref NYT
no lnx
NEWS ANALYSIS
Taking Page From Authoritarians, Trump Turns Power of State Against Political Rivals
President Trump took a step even Richard M. Nixon avoided in his most desperate days: openly ordering direct, immediate government action against specific opponents, timed to serve his re-election campaign.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was ordered by President Trump to declassify thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
By David E. Sanger
Oct. 10, 2020
President Trump’s order to his secretary of state to declassify thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails, along with his insistence that his attorney general issue indictments against Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., takes his presidency into new territory — until now, occupied by leaders with names like Putin, Xi and Erdogan.
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Mr. Trump has long demanded — quite publicly, often on Twitter — that his most senior cabinet members use the power of their office to pursue political enemies. But his appeals this week, as he trailed badly in the polls and was desperate to turn the national conversation away from the coronavirus, were so blatant that one had to look to authoritarian nations to make comparisons.
He took a step even Richard M. Nixon avoided in his most desperate days: openly ordering direct, immediate government action against specific opponents, timed to serve his re-election campaign.
“There is essentially no precedent,” said Jack Goldsmith, who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush and has written extensively on presidential powers. “We have a norm that developed after Watergate that presidents don’t talk about ongoing investigations, much less interfere with them.”
“It is crazy and it is unprecedented,” said Mr. Goldsmith, now a professor at Harvard Law School, “but it’s no different from what he has been saying since the beginning of his presidency. The only thing new is that he has moved from talking about it to seeming to order it.”
Mr. Trump’s vision of the presidency has always leaned to exercising the absolute powers of the chief executive, a writ-large version of the family business he presided over. “I have an Article II,” he told young adults last year at a Turning Point USA summit, referring to the section of the Constitution that deals with the president’s powers, “where I have the right to do whatever I want as president, but I don’t even talk about that.”
Now he is talking about it, almost daily. He is making it clear that prosecutions, like vaccines for the coronavirus, are useless to him if they come after Nov. 3. He has declared, without evidence, that there is already plenty of proof that Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden and Mrs. Clinton, among others, were fueling the charges that his campaign had links to Russia — what he calls “the Russia hoax.” And he has pressured his secretary of state to agree to release more of Mrs. Clinton’s emails before the election, reprising a yearslong fixation despite having defeated her four years ago.
Presidential historians say there is no case in modern times where the president has so plainly used his powers to take political opponents off the field — or has been so eager to replicate the behavior of strongmen. “In America, our presidents have generally avoided strongman balcony scenes — that’s for other countries with authoritarian systems,” Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian,wrote on Twitter after Mr. Trump returned from the hospital where he received Covid-19 treatment and removed his mask, while still considered contagious, as he saluted from the White House balcony.
Long ago, White House officials learned how to avoid questions about whether the president views his powers as fundamentally more constrained than those of the authoritarians he so often casts in admiring terms, including Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. They have something in common: Mr. Trump’s State Department has criticized all three for corrupting the justice systems in their countries to pursue political enemies.
(Russia, the State Department complained in its 2019 Human Rights report, engaged in a “crackdown on political opposition and other critics before and after presidential elections that Vladimir Putin won.” Turkey, it said the same year, has conducted the “arbitrary arrest and detention of tens of thousands of persons, including former opposition members of parliament.” In recent weeks. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been particularly outspoken about the state’s use of a new national security law to arrest activists and political opponents of the Chinese Communist Party.)
Mr. Pompeo has always bristled when reporters have asked him to explain what the world should believe when it reads Mr. Trump’s most authoritarian-sounding tweets. He answers that what distinguishes the United States is that it is a “rule of law” nation, and then often turns the tables on his questioners, charging that even raising the issue reveals that the reporters are partisans, not journalists, intent on embarrassing Mr. Trump and the United States.
But his anger is often wielded as a shield, one that keeps him from publicly grappling with the underlying question: How can Washington take on other authoritarians around the world — especially China, Mr. Pompeo’s nemesis — for abusing state power when the president of the United States calls for political prosecutions and politically motivated declassifications?
“We’ve never seen anything like this in an American election campaign,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former under secretary of state who is now an informal adviser to Mr. Biden. “It reduces our credibility — we look like the countries we condemn for nondemocratic practices before an election.”
“I have worked for nine secretaries of state,” Mr. Burns said. “I cannot imagine any of them intervening in an election as blatantly as what we are seeing now. Our tradition is that secretaries of state stay out of elections. If they wanted to release Hillary Clinton’s emails, they could have done it in 2017, 2018 or 2019. It is an abuse of power by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo.”
Another career diplomat who served as both ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of state, William J. Burns, said that what Mr. Trump had ordered is “exactly the kind of behavior I saw so often in authoritarian regimes in many years as an American diplomat.”
“In dealing with Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey, we would have protested and condemned such actions,” he said. “Now it’s our own government that’s engaging in them.”
“The result,” said Mr. Burns, now the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “is the hollowing out of our institutions at home, and deep corrosion of our image and influence abroad.”
In the current cases, it is unclear whether Mr. Trump will get his wish — or whether his loyal appointees will slow-walk his requests. There is some evidence they are already looking for escape hatches.
Mr. Pompeo, the administration’s most conspicuous ideologue, Mr. Trump’s most vocal loyalist and a lawyer, was clearly taken aback when the president expressed displeasure, saying he was “not happy” that the State Department had not released emails sent through Mrs. Clinton’s home server.
“You’re running the State Department, you get them out,” the president told Fox Business in an interview this week. “Forget about the fact that they were classified. Let’s go. Maybe Mike Pompeo finally finds them.”
Mr. Pompeo, one of his aides said Saturday, was in a box: The complaint about Mrs. Clinton’s home server was that she was risking exposing classified emails by not using the State Department email system — a system Russia had already infiltrated — yet Mr. Trump was demanding that they be released in full. Just days before, he had announced, over Twitter, that he was using his executive power to declassify all of them, without redactions.
“We’ve got the emails,” Mr. Pompeo responded on Fox News. “We’re getting them out. We’re going to get all this information out so the American people can see it.”
But he also hinted that many of Mrs. Clinton’s emails, mostly those that were stored on the State Department’s own system, have already been posted on the agency’s website, after an unusually diligent effort by the department to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests from Mr. Trump’s supporters. (They are often heavily redacted — to the point of containing no content — despite the president’s order to the contrary.)
“We’re doing it as fast as we can,” Mr. Pompeo told Dana Perino, a Fox News anchor who once served as President Bush’s press secretary. “I certainly think there’ll be more to see before the election.”
Mr. Pompeo clearly understands the problem: Even if he makes all of them public, they are unlikely to satisfy the president. Last year, the State Department’s own inspector general found that while Mrs. Clinton had risked compromising classified information, she did not systematically or deliberately mishandle her emails.
William P. Barr may face an even greater challenge in satisfying the president. No attorney general since John N. Mitchell, who served Mr. Nixon and brought conspiracy charges against critics of the Vietnam War, bent the Justice Department more in a president’s direction. And Mr. Nixon himself, while urging the I.R.S. to audit political opponents, stopped short of publicly calling for individual prosecutions. Yet in February, Mr. Barr told ABC News that Mr. Trump “has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case.” At the same time, he complained that the president’s tweets about the Justice Department “make it impossible for me to do my job.”
Now, clearly, the president has asked Mr. Barr to act in a criminal case — and not in a quiet phone call. Instead, he did it on Twitter and Fox News, expressing his deep disappointment with his second attorney general, for essentially the same reason he fired his first one, Jeff Sessions: insufficient blind loyalty.
His complaint appears to have been driven by Mr. Barr’s warning to the White House and other officials that there are likely to be no indictments before the election from the investigation being run by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut. Mr. Durham is searching for evidence that the inquiry into Russia was a politically motivated effort to undercut his presidency.
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Mr. Trump says the case is clear-cut. He told Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host to whom he gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the last State of the Union address, that Mr. Durham has had “plenty of time to do it.”
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“Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes — the greatest political crime in the history of our country — then we’ll get little satisfaction, unless I win,” Mr. Trump said on Fox Business.
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“If we don’t win,” he said, “that whole thing is going to be dismissed.”
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/bill-barr-battles-the-rule-of-law-in-this-war-there-are-no-bystanders/
no lnx [long, full here]
Bill Barr battles the rule of law: In this war, there are no bystanders
Trump's biggest vulnerability isn't his crimes — it's his humiliating failure
Steven Harper and Moyers & Company October 10, 2020
"With your law degrees, you will have immense power to do great harm," Harvard Law Professor Duncan Kennedy admonished our one-L torts class in 1976.
A few months later, former President Richard M. Nixon (JD, Duke, '37) — who thought Watergate had been a political "witch hunt" — uttered his infamous line, "Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal." And his former attorney general, John N. Mitchell (JD, Fordham, '38), was headed to prison.
More than 40 years after that class, United States Attorney General William P. Barr (JD, George Washington, '77) has driven home the gravity of Prof. Kennedy's admonition. When the story of the Trump era is written, history will pose a single defining question to every American lawyer: In the fight to preserve the rule of law, which side were you on?America has seen which side William Barr is on. As the nation's top law enforcement officer, the attorney general represents the "People of the United States." Early in his tenure, Barr jettisoned that role.
Operating as Trump's personal advocate, Barr has abused the power of his office to undermine the Trump-Russia investigation. Although troublesome, Barr's actions are best viewed as a case study in his modus operandi. What Barr has done to that investigation and its key players, he can do to anything and anyone. That makes Barr's methods ominous for the rule of law itself.
Hiring Barr was no accident. Early in 2017, before special counsel Robert Mueller's appointment, Trump feared that he was losing control of the Trump-Russia investigation. He was furious at then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions' (JD, Alabama, 73) for recusing himself from the ongoing probe. Referring to his former personal attorney, notorious fixer, and top aide to Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-WI) during the investigations of communist activity in the 1950s, Trump lamented, "Where's my Roy Cohn?"
A year later, he got his answer. Barr sent Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (JD, Harvard, '89) an unsolicited 19-page memo challenging the premise of Mueller's obstruction of justice investigation and urging that the special counsel should not even be permitted to question Trump. In William Barr, Trump had finally found his Roy Cohn.
First came the lies and deceptions. According to The Washington Post, as of July 9, 2020, Trump had made more than 20,000 "false or misleading claims" since assuming office. Like Trump, Barr understands the rhetorical and psychological concepts of primacy and repetition. Whoever speaks first and most frequently on an important topic has the upper hand in controlling the resulting narrative, regardless of its veracity.
From his first days in office, Barr has reinforced Trump's false assertions that the Trump-Russia investigation never should have happened. In the maelstrom that followed, truth became a casualty. So it's important to start with a brief reprise of the Mueller report's key conclusions:"[T]he Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome." (Vol. I, p. 5)
The Trump campaign "expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts." (Vol. I, p. 5)
Trump tried repeatedly to obstruct the investigation into his campaign ties to Russia.
And Mueller concluded, "[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment… Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him." (Vol. II, p. 2)
Barr's dissembling prevented the truth from gaining traction. Two days after Mueller gave Barr his final report confidentially — including summaries suitable for public dissemination — Barr sent a letter to Congress with his own misleading "summary" of Mueller's findings. It was so deceptive that Mueller himself complained to Barr immediately, saying that Barr's letter "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office's work and conclusions." The result, Mueller wrote, "is public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation."But public confusion was the objective because it led to public indifference. For another three weeks, Barr did not release even a redacted version of Mueller's report, and Mueller's dissenting letter to Barr did not surface until two weeks after that. During the intervening month-and-a-half, Barr's mischaracterizations became the only story of Mueller's findings, and they stuck. Primacy gave Barr the edge and repetition then took over.
Immediately, Trump used Barr's spin to reinforce his big lie. "No collusion, No obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION," Trump tweeted — three lies in a single post.
Then Barr made things worse — or from Trump's perspective, better. Two hours before releasing a redacted version of Mueller's report, Barr held a press conference to spin its conclusions again. He repeated Trump's false "no collusion" meme four times.
On obstruction, Barr also made this disingenuous claim: "The White House fully cooperated with the special counsel's investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims. And at the same time, the president took no act that in fact deprived the special counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation."
Here's the truth:
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From its inception, Trump attacked Mueller's investigation and repeatedly pressured then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House counsel Don McGahn (JD, Widener, '94) to curtail or terminate it. (Vol. II, pp. 77-120)
Trump refused Mueller's requests for an interview. (Vol. II, pp. C-1-2)
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Mueller said Trump's written answers to his questions were "inadequate." (Vol. II, C-2)
Trump dangled pardons aimed at influencing key witnesses, including his former national security adviser Mike Flynn, former campaign chairman Paul Manafort (JD, Georgetown, '74), and a person whose name was initially redacted from Mueller's report but who we now know is Trump's longtime confidant, Roger Stone. Trump also tried to influence and intimidate his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen (JD, Thomas M. Cooley, '91). (Vol. II, pp. 120-156)
The Rule of Law
In 1789, Thomas Jefferson wrote that a well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to democracy. Barr kneecapped the truth. When the redacted version of Mueller's report finally appeared,The Washington Post awarded him "Three Pinocchios" for his "incomplete or misleading" descriptions of Mueller's investigation and conclusions. But Barr had withheld even a redacted version so long that his false spin had irrevocably infected the body politic.
Fortunately, the rule of law has courageous defenders who honor the oath that every attorney takes to uphold the rule of law. In an opinion on a Freedom of Information Act request for an unredacted copy of Mueller's report, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton blasted Barr's pre-release "distortions" and "lack of candor." In a remarkable ruling, the respected federal judge wrote that he could not trust the attorney general of the United States:
"The speed by which Attorney General Barr released to the public the summary of Special Counsel Mueller's principal conclusions, coupled with the fact that Attorney General Barr failed to provide a thorough representation of the findings in the Mueller Report, causes the Court to question whether Attorney General Barr's intent was to create a one-sided narrative about the Mueller Report — a narrative that is clearly in some respects substantively at odds with the redacted version of the Mueller Report." (Elec. Privacy Info. Ctr. v. US Dept. of Justice, No-19-810 RBW, slip op. p. 17-18 (D.D.C. Mar 5, 2020)
Judge Walton could not reconcile "certain public representations made by Attorney General Barr with the findings in the Mueller Report." The inconsistencies caused him "to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary." (Op. p. 19)
The court's Mar. 5, 2020 rebuke came a year too late. As Jonathan Swift wrote more than two centuries ago, "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it." With Barr's help, Trump created a narrative that was at odds with the evidence set forth in Mueller's report. Barr had fired his first bullet at the rule of law and it was a bulls-eye.
But lies and false spin were just Barr's opening gambit. Trump wanted the entire investigation discredited — destroyed root and branch. Barr quickly weaponized the Justice Department. He used his prosecutorial powers as a vehicle to pursue Trump's attacks on those responsible for launching the investigation in the first place.
In a revealing exchange on May 1, 2019, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA, California-Hasting, '89) asked Barr if "the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone."
Barr stuttered, stammered, and asked her to repeat the question.
"It seems you'd remember something like that and be able to tell us," she pressed.
"I'm trying to grapple with the word 'suggest,'" Barr said. "I mean there have been discussions of, of matters out there, that, uh, they've not asked me to open an investigation."
"Perhaps they suggested?" Harris offered.
"I don't know. I wouldn't say 'suggest'," Barr hesitated.
"Hinted?" she continued.
"I don't know," he replied.
"Inferred?"
Barr didn't answer.
"You don't know," Harris said.
"No," Barr mumbled.
Delegitimizing the Investigators
Sen. Harris might have sensed where Trump and Barr were heading. Unable to erase the proof that Mueller had found, they focused on undermining the investigation itself as illegitimate and attacking the investigators as "corrupt."
Immediately after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, acting Director Andrew McCabe(JD, Washington Univ. – St. Louis, '93) authorized the Trump-Russia counterintelligence probe.Two years later, McCabe became a poster child for Trump and Barr's abuse of power. Even prior to Barr's appointment, a team of prosecutors had investigated whether McCabe had lied to investigators about improper media leaks concerning an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Those prosecutors concluded that they could not win a conviction, so Trump's chosen US attorney for the District of Columbia, Jessie Liu (JD, Yale, '98), brought in another team to go after McCabe. For months, Liu's office asked the judge handling the matter — U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton once again — for more time. By then, Barr was the attorney general. In a closed-door session on Sept. 30, 2019, Walton warned prosecutors to stop stringing McCabe along:
"I don't think people like the fact that you got somebody at the top basically trying to dictate whether somebody should be prosecuted. I just think it's a banana republic when we go down that road…"
Judge Walton added, "I just think the integrity of the process is being unduly undermined by inappropriate comments and actions by people at the top of our government. I think it's very unfortunate. And I think as a government and as a society we're going to pay a price at some point for this." (9/30/2019 Tr., p. 5)
Eventually, the case against McCabe fell apart again and a grand jury refused to indict him. But for months, Barr left McCabe twisting in the wind of legal uncertainty. Once again, defenders of the rule of law rose to the challenge. The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) won a court order requiring the release of the devastating Sept. 30 transcript of Judge Walton's earlier comments. On Feb. 14, 2020 — the day that transcript became public — the Justice Department finally informed McCabe that he would not face charges.
As Barr's efforts to investigate the investigators failed to produce Trump's desired outcome, he assigned new teams to keep trying. For example, Mueller had concluded that the FBI had opened its Trump-Russia investigation appropriately in late July 2016. (Mueller Rep., Vol. I, pp. 88-89, fn. 465) Despite knowing Mueller and claiming to respect him as a friend and colleague for years, Barr appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham (JD, Connecticut, '75) to second-guess that finding. Barr also asked foreign leaders in the United Kingdom and Italy for help in gathering information that Trump hoped would discredit Mueller's work. Trump personally made such a request of the Australian prime minister.
Likewise, in December 2019, the Justice Department's inspector general, Michael Horowitz (JD, Harvard, '87), completed an 18-month investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. Although his 400-page report found that the FBI had adequate reasons for opening the probe, Barr nevertheless asserted that the FBI's reasons were insufficient and publicly attacked Horowitz's conclusion.
Undermining the Convictions
Finally, beyond using the power of his office to pursue Trump's perceived enemies, Barr has deployed the Justice Department to help Trump's convicted friends. It was the final step in wiping the Russia investigation from the history books altogether. But Barr's manipulations also have profound implications for the rule of law.
When Mueller closed up shop in 2019, then-U.S. Attorney Liu (whose office supervised the McCabe investigation) assumed control of several special counsel prosecutions and earlier referrals, including cases against Roger Stone and Mike Flynn. But after Liu failed to get McCabe indicted, Barr replaced her with his old friend and confidant, Timothy Shea (JD, Georgetown '91) — just as the Justice Department was finalizing its sentencing recommendation in Stone's case.
In 2017, Stone had lied to the House Intelligence Committee about his role concerning Trump campaign contacts with Russia. Then he threatened a witness who was going to expose him. A jury deliberated for about seven hours before convicting Stone on all seven counts of lying to Congress and witness tampering.
As Shea replaced Liu in the District of Columbia U.S. attorney's office, career prosecutors handling Stone's case filed a brief that followed federal sentencing guidelines recommending seven to nine years in prison. Immediately, Trump tweeted that Stone's plight was "horrible," "unfair," and a "miscarriage of justice." Hours later, an official at Justice Department headquarters said that the DC office's recommendation was "extreme" and "excessive" and that a new memorandum would outline the government's revised position.
Defending the rule of law, four of the federal prosecutors who signed the sentencing memorandum resigned immediately from the case. Jonathan Kravis (Yale, JD, '04) — one of Stone's prosecutors at trial — resigned from the Justice Department altogether. That left Shea and his assistant who was newly assigned to the Stone case to file a revised memorandum asserting that the government's previously recommended sentence "could be considered excessive and unwarranted."
The following day, Trump congratulated Barr for "taking charge" of the Stone case, "which perhaps should not even been brought."
Defenders of the rule of law fought back. Appearing on national television, the former chief of the criminal fraud section of the Justice Department, Andrew Weissmann (JD, Columbia, '84) — an appointee of President George H. W. Bush — said he could think of no instance where he had even heard of the attorney general reaching into a single criminal case to weigh in on a sentencing submission. Former Attorney General Eric Holder (JD, Columbia, '76) called Barr's direct intervention "unprecedented, wrong, and ultimately dangerous."
"Public confusion was the objective, because it led to public indifference"
The most damning criticism came from Donald Ayer (JD, Harvard, '75), who had served as President George H. W. Bush's deputy attorney general and Barr's boss at one point. On Feb. 17, 2020, Ayer wrote in The Atlantic:
"All of this conduct — including Barr's personal interventions to influence or negate independent investigations or the pursuit of criminal cases, and his use of the department's resources to frustrate the checks and balances provided by other branches — is incompatible with the rule of law as we know it…"
Ayer concluded: "Bill Barr's America is not a place that anyone, including Trump voters, should want to go. It is a banana republic where all are subject to the whims of a dictatorial president and his henchmen. To prevent that, we need a public uprising demanding that Bill Barr resign immediately, or failing that, be impeached."
Trump and Barr were undeterred. Trump attacked Stone's judge, Amy Berman Jackson (JD, Harvard, JD '79), calling her "the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure." That was another Trump lie. Prison officials had made the decision about Manafort's federal housing. But Barr did not defend Jackson against Trump's attack, and the Judicial Code of Conduct prevented her from defending herself.
Instead, Barr gave an interview during which he sent Trump a message — the tweets were making it "impossible" for him to do his job. Since then, Barr's view of his job has become even clearer: obliterate all trace of the Russia investigation. Mike Flynn became a stunning example of Barr's methods.
Moving to Drop Charges After a Guilty Plea
On Dec. 1, 2017, Flynn pled guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. On Dec. 18, 2018, he again acknowledged his crimes in open court. Judge Emmett G. Sullivan (JD, Howard Univ., '71) did not hide his disgust.
"[Y]ou lied to the FBI about three different topics, and you made those false statements while you were serving as the national security advisor, the President of the United States' most senior national security aid. I can't minimize that," the judge said. "Two months later you again made false statements in multiple documents filed pursuant to the Foreign Agents Registration Act. So, 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. I mean, arguably, that undermines everything this flag over here stands for. Arguably, you sold your country out."
But after Barr became attorney general two months later, he appointed the U.S. attorney in St. Louis, Jeff Jensen (JD, St. Louis Univ., '98), to review Flynn's case. In June 2019, Flynn retained new a lawyer — Sidney Powell (JD, North Carolina, '78), a far-right conspiracy theorist. Powell wrote directly to Barr, urging him to conduct an internal review and throw out Flynn's conviction. A week later, Trump congratulated Flynn for retaining Powell, tweeting that she was a "GREAT LAWYER."
Shortly before the July 2019 trial at which Flynn was supposed to be a cooperating witness against his former business associate, he suddenly became uncooperative and prosecutors did not call him to testify. Powell then asked Judge Sullivan to nullify Flynn's conviction on the grounds that prosecutors had engaged in misconduct — claims that the judge rejected. As Flynn's sentencing approached in early January 2020, prosecutors withdrew their earlier recommendation of probation and urged Flynn's incarceration for as long as six months.
As with Roger Stone, things then changed abruptly and mysteriously in Flynn's favor. And as with Stone, Barr and his confidant, interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia Timothy Shea, made it happen. On May 7, Shea's office took the unprecedented step of moving to drop all charges against Flynn. Shea alone signed the motion with no line prosecutors joining. It included no affidavits or declarations supporting its many new factual allegations. No motion to vacate the government's prior, contrary filings and representations accompanied the filing.
The defenders of the rule of law stepped forward again. One of Flynn's prosecutors withdrew from the case and Judge Sullivan invited amicus briefs on the unusual motion. Then he assigned a former federal judge to oppose the Justice Department's move and to determine whether Flynn should be found in criminal contempt for lying to the court when he had pled guilty — twice.
Flynn's attorney sought a writ of mandamus in the District of Columbia circuit court of appeals. That, in turn, forced Judge Sullivan to hire an attorney, Beth Wilkinson (JD, Virginia, '87), to answer the mandamus petition. The circle was complete: A judge defending the rule of law now needed his own lawyer to defend himself.
In her brief on Judge Sullivan's behalf, Wilkinson wrote, "It is unprecedented for an Acting U.S. Attorney to contradict the solemn representations that career prosecutors made time and again, and undermine the district court's legal and factual findings, in moving on his own to dismiss the charge years after two different federal judges accepted the defendant's plea."
What began in March 2019 with Barr's false spin and outright lies to assuage a president's obsession with the Russia investigation had exploded into a multidimensional assault on the rule of law itself. No limiting principle has guided Barr's abuses, but he has encountered resistance. Individually and together, attorneys — especially litigators — have stepped forward:
More than 1,000 former federal prosecutors from Republican and Democratic administrations signed an open letter stating that, but for the fact that Trump was a sitting president, Mueller's proof would have led to Trump's indictment for obstruction of justice.
In connection with Roger Stone's sentencing, more than 2,600 former prosecutors and other DOJ attorneys from Republican and Democratic administrations signed an open letter condemning Barr for "interference in the fair administration of justice," "openly and repeatedly flouting" the fundamental principle of "equal justice under law," and calling on Barr to resign. They wrote, "Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies."
The president of the New York State Bar Ass'n issued a statement saying, "The intervention by senior Department of Justice officials in the sentencing of Roger Stone is an assault on a bedrock principle of the rule of law — the apolitical administration of justice. Our nation was founded on the principle that everyone must be treated equally in the eyes of the law…"
More than 2,000 former Justice Department officials from Republican and Democratic administrations signed an open letter stating that Barr had "once again assaulted the rule of law" in seeking the dismissal of Flynn's case. "Attorney General Barr's repeated actions to use the Department as a tool to further President Trump's personal and political interests have undermined any claim to the deference that courts usually apply to the Department's decisions about whether or not to prosecute a case," they wrote.
Judge Sullivan and the appeals court received numerous amicus briefs supporting the district court's exercise of judgment when deciding whether to accept the government's motion to dismiss the federal criminal charges against Flynn. Filings in support of the judge came from former federal judges, former Watergate prosecutors, legal scholars, and the New York City Bar Ass'n.
ABA President Judy Perry Martinez issued a statement declaring, "Public officials who personally attack judges or prosecutors can create a perception that the system is serving a political or other purpose rather than the fair administration of justice. It is incumbent upon public officials and members of the legal profession, whose sworn duty it is to uphold the law, to do everything in their power to preserve the integrity of the justice system."
What's next? Federal judges enjoy lifetime tenure that prevents Trump from purging the bench of his perceived judicial enemies. But Trump and his key Senate enabler with a law degree, Sen. Mitch McConnell (JD, Kentucky, '67), have boasted about filling federal judgeships at a brisk pace. Those judges must demonstrate their independence. With their actions, they have a unique opportunity to reaffirm that "equal justice under law" and "no one is above the law" are not empty platitudes, but guiding principles of our democracy.
Pundits often understate Barr's conduct as violating "norms." It is more accurate to say that he and Trump are at war with the rule of law. Federal judges and litigators throughout the country have become first-responders in the fight. The front lines have formed in courtrooms throughout the country, but lawyers away from the immediate field of battle are also making a difference.
So which side are you on?
In this war, there are no bystanders.
This article appears in the Fall 2020 issue of Litigation – The Journal of the Section of Litigation of the American Bar Association.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/barr-confirms-gops-russian-report-will-not-be-complete-by-election-day/
1020
CNN anchor Chris Cuomo on Thursday blasted Attorney General Bill Barr. Cuomo played a video of Rep. Pramila Jayapal questioning the attorney general, which has new importance after the plot to kidnap or murder Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI). In the clip, Rep. Jayapal grilled Barr about widely reported press accounts of the armed takeover of the Michigan state capitol. At least two of the men arrested appeared at the rally. https://twitter.com/ChadLivengood/status/1314332374759542784 "He's damned by his own words," Cuomo declared. "These people were investigating it at the same time. A sitting governor, over a dozen bad guys, months of planning, murderous intent, derivative of the main domestic terror threat we face," he explained. "And he's clueless? How? How is that okay?" Watch:
amy b another paleo-cath?
an 1020 pro pub
Justice Department may have violated Attorney General Barr’s own policy memo
Justin Elliott Robert Faturechi
October 07, 2020
When the Justice Department recently publicized an ongoing investigation into potentially improperly discarded Trump ballots, critics accused it of violating long-standing agency policy against interfering in an election.
But the unusual decision to publicly detail the Pennsylvania case may also have run afoul of guidelines that Attorney General William Barr himself issued to federal prosecutors this year, according to a memo obtained by ProPublica.
In May, Barr wrote a directive to all Justice Department employees imploring them to be “particularly sensitive to safeguarding the Department's reputation for fairness, neutrality, and non-partisanship" when it comes to election-related crimes.
“Partisan politics," he wrote, “must play no role in the decisions of federal investigators or prosecutors regarding any investigations or criminal charges. Law enforcement officers and prosecutors may never select the timing of public statements (attributed or not), investigative steps, criminal charges, or any other action in any matter or case for the purpose of affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party."
Nevertheless, last month Barr's Justice Department issued a press release announcing an investigation into whether local elections officials illegally discarded nine mail-in military ballots in Pennsylvania. The announcement of an open investigation was highly unusual. Even more abnormal was that the press release specified that at least seven of those ballots were for President Donald Trump.
While the motivation of the Pennsylvania press release is unclear, Barr had personally briefed Trump on the matter before the announcement, The Washington Post subsequently reported, citing an anonymous source. The president raised it in a media interview and then DOJ's Pennsylvania office announced the investigation.
Then, the Trump campaign quickly jumped on the Pennsylvania case to bolster those claims.
“BREAKING: FBI finds military mail-in ballots discarded in Pennsylvania. 100% of them were cast for President Trump. Democrats are trying to steal the election," a campaign official tweeted.
Justin Levitt, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ's civil rights division, said the Pennsylvania press release was “flatly inconsistent" with Barr's memo “and shamefully so."
“There's absolutely no legitimate law enforcement reason I know of to mention who the ballots were cast for: They were either dealt with properly or not properly," he said. “And if there's no good reason, it leaves only the most likely bad reason: that the identity of the candidate was revealed for partisan political purposes."
Some experts did not agree . Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at Duke Law School, said Barr could argue that “any public announcement about a ballot investigation complies with [the memo] because the language is so broad."
Barr, he said, could say the “purpose" of the Pennsylvania announcement was not to affect the outcome of the election or support a particular candidate, but some other non-prohibited motivation like “protecting the vote."
The Barr memo closelymirrored election-year guidance that previous attorneys general sent out under both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. Barr himself said at his Senate confirmation hearings last year that the election policies were in place because the incumbent party has “their hands on the levers of the law enforcement apparatus of the country, and you do not want it used against the opposing political party."
Asked whether the Pennsylvania announcement ran afoul of the agency's election policies, Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec responded: “No." She declined to elaborate.
The U.S. attorney overseeing the case is David Freed, a former Republican nominee for Pennsylvania state attorney general who was nominated for his current role by Trump in 2017. In a publicly released letter, Freed said he was detailing initial findings despite an ongoing investigation “based on the limited amount of time before the general election and the vital public importance of these issues."
A second memo obtained by ProPublica, issued in August by Corey Amundson, chief of the DOJ's Public Integrity Section, was even more explicit.
In it, Amundson reiterated the Justice Department's long-standing policy in election fraud cases: “Overt criminal investigative measures should not ordinarily be taken in matters involving alleged fraud in the manner in which votes were cast or counted until the election in question has been concluded."
The memo was addressed to the Attorney General Advisory Committee, a group of U.S. attorneys that advise the attorney general.
The policy Amundson cites appears to make an exception for extraordinary cases. But it seems unlikely that would apply to the case in Pennsylvania. That involved only nine ballots, which appear to have been discarded by a sole contract employee. The motivation may have been an innocuous attempt to follow Pennsylvania rules barring ballots sent back without the proper envelope.
Current and former Justice Department officials told ProPublica that, even without the memos from top agency officials including Barr, the Pennsylvania press release violated long-standing department policy. They explained that prosecutors not only should not announce that they are investigating, but that they should be slow even to start an election-sensitive investigation during the campaign. Such an investigation is so sensitive, an opposing candidate could use it to smear his or her opponent.
“That's what they drill into us: the policy of non-interference and never, ever, ever announcing an investigation," one official said. “That's why the thing in Pennsylvania is bonkers, completely bonkers."
A spokeswoman for Freed declined to comment.
Barr has amplified Trump's attempt to discredit mail-in voting before, claiming falsely that there is widespread fraud.
Filed under:
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/barr-doj-offer-talking-points-for-trump-amid-speculation-of-political-motives/
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/bill-barrs-tip-off-revealed-trumps-desperation-and-his-own-pitiful-effort-to-boost-the-president
steve salon
on Thursday, President Trump, White House staff, federal prosecutors and Trump campaign spokespeople issued dire warnings about voting this fall with mailed-out ballots after a temporary election worker in a Pennsylvania County apparently mishandled nine ballots cast by military service members.
The incident occurred in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, a swing county in a swing state, where nearly 6 million votes for president were cast in 2016's fall election. (Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 44,292 votes.)
The White House and Trump campaign statements raced to the top of national news and social media. They also drew intelligent rejoinders from experts who know how elections are run, from warnings not to fall for claims of massive malfeasance when poll workers routinely make small scale errors, to tweets that the mistake involving discarded ballots should have been easily fixed by routine procedures.
"Luzerne County has the ability to contact these military voters and enfranchise them, despite the mistake, but now, the DOJ [Department of Justice] has already pierced the secrecy of their ballots, before the county could act to help these voters, with no legitimate law enforcement reason," tweeted David Becker, a former Justice Department Voting Section attorney who is now executive director of the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.
"After investigating for only 3 days, apparently finding no crime, and before the military voters were notified, the DOJ violates ballot secrecy, and the AG [Attorney General William Barr] personally briefs the president on this fixable mistake, and shortly after, the president uses it in his campaign," Becker said in an earlier tweet recounting the events.
Becker's comments raise disturbing questions. How far will the Justice Department go to smear routine election administration on behalf of the president's re-election? The mistakes made in Luzerne County, which twice voted for Barrack Obama but backed Trump in 2016, were noted by local election officials. A temporary poll worker was fired, but the incident was quickly seized by the Justice Department, White House and Trump campaign which announced investigations and issued statements.
The U.S. attorney general's fealty to Trump above protecting the Justice Department's reputation as being above politics, as many scholars have noted, is unlike anything seen in decades and extends beyond voting. Barr has assailed federal prosecutors for not arresting protesters in racial justice protests. Even the nation's military chiefs have worried that Trump will order them to intervene if there's election unrest.
It may be hard not to react viscerally as Trump continues to lie about purported fraud involving mailed-out ballots and keeps escalating his attacks on election officials—who largely have let those inaccurate smears go unanswered because they are civil servants who do not speak about elected officials due to their professional ethics.
But there may be a counterpoint worth keeping in mind. While the Justice Department is abusing its immense power by issuing statements about investigations before any evidence has been presented in court, there is something pitiful about the FBI, state and local police resorting to dumpster diving in rural Pennsylvania to boost Trump.
The Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, episode underscores that small-scale errors are a fact of life in managing elections, but they are not indices of a flawed overall system.
"There will be reports of ballots sent to voters that end up in the trash or in a ditch. We may hear about a box of ballots never delivered to voters or election officials by the post office. There may be isolated instances of fraud, or of things that initially look like fraud but turn out to be election administrator error," Rick Hasen, a University of California Irvine law professor and nationally known expert on elections, wrote in the Los Angeles Times. "This doesn't mean we won't have a fair election overall, and we should not allow cynical political operatives to parlay small-bore errors into a full-scale attack on the integrity of the November vote."
As other analyses have noted, it is Barr and DOJ officials following his orders (and not all are) that have broken with institutional protocols to insulate the Department from political tides. Beyond the abuses of power, abandonment of professional ethics and politicizing the agency that is supposed to defend voting rights, not subvert them, is a measure of desperation by a president whose rhetoric suggests that he would not be re-elected in a normal election.
As the New York Times noted on September 26, Barr's briefing Trump on finding nine mishandled mail-in ballots in a state "was akin to telling him about the most mundane law enforcement developments across the country," which was anything but briefing a president "on a criminal D.O.J. investigation only if it was of some major importance to national security."
It remains to be seen how far the DOJ can go to interfere in America's locally run elections.Last Thursday's statement by David Freed, the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, in a letter to Luzerne officials, was a slap on the wrist filled with more innuendo than facts.
"The preliminary findings of this inquiry are troubling and the Luzerne County Bureau of Elections must comply with all applicable state and federal election laws and guidance to ensure that all votes—regardless of party—are counted to ensure an accurate election count," Freed said. "Even though your staff has made some attempts to reconstitute certain of the improperly opened ballots, there is no guarantee that any of these votes will be counted in the general election."
As Becker's tweet noted, it was the DOJ that breached the secret ballots—by revealing their presidential votes—and blocked officials from resolving an easily fixed problem.
Election officials in swing counties know the stakes in 2020's election. They do not need reminders from the Justice Department about doing their job. While the prospect of the DOJ looking over their shoulder is unnerving, the Luzerne County incident also reveals how worried Trump is about losing. And it is a nationwide tipoff of how far the attorney general and president will go to create mirages that undermine public confidence in the voting process and results.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/heres-the-truth-about-the-white-house-and-dojs-9-discarded-ballots-in-pennsylvania/
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here's the truth about the White House and DOJ's 9 discarded ballots in Pennsylvania
David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement September 27, 2020
Major news is coming in over the "case" of the nine "discarded" ballots from Luzerne County, Pennsylvania that President Donald Trump revealed to Fox News Radio on Thursday.
Here's what appears to have happened, and we're going to bullet point this so it's easy to follow.
The ballots were discarded by a temporary, or "contract" worker assigned to sort the mail who appears to have been following direction.
The ballots were military ballots, not absentee or other by-mail ballots.
The county immediately reported what happened to federal officials, who appear to have immediately politicized the issue.
"Because these ballots were returned in envelopes similar to absentee ballot requests, elections officials opened them," The Washington Post reports. "If the ballots weren't then enclosed in another envelope which shielded the actual vote being cast, they may have been considered 'naked ballots,' a term used to describe mail ballots returned without the voter's intent being protected.
The Trump campaign and the Pennsylvania GOP in a lawsuit argued that "naked ballots" should not be counted. They won that lawsuit. These nine ballots appear to be "naked ballots," and that appears to be the reason they were thrown out.
Here's how MSNBC's Chris Hayes sums it up: It's the GOP's fault.
The contract worker has been told to not return.
Buzzfeed adds it appears the DOJ violated its own policy by issuing a press release about the "discarded" ballots, and even worse, suggesting this is a case of election fraud, and even worse than that, suggesting one candidate over another was favored.
MSNBC adds that county officials were not aware of who the ballots were for until the DOJ's press release was issued.
Attorney General Bill Barr personally briefed President Trump about the discarded ballots. Trump and his White House press secretary then politicized the event.
The county elections supervisor was exceedingly thorough. "Garbage from the Elections Bureau from September 14 through September 16, the time the independent contractor was on County property, was put in a dumpster and secured by County staff," a local Pennsylvania news report states. "The trash was then searched by the FBI, the Luzerne County District Attorney's Office, the Pennsylvania State Police and county staff. All contents relating to the matter were taken by the FBI."
federal judge delivers blow to AG Barr in battle against former FBI deputy director
Alex Henderson September 25, 2020
U.S. Attorney General William Barr has insisted that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, now a CNN contributor, was not fired for political reasons, but McCabe has maintained that the…
fair # of these, not all capt eg
trump already ‘laid out the roadmap’ to cheat in the upcoming election: analyst
AlterNet Staff September 23, 2020
John Heilemann, the national affairs analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, explained how President Donald Trump has already laid out his “roadmap” to cheat in plain sight for the upcoming…
OMG
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/former-federal-prosecutor-explains-how-ag-barr-could-help-trump-steal-the-election-and-take-the-us-to-a-very-dark-place/
between the coronavirus pandemic, civil unrest in major U.S. cities, huge anti-racism protests, bitter political divisions, a heated Supreme Court battle and President Donald Trump’s ruthless voter suppression efforts, the United States’ 2020 presidential election is turning out to be even more chaotic than the elections of 2000 and 1968. Trump has a devoted loyalist in U.S. Attorney General William Barr, and former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade discusses the effect he could have on the 2020 electionin a disturbing op-ed published in the Washington Post on September 22.
“William P. Barr sounds more like a far-right-wing news pundit lately than the nation’s attorney general when he’s discussing politics and the coming election,” McQuade warns. “The difference is that unlike talk show panelists, Barr has the power to do something about it.”
McQuade gets into specific comments from Barr, noting, “He said, ‘These so-called Black Lives Matter people’ are ‘not interested in black lives. They’re interested in props: a small number of blacks who were killed by police during conflict with police, usually less than a dozen a year, who they can use as props to achieve a much broader political agenda.’ He told a journalist that if President Trump is not reelected, then the nation would be ‘irrevocably committed to the socialist path.’ He called coronavirus lockdowns ‘the greatest intrusion on civil liberties other than slavery.’ Later, he lauded the role of politics in prosecution, saying, ‘The most basic check on prosecution is politics.’”
The former U.S. attorney adds that Barr has joined Trump in making the baseless claim that mail-in ballots encourage voter fraud on a grand scale, and she fears that if the presidential election is close, Barr won’t hesitate to intervene or to give Trump an unfair advantage over his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.
"Barr has demonstrated a determination to use his position — and the legal powers of the federal government — to advance the president’s political interests,”McQuade explains. “So, what damage could Barr do in the days and weeks after the election to help Trump stay in office no matter what voters might prefer? First, Barr has the power to file criminal charges of voter fraud. The presidential election is really state elections, but that doesn’t mean the federal government can’t step in.”
A “determined Barr,” McQuade goes on to say, “could use the fraud statute to charge voters, the Democratic Party or even state election officials with a crime” and “could also involve the Justice Department in civil suits challenging election results.”
McQuade notes, “If a candidate or party filed a lawsuit challenging the election results in one or more states, a statement of interest would allow the Justice Department to make arguments that favor Trump’s campaign. Think Bush v. Gore, but with the U.S. government taking sides. That tactic could bring the powerful voice of the Justice Department to the case, potentially influencing the court of law as well as the court of public opinion.”
“The Justice Department has long taken pride in being independent of politics,” McQuade writes. “Barr’s erosion of this tradition could take our country to a very dark place — sooner than we think.”
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/barr-to-be-honored-for-christlike-behavior-with-award-from-right-wing-catholic-group-with-strong-ties-to-trump/
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ttorney General Bill Barr will be honored for his “Christlike behavior” at Wednesday’s National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, according to Roman Catholic Sister, author, and anti-death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean.
"sister Helen Prejean
@helenprejean
The National Catholic Prayer Breakfast will present an award to Attorney General Barr for “Christlike behavior” tomorrow morning. A.G. Barr has ordered the executions of six men with at least one more on the calendar. What is “Christlike” about using discretionary power to kill?"
The National Catholic Prayer Breakfast says Barr will be presented with its Christifideles Laici Award during today’s 16th annual prayer event.
“In Honor and Gratitude for Fidelity to the Church, Exemplary Selfless and Steadfast Service in the Lord’s Vineyard,” are the words inscribed on the award.
The event is being sponsored by several groups, including Alliance Defending Freedom, which appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups.
President Donald Trump is expected to address the group today during its virtual ceremony.
Among the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast’s founders arePat Cipollone, President Trump’s White House Counsel; former RepublicanSenator Rick Santorum; and Joseph Cella, President Trump’s Ambassador to Fiji, and a former Trump transition team member who co-founded the right wing activist group Catholic Vote.
Another founder of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast is Austin Ruse, the president of the anti-LGBTQ hate group Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM).
Perhaps the most notable founder of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast is the group’s president, conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo.
Leo also serves as co-chairman of the Federalist Society, the far right group responsible for promoting the illegitimate belief that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted by judges according to how the nation’s founders thought.
President Trump, for the first time in history, has effectively farmed out the approval process for federal court judges and even Supreme Court justices he nominates, to the Federalist Society.
The award to Barr is being condemned by notable Catholics, including Sister Prejean, and Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor-at-large at America magazine.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/ag-barrs-doj-threatens-to-cut-off-federal-funding-to-3-major-american-cities-with-bogus-anarchist-jurisdiction-designation/
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Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos September 21, 2020
Earlier this month, Donald Trump directed federal officials to find a rationale for cutting government funding to certain cities controlled by Democrats. It’s a plainly politically motivated move that seems unlikely to hold up in court, but Attorney General Bill Barr, more than happy to oblige, delivered a verdict Monday on which cities were on the chopping block: New York, Seattle, and Portland—all liberal-leaning cities run by Democrats in Democrat-controlled states. Surprise, surprise.
“The U.S. Department of Justice today identified the following three jurisdictions that have permitted violence and destruction of property to persist and have refused to undertake reasonable measures to counteract criminal activities: New York City; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle, Washington,” claimed a Justice Department press release.
In a statement, Barr accused state and local leaders of endangering “innocent citizens” by impeding their own law enforcement officials and agencies from doing their jobs. Clearly, too little tear gas, violence, and military “heat ray” technology has been unleashed on citizen protesters exercising their First Amendment rights for Barr’s tastes. “It is my hope that the cities identified by the Department of Justice today will reverse course and become serious about performing the basic function of government and start protecting their own citizens,” Barr said.
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But this is all too tame for Barr’s twisted version of justice. Barr originally wanted to prosecute Portland officials for their handling of nightly protests outside a federal courthouse in the city. And Barr, of course, has already presided over deploying unmarked federal militia to cities led by Democrats to kidnap people off the streets, whisk them away in unmarked vehicles, and detain them for questioning without cause—which is illegal.
The protests stemming from the killing of George Floyd have been, and continue to be, overwhelmingly peaceful, with any violence usually limited to exceedingly small areas and clusters of people. In fact, the biggest threat of violence to Americans comes not from liberal protesters but right-wing extremists—a fact that Trump and his top administration officials have worked diligently to cover up even as the threat to law-abiding Americans mushroomed during Trump’s tenure.
Though conservative and even mainstream news outlets have played isolated incidences of violence on a loop, these cities are not engulfed in flames (other than in Portland, where devastating wildfires due to climate change have been knocking on city’s door). In fact, below is a picture of New York’s violence-ravaged streets taken on Monday.
On top of the Trump administration’s disinformation campaign, the notion that the federal government is going to withhold federal funds from three of its top contributing cities is ludicrous.
All three cities rank in the top 10 per capita income for the 25 most populated cities in the U.S.: Seattle was second, Portland eighth, and New York 10th. Because states and cities with a larger share of higher income residents contribute more to the federal government, these three cities alone likely contribute more tax dollars to federal coffers than most red states, which have been feeding at the federal trough for decadeswhile contributing far less money to its bottom line. New York and the northeastern states, in particular, are “giver” states, while most red states, especially in the southeast, are “getter” states, according to a Rockefeller Institute of Government study.
But now that Barr has homed in on the cities he wants to target and delivered supposed criteria for determining which cities fall into that category, the next step, according to Trump’s presidential memo, is for thedirector of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, to issue guidance to the heads of certain agencies on “restricting eligibility of or otherwise disfavoring, to the maximum extent permitted by law, anarchist jurisdictions in the receipt of federal grants.”
Again, such a direction will undoubtedly be challenged in court and tied up until long after the election. So at this point, it’s nothing more than another lawless effort by Trump to target cities run by Democrats in order to gin up and delight his “getter” constituency in the red states.
If Joe Biden wins, this ridiculous presidential directive will obviously fall onto a scrap heap of other lawless Trump directives targeting Democrats, liberals, and certain demographic groups purely for Trump’s political benefit and pandering to his supporters.
But if Trump manages to somehow steal this election, the directive is simply one more reason why we could see a serious effort by Democratic states to leave the union. There’s absolutely no reason for those states and their densely populated liberal cities to stick around for Trump’s presidential harassment while the federal government bleeds them dry.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/bill-barr-goes-full-on-right-wing-nutjob/
Are you kidding me? Sedition? From 1798?
Just in case someone is not persuaded that this Trump Administration is falling off its rocker, the advice from Atty. Gen. William P. Barr to federal prosecutors to use a two-century-old law to stop people – no, specifically “violent” leftist protests outside federal courthouses – from seeking to overthrow the government should make us stop and scratch our collective heads.
For openers, protesting disproportionate police brutality against Black citizens is not calling for the overthrow of the government.
Secondly, there is actual evidence that groups other than Black Lives Matter or the oft-cited, if unorganized “antifa” are not the only ones in street. You heard nothing from Barr about using sedition laws against actual, organized, gun-toting, right-wing, white supremacist nationals who seem actually to want to overthrow the government – as well as to mix it up with lefties in the streets. Thirdly, sedition laws have not been used over two centuries for good reason: Their Constitutionality runs very close to the edge of First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly that have protected leftists, neo-Nazis, right-wingers, flag-burners and vocal bayers-at-the-moon.
Looking for a definitive reason to deny the Trump team four more years? How about using the law to declare a virtual shutdown of civil liberties and free speech. Barr’s remarks this week were so outrageous that comparing state orders mandating masks and shutdowns for public health to slavery were not even the top line head-slap.
Aggressive Tactics
This has nothing to do with people who break rules about trespass or fire-setting or bottle-throwing,
No, this is the baring of raw power to shut down dissent. And it is a blatant attempt to use the Justice Department to underscore a Donald Trump campaign promise for Law & Order prompted by several localized protests that turn violent only in the middle of the night – a continuation of absolute reinterpretations of law and procedure to promote Trump’s politics.
The wording of the federal sedition statute says it is a crime for two or more people to conspire to use force to oppose federal authority, hinder the government’s ability to enforce any federal law or unlawfully seize any federal property — elements that might conceivably be made to fit a plot to, say, break into and set fire to a federal courthouse, despite evidence that more than 93% of nearly 8,000 Black Lives Matter protests between May and August this year have been peaceful.
Maybe Barr should be looking at those organized Western ranchers, right-wingers all, when they held off enforcement of federal water law enforcement at gunpoint. Or at organized, armed Trump supporters who entered statehouses to threaten the lives of legislators considering laws to require coronavirus masks.
Or he could be looking at Trump administration officials and Republican supporters calling on people to arm themselves for insurrection in the event that Joe Biden wins the election. Or maybe even at the continued use of federal law enforcement and the Justice Department itself as political instruments to advance the partisan cause of a single sitting president seeking reelection, clearly throwing out any separations of power as constitutionally required to get his way in a wide variety of cases ranging from the misuse of U.S. intelligence to the matters of impeachment.
Just who here is seeking the overthrow of government as we have known it for 200 years? FBI Director Christopher Wray told a House committee it is right-wing white militias. Where’s Barr?
I get that Barr wants prosecutors to be aggressive in the case of Portland’s protests, which have involved the setting of small fires at the federal courthouse. Pursue shooters who have emerged aggressively, please. But moving to sedition and its 20-year sentences in the name of liberty and Law & Order?Are we Belarus or Hong Kong?
Overkill
Actually, coincidental to the disclosures about using sedition laws, came news that federal officials had been stockpiling ammunition and devices that could emit deafening sounds or singe anyone within range feel like their skin is on fire to clear Lafayette Squarein Washington for that Donald Trump Bible photo op. The disclosures came in The Washington Post from D.C. National Guard Maj. Adam D. DeMarco, who led the brigade there, and filed them as a whistleblower.
Are we nuts all of a sudden as a nation or can we see this as the excess of a bad political campaign? Does Barr think we are idiots? He actually compared his own prosecutors to pre-schoolers and asserted that he and Trump are in charge, not those career prosecutors who make daily decisions in individual cases.
Barr was wrong in citing “a dozen cases” each year in which Black citizens are mistreated; there are 250 deaths at the hands of police this last year. He and Trump are wrong to deny that there are systemic elements to racism in this country and to our policing practices.
The federal sedition law is rarely invoked, and something that does not seem to fit the circumstances of the unrest in places like Portland in response to police killings of Black men. So, too, would be ordering the arrest of the Seattle mayor for allowing a protest to cool itself in that city.
Promoting sedition laws to stop protests is an extremist Justice Department policy. Barr has no business being attorney general.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/top-democrats-demand-a-probe-into-possible-election-meddling-by-bill-barr/
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-right-wing-plan-to-steal-the-election-is-right-in-front-of-our-noses/
no lnx
The right-wing plan to steal the election is right in front of our noses
Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon September 17, 2020
There has been a ton of news about Bill Barr — official title, “Attorney General of the United States;” actual job, Donald Trump’s capo— crawling across cable news chyrons in recent days, so much so that it’s hard to keep track of it all. There’s that thing he said about quarantine restrictions being nearly as bad as slavery. And the thing where he whined about the Justice Department staffers that’s more interested in enforcing the law than protecting Trump’s political power. And where he compared such people to preschool children, for having the temerity to question his decisions.
All that is bad, but probably the worst news this week is a report from the New York Times that “Barr told federal prosecutors in a call last week that they should consider charging rioters and others who had committed violent crimes at protests in recent months with sedition.”
He also asked federal prosecutors “to explore whether they could bring criminal charges against Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle for allowing some residents to establish a police-free protest zone near the city’s downtown for weeks this summer.”
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This is especially alarming in light of Barr’s assertion, in the same speech where he made offensive comments about his own staff and about slavery, that he believes he has “virtually unchecked discretion” in determining what cases to prosecute.
Barr was talking about cases stemming from the protests in various cities over the summer. Although the vast majority of those protests were peaceful, there were a few incidents of violence and looting, though absolutely no evidence of plots to overthrow the U.S. government (which is what “sedition” means). Barr’s eagerness to overreact, however, is another alarming sign that he is exploring ways to assist Trump’s public and obvious plans to do whatever he can to steal the presidential election.
Thursday morning, in the midst of one of his lengthy morning Twitter tantrums, Trump hinted yet again at his plans to use phony claims about “fraud” as cover to keep election officials from counting all the ballots after Election Day:
[twt pix]
It’s a muddled mess of a tweet, but basically, he’s using scare quotes to suggest that votes by mail, at least by Democrats, are illegitimate. He’s also, in his usual manner, accusing his opponents of doing what he’s clearly planning to do, which in this case is to keep the ballots from being accurately tallied.
This is where Barr’s dark talk of “sedition” comes in.Should the votes in swing states be close — and every indication from polling is they will be — Trump will likely try to declare victory on the night of the election. After that, there will be a massive battle, as happened under similar circumstances in 2000, over how and whether to count all those mail-in ballots. Much of that will be in the courts, but there will be a street component, as well, as pro-democracy protesters will hit the streets to demand a full vote count, and election officials could face efforts to physically stop them from counting votes.
It’s increasingly clear that putting down those anticipated protesters and stopping the vote count is a priority for Trump and his allies. So there’s increasing talk from prominent Trump allies of a possible “insurrection” by the left after Election Day, and the need to use maximum force to put it down.
Michael Caputo, a 2016 Trump campaign aide and bug-eyed right-wing conspiracy theorist who was given the job of assistant secretary for public affairs at Health and Human Services, recently made news for a truly wacky set of utterances during a recent Facebook Live event. Among other things, Caputo accused government scientists of, yep, “sedition” and accused the left of plotting an insurrection, recommending that right-wingers “buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.”
A wave of bad press compelled Caputo to take a leave of absence from his government job, citing vague medical concerns, but what he said directly echoes the rhetoric of Roger Stone, his longtime friend and fellow Trump confidant. Stone recently saw his sentence for felonies related to his role in the Russian conspiracy to undermine the 2016 election commuted by Trump, and has been at the forefront of trying to characterize efforts to count all the votes as an “insurrection” to be suppressed with violence.
During a segment on Infowars last week, Stone suggested that Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act or declare martial law and that early voting and mail-in ballots in Nevada “should be seized by federal marshals and taken from the state” to keep them from being counted. Stone claimed such ballots were fraudulent, but of course the real concern is that they’re legitimate — and that far too many of them will be cast for Joe Biden.
On Tuesday, Mark Levin — who is currently a radio TV host, but formerly worked with Barr at the Justice Department during the Reagan/Bush years — warned that the protests from the summer will “multiply by five or 10” and that Trump should declare them insurrections because they “need to be put down.”
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Levin was being vague about what he thinks might provoke such enormous protests, but it’s not hard to see what upcoming event might do such a thing: A close election that Trump will try to steal by suppressing vote-counting.
And let’s be clear that Barr himself is on board with this idea that mail-in ballots are inherently illegitimate and that fighting to keep them from being counted is therefore justified. Barr has repeatedly floated baseless claims that mail-in ballots are fraudulent or that foreign countries “could easily make counterfeit ballots.”
None of this, it cannot be stated strongly enough, is true. It’s a shameless pretext for what is likely an upcoming fight to get those ballots thrown out.
It’s tempting to see all this talk of “insurrection” and “sedition” from the right — including Trump’s own government officials — as nothing more than hyperbole from Republicans who are emotionally overwrought in the face of what looks to be a lost election. Unfortunately, as the scandal around slowdowns at the U.S. Postal Service and lawsuits over mail-in voting make clear, the Trump administration is doing more than talk. It’s actively pulling whatever levers it can to keep Democratic votes from being counted this November.
Once those ballots have been cast, the fight to make sure they’re counted is going to get rough — not just in the courts, but in the streets. Much could depend on the ability of the left to hit the streets, not just in protests to put pressure on election officials to finish the vote count, but possibly to physically protect officials who are counting votes from armed right-wingers whom Trump has whipped into a frenzy. All this chatter about “insurrection,” “riots” and “sedition” is an effort to preemptively characterize pro-democracy protesters as a threat, and to justify using violence to suppress them.
Remember, Trump was willing to use tear gas and baton assaults against peaceful protesters just to keep them from heckling him. There’s no telling how far he’ll go to keep those same peaceful protesters from messing with his efforts to steal an election.
Tyrannical and un-American’: ACLU slams Barr for urging sedition charges against protesters
Brett Wilkins / Common Dreams September 17, 2020
Attorney General William Barr drew stinging rebuke from legal experts and civil liberties advocates including the ACLU Wednesday after he told federal prosecutors to more aggressively charge some protesters with…
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William Barr compares coronavirus restrictions to slavery
Laura Clawson / Daily Kos September 17, 2020
Attorney General William Barr showed just how like Donald Trump he is on Wednesday night by lying while comparing coronavirus lockdowns to slavery. That is not an exaggeration of what…
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fox News analyst destroys Barr’s ‘absurd’ desire to charge rioters with sedition: ‘A bridge too far’
David Edwards / Raw StorySeptember 17, 2020
Fox News judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano, a former judge, on Thursday pushed back against Attorney General William Barr’s call to charge violent protesters with sedition. According to The Wall Street Journal,…
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an 920
imperial AG?
Alex Henderson September 17, 2020
U.S. Attorney General William Barr had a lot to say when he spoke at Hillsdale College in Michigan on Wednesday, September 16, and he was highly critical of some of…
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/critics-warn-of-transparent-effort-to-retaliate-after-doj-issues-subpoenas-in-criminal-probe-of-john-boltons-memoir/
an 920
no lnx
Department of Justice (DOJ) has opened a criminal investigation into whether President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton disclosed classified information in his recent book.
The DOJ convened a grand jury, which issued subpoenas to Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Bolton’s memoir “The Room Where It Happened,” according to The New York Times. The grand jury also issued a subpoena to Bolton’s literary agency Javelin, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The Trump administration previously tried to block the release of the book — which was highly critical of the president — over claims that it contained classified information. The move was ultimately unsuccessful. Nevertheless, Trump’s handpicked director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe referred the matter to the DOJ’s national security division last month, which opened a criminal investigation, according to The Times.
Bolton has denied that his memoir contained any classified information. Though he agreed to let the administration review its contents in order to make sure it did not contain classified intelligence, the DOJ accused Bolton of allowing Simon & Schuster to release the book ahead of final approval. The agency unsuccessfully attempted to block the book’s release.
“With hundreds of thousands of copies around the globe — many in newsrooms — the damage is done,” D.C. Circuit Judge Royce Lamberth ruled in June.
But the opinion left open the possibility that Bolton could be criminally charged if he allowed the memoir to be released before final approval.
“Bolton has gambled with the national security of the United States,” Lamberth wrote. “He has exposed his country to harm and himself to civil (and potentially criminal) liability. But these facts do not control the motion before the court.”
Lamberth also said he was “persuaded that defendant Bolton likely jeopardized national security by disclosing classified information in violation of his nondisclosure agreement obligations.”
An attorney disputed the conclusion that Bolton “did not fully comply” with his obligations and accused the administration of slow-walking the approval process in an attempt to prevent the release of the highly-critical book. According to The Times, the National Security Council’s (NSC) top official for prepublication review also said in an email at the time that she was “satisfied with the edits that Mr. Bolton made to address her concerns about classified information.”
But the White House launched another review without notifying Bolton, and the official involved cited multiple instances of classified information, according to the report. Though Bolton did not receive final approval from the White House, he approved the memoir for publication.
The grand jury subpoenas came after Trump repeatedly called for Bolton to be prosecuted over the book’s release. The president has claimed that Bolton “broke the law” and “should be in jail” for “disseminating, for profit, highly Classified information.” At the same time, he simultaneously argued that the book was a “compilation of lies and made up stories, all intended to make me look bad.”
The memoir detailed Trump’s alleged attempts to pressure Ukraine and China to investigate Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, as well as his behind-the-scenes dealings with Turkey and North Korea.
Attorneys at both the DOJ and the NSC expressed concerns about launching a criminal investigation, because Trump’s statements “made it seem like an overtly political act,” The Times reported.
National security attorney Bradley Moss described the criminal probe as “absolutely an overtly political act,” but said it was unclear whether that would be enough to beat back potential criminal charges for Bolton.
Bolton also faces separate civil litigation, which could require him to forfeit the proceeds of the book for violating the prepublication review agreement.
Lamberth, who is overseeing the case, said in June that Bolton should have sued the government rather than prematurely approve the memoir for release before the process was complete.
“This was Bolton’s bet: If he is right and the book does not contain classified information, he keeps the upside mentioned above; but if he is wrong, he stands to lose his profits from the book deal, exposes himself to criminal liability, and imperils national security,” Lamberth said at the time. “Bolton was wrong.”
Some legal experts, however, expressed concerns about the DOJ pursuing a former official who has criticized the president.
“Bolton deserves nothing but scorn for how he’s behaved,” wrote Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, “but this is a transparent effort to retaliate against a former senior official for exercising his First Amendment rights and to chill those thinking about similarly coming forward.”
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/bill-barr-had-deep-links-to-the-origins-of-central-american-migration-crisis-long-before-trump/
...
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Roberto, you begin the book talking about a tour you were giving in 1992 in Los Angeles at the time you were working with the immigrant rights group CARECEN in Los Angeles. And you’re touring around a foundation program officer, one of these people who decides whether to give money to worthy organizations. And you had very mixed feelings taking him around the Pico-Union area of Los Angeles. There’s a sudden shootout at one point. Could you talk about that whole part of your work with CARECEN? Also, what lessons might be drawn for a lot of activists today, Black Lives Matter activists and prison reform activists, who are suddenly being courted by foundations who suddenly have discovered that they haven’t been properly funding antiracism programs around the country?
ROBERTO LOVATO: That’s a great question, Juan. Yeah, the opening, the introduction of the book, is 1992, right after the L.A. riots had hit. We had foundations and corporations come in, along with scholars, and it was just people interested in post-riot L.A. And we were in MacArthur Park touring, like we did. I felt like — and I say at one point I felt like, you know, I was getting tired of being like Virgil to these Dantes, you know, these aspiring Dantes wanting to see the underworld. And so, I’m showing this guy, Leland, MacArthur Park,when I’m approached by the first MS-13 member I ever met, this kid named José. And, you know, we were — and I could tell that Leland was scared out of his wits, like he was in a lion’s den or something, and he was looking to me for security.
And so, I open it that way because it shows kind of the way that the whole issue of youth and urban youth and gangs, even foundations and corporations will kind of shy away from, as do legislators, including legislators of color here in California, where the gangs were born, in fact, where MS-13 and 18th Street were born. And then, after they were born, they kind of adopted the structures of like the Mexican Mafia. And so, I’m there when this is starting to escalate and get more violent.
And then, Attorney General William Barr, again, and at the avatar, from the Bush administration, who’s now in the Trump administration, deployed all these FBI resources to L.A. and other cities to start the gang war, which, you know, we see the products as we speak, right? And so, then he also introduced the INS to then join the LAPD and law enforcement to deport the “problem,” the gang structures, to El Salvador.
...
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, William Barr, the current attorney general, the attorney general under George H.W. Bush — we just have a minute, but as you wrap up, Roberto, what is his connection to this story?
ROBERTO LOVATO: William Barr, as attorney general under the first Bush, redeployed FBI resources, in the greatest deployment of FBI resources up to that point, taking FBI agents who were fighting foreign — you know, looking at foreign “threats,” and started focusing them on gangs. And then he starts looking at MS-13 and other gangs right after the L.A. riots. You can see he was there in L.A., and he started us on the path to eventually, like, militarizing the police, that we have right now. And then, he then also had the INS deport the gang “problem” to El Salvador, and then he exported, after the war, U.S.-style policing. And then, I found out that military trainers from El Salvador actually came to train LAPDin counterinsurgency, and other police forces. It’s just when you start seeing the Robocopization of cop uniforms— right? — and that we have now. And William Barr had everything to do with — had not everything, but he had a lot to do with this. I had to sing his song, because he deserves all the credit he deserves for what he did to El Salvador and to L.A. and to our national situation long before Trump....
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-strange-case-of-carroll-v-trump-an-adventure-in-wonderland/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/why-is-bill-barr-shielding-foreign-terrorists-from-the-penalty/
...Barr also decided this summer to skip the death penalty for a pair of foreign ISIS terrorists who clearly qualified for the ultimate punishment. Shockingly, Barr wrote a three-page letter dated Aug. 18 to British Home Secretary Priti Patel to say he won’t seek the death penalty for two terrorists in U.S. military custody in Iraq. The despicable duo, nicknamed “The Beatles” because of their British accents, are accused of kidnapping and beheading several hostages in Syria in 2014, including James Foley, an American journalist.
And Barr’s assurances to Patel went further, saying that even if a death penalty were imposed, “It would not be carried out.” That’s right, he’s both killing Americans and guaranteeing not to kill terrorists. This disparity is offensive and needs to change.
Society is currently debating whether there are two systems of American justice as the 2020 presidential election forces the question: Is there one harshly punitive system for Black America and another less-severe system for the rest of America? That answer may come as early as Nov. 3.
What’s clear now is that there is a two-tier system of American justice. One says the death penalty is OK for criminals inside U.S. territory. The other essentially gives criminals residing outside the United States a get-out-of-jail-free card.
The reason? Countries can’t — and won’t — extradite to America criminals eligible for the death penalty. Sen. Dianne Feinstein recognized this crazy reality in 2003 when she said, “If you steal a car in the U.S., Mexico will return you to face prosecution and punishment. If you kill the driver, Mexico will protect you.” That’s right. The more heinous the crime, the less likely the chance of being extradited to the United States.
As a result, America can’t get its man. In the case of the “Beatles,” the United Kingdom won’t even give evidence unless Barr cries “Uncle.”...
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/barr-slammed-for-acting-as-personal-henchman-of-trump-as-doj-moves-to-take-over-his-defense-in-suit-filed-by-rape-accuser
one of Deutsche Bank’s most famous customers has been President Donald Trump, and Deutsche’s activities —including its dealings with Trump — have been the subject of investigations by prosecutors as well as members of Congress. The German bank, Bloomberg News is reporting, has hired attorney Robert Kimmitt — whose relationship with Attorney General William Barr goes back to the late 1980s — to represent it in Washington, D.C.
The 72-year-old Kimmitt is a former U.S. ambassador to Germany. According to Bloomberg, Kimmitt’s “precise role” in Deutsche “isn’t clear even to many executives within the bank.”
Bloomberg journalists Greg Farrell, Steven Arons, Christian Berthelsen and Tom Schoenberg explain, “When Kimmitt was hired, many top executives in the U.S. weren’t immediately informed of his role, according to other people familiar with the matter. Lawyers representing the bank in U.S. Justice Department investigations have been dealing directly with line prosecutors in several long-running investigations. In at least one of those investigations, the Department has relayed almost no information in years, these people said.”
The reporters note that according to Bloomberg’s sources, some of Deutsche’s senior executives in Frankfurt, Germany are hoping that Kimmitt’s relationship with Barr “could help clear up a logjam of Justice Department investigations.” Kimmit, Bloomberg notes, “has close connections to both Deutsche Bank and the Justice Department."
kimmitt’s relationship with Barr goes back to the presidential election of 1988, when Vice President George H.W. Bush received the Republican nomination and went up against the Democratic presidential nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. That year, Bloomberg explains, Kimmitt and Barr “were responsible for vetting potential running mates for the vice president.”
After evaluating various possibilities, the GOP chose Dan Quayle as Bush’s running mate.Bush defeated Dukakis in the general election, and Barr served as Bush’s attorney general in the early 1990s before becoming attorney general for the Trump Administration in 2019.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/thats-not-what-happened-at-all-prosecutors-fact-check-barrs-false-claim-that-man-cast-1700-fake-ballots-in-texas/
no lnx twt
as Attorney General William Barr faced renewed calls for his impeachment after claiming not to know whether it’s illegal for a U.S. voter to cast two ballots in a federal election, prosecutors and journalists have caught the nation’s top law enforcement officer in a “massive falsehood” about a mail-in ballot fraud case in Texas.
In his interview with CNN earlier this week, Barr told Wolf Blitzer that prosecutors had indicted a man who collected 1,700 blank ballots and used them to cast a specific vote.
“Elections that have been held with mail have found substantial fraud and coercion,” Barr said. “For example, we indicted someone in Texas, 1,700 ballots collected…from people who could vote, he made them out and voted for the person he wanted to. Okay?”
Aside from vastly overstating the prevalence of fraud in vote-by-mail systems which have been used by millions of Americans for decades, Barr appeared to fabricate the facts about the case in Texas, prosecutors who worked on the case told the Washington Post.
“That’s not what happened at all,” Andy Chatham, who served as assistant district attorney in Dallas County when prosecutors investigated the collection of a small number of blank ballots in 2017, told the newspaper.
Barr suggested the Department of Justice prosecuted a federal case of voter fraud, but he appeared to be referring to a local prosecution involving a City Council election.
Authorities uncovered 700 ballots on which voters stated that someone named Jose Rodriguez had helped them to prepare them, but the ballots did not favor a particular candidate and the voters confirmed that the votes were accurate. Chatham said investigators were eventually led to a man named Miguel Hernandez, likely a “low-level player in a possibly larger scheme that never came to fruition,” who pleaded guilty to improperly returning a marked ballot.
Hernandez collected a blank ballot from a woman, filled it out, and forged her signature, according to court records.
Prosecutors in the case told the Post that while they initially suspected as many as 1,700 fraudulent ballots, “we did not uncover that, at all… We couldn’t find it except that little tiny case.”
“Unfortunately, it speaks volumes to the credibility of Attorney General Barr when he submits half-truths and alternative facts as clear evidence of voter fraud without having so much as even contacted me or the district attorney’s office for an understanding of the events that actually occurred,” Chatham told the Post.
A Justice Department spokesperson said Friday, as news of the prosecutors’ objections to Barr’s story spread across social media, that the attorney general had received inaccurate information from a staffer.
“Was that staffer a Trump appointee?” asked journalist and activist Isaiah Poole. “Was he disciplined or fired?”
New York Times journalist Charlie Savage pointed out that the incident is far from the first time that Barr has been caught making up details of legal and criminal cases.
..L.ike that time in July when he said a surge of federal agents sent to Kansas City had made 200 arrests in two weeks, which was false. /2 [referred to an earlier Dec op relentless ]
“Barr is a shameless liar and most importantly has been one for his entire career,” Times columnist Jamelle Bouie tweeted.
Prosecutors also called into question, as a number of academic studies of election fraud have, Barr’s claim that elections in which mail-in ballots are primarily used lead to “substantial fraud and coercion.”
Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington all use mail-in ballots as their primary method of voting, and President Donald Trump cast a mail-in ballot last month in the Florida primary despite his ongoing claims that voting by mail invites fraud. In 2018, a quarter of all American voters cast ballots via mail.
A study by the Post of five elections held over two years in Colorado, Washington, and Oregon showed that out of 14.6 million votes, officials identified 372 possibly fraudulent votes—a rate of 0.0025%.
Local prosecutors in states that use mail-in voting do not classify fraudulent voters as much of a concern; as Chatham told the Post, fraudulent ballots are “incredibly simple to ferret out” before they have an impact on an election’s outcome.
“Not only are there barcodes on the ballot, but the ballot won’t be accepted unless it is from a registered voter, whose name and signature are verified by elections officials,” Columbia University elections expert Richard Briffault told the Post.
Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), tweeted that Barr’s credibility was “compromised” well before his latest claim about fraudulent voting.
“Misrepresenting investigations for political purposes further erodes trust in him and the DOJ,” Bookbinder wrote.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/bill-barr-has-proved-himself-to-be-trumps-most-dangerous-ally/
digby
many of us have long warned that this fall would see a dirty campaign without precedent, that Donald Trump would stop at nothing to foment chaos, and so forth. But up till now there has been a certain abstractness about it. Who knew exactly what form it would take and whether it would have any real effect?
It’s here, and it’s not abstract any longer. What was assumed to be just more of the usual Trump lunacy is starting to feel terrifying. He and his campaign really are pulling out all the stops and they are doing it in the middle of a deadly pandemic that has ravaged the people and destroyed the economy. Creating even more disorder and turmoil in the middle of this crisis, in an effort to concoct or create an electoral victory he will not have earned legitimately, is over-the-top even for him.
This week the president gave a number of interviews and rallies in which he sounded more unhinged than usual. In fact, they were so bad that if his plans only depended upon him, we could probably feel a bit reassured. Unfortunately, his henchmen all seem to be on board and none more so than Attorney General Bill Barr, who appeared on CNN Wednesday and signaled that he’s prepared to enlist the Department of Justice and federal law enforcement in Trump’s election chaos strategy.
Barr always has an arrogant, supercilious attitude, whether he’s facing Congress or members of the media. But he was downright angry with anchor Wolf Blitzer and it took him off his usual game.More than any other interview I can remember, this one revealed that Barr’s insolence is actually cover for the fact that he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The man who once told the New York Times that investigating the silly, manufactured Clinton-related Uranium One “scandal” was more justified than any probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election still sees the world from the perspective of a Fox News viewer, rather than as the leader of the federal government’s most powerful law enforcement agency. And like his boss, Barr is much too egotistical to have a clue how ignorant that makes him.
he showed how little he knows or cares about the ethics of his position by saying that he wouldn’t talk about the case of Jacob Blake case (the Black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who was shot seven times in the back by a police officer) and then proceeded to share his conclusion that Blake was armed and in the process of committing a felony. When Blitzer pointed out that this was not established fact, Barr came back with “I’ve stated what I believe …” In other words, he was prejudging the facts of the case on television, which totally taints the Justice Department’s investigation.
He couldn’t simply say, “I won’t comment on the case because the department is investigating,” as any other attorney general would have done. That was because Barr clearly has a political agenda, which became more explicit as he went on to deny the existence of systemic racism. He said that “the narrative that the police are on some, you know, epidemic of shooting unarmed Black men is simply a false narrative and also the narrative that that’s based on race.” He elaborated on this by saying that Black men are stopped more often by police is not the result of racism but rather of “stereotypes” about Black people being criminals. In other words, he doesn’t even know what racism is, nor does he have the self-awareness to know that his own antediluvian attitudes are racist — another thing he has in common with President Trump. (I really shouldn’t have to say this, but Barr is wrong about all of this.)
Barr blatantly lied when he said that Russia hasn’t been interfering in the election up until now and that China is a greater threat to the integrity of the process,despite the fact that the U.S. intelligence community and the FBI have said the opposite. Indeed, the very next day the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin saying it has high confidence that “Russian malign influence actors” have targeted the absentee voting process “by spreading disinformation” since at least March:
Russian state media and proxy websites in mid-August 2020 criticized the integrity of expanded and universal vote-by-mail, claiming ineligible voters could receive ballots due to out-of-date voter rolls, leaving a vast amount of ballots unaccounted for and vulnerable to tampering. These websites also alleged that vote-by-mail processes would overburden the U.S. Postal Service and local boards of election delaying vote tabulation and creating more opportunities for fraud and error.
The attorney general must be on their mailing list because these were exactly the arguments he set forth in the CNN interview, at one point getting very testy with Blitzer on the subject. He insisted that the nation is “playing with fire” by changing the method of voting in this election, fatuously insisting that it will cause people to lose faith in the process — which of course is exactly what he is doing in spreading this hysterical propaganda.
When Blitzer asked him about Trump’s recent exhortation to his voters to vote by mail and then go to the polls to try to vote again, the attorney general said he couldn’t comment because he didn’t know the laws in individual states, as if any of them allowed voting twice in the same election. When quizzed about how many cases of voter fraud the Justice Department is pursuing, he said he didn’t know, althoughhe did mention one case that purportedly had 1,700 cases of mail-in voter fraud.That story was totally wrong and the DOJ had to issue a correction saying Barr had been given incorrect information.
Barr’s most ludicrous contention was that foreign countries are going to counterfeit ballots and mail them in. He has no evidence other than what he calls “logic” to back up this ridiculous claim, which proves how divorced from reality the attorney general of the United States actually is. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump explains:
For one thing, any number of those ballots would conflict with existing submitted ballots and be rejected. For another, ballots meet particular design and production standards that would need to be matched. But most important, ballots submitted by mail are validated upon receipt, usually by matching the ballot’s signature to the recorded signature for the voter. As a forgery expert with whom we spoke in June made clear, this would be nearly impossible to fake.
Barr is essentially spreading a ludicrous conspiracy theory about foreign interference with mail-in ballots, while also helping a foreign adversary interfere in the election by spreading several different conspiracy theories. It’s insane.
We’ve long known that Barr was happily performing the role of Trump’s “Roy Cohn,” seeing his primary role as leader of the Justice Department as leading a war against Trump’s political enemies. But Barr is also a true believer, not just a cynical fraud. His willingness to distort the rule of law to benefit his patron, while at the same time falling down the rabbit hole of one right-wing conspiracy theory after another, is the very definition of Trumpism in action. And he’s not even trying to hide it.
an 920
no lnx
Amanda Carpenter is not a liberal. She not even a moderate. She’s worked for two of the most right wing Republican Senators and at several far right wing publications. Now a CNN conservative contributor, Carpenter is also anti-Trump. And she’s warning about how she thinks President Donald Trump is already rigging the election.
Wednesday evening she posted a Twitter thread in response to Attorney General Bill Barr’s disastrous and disturbing CNN interview. One part of his comments, she says, that “set off alarm bells” for her was Barr’s odd insistence that a foreign government could send thousands of fake ballots to rig the election – and that he refused to offer and evidence, other than what he says is “logic.”
More than anything in the interview, this set off alarm bells in my mind. Loud ones. https://t.co/BhCHfmbNb9
— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) September 2, 2020
Here’s Barr making the strange claim to Wolf Blitzer. Notice how Blitzer seems stunned and for a moment speechless when Barr says “logic.”
Attorney General Barr says he doesn’t have evidence that foreign countries could successfully interfere in the election with fake ballots. He says he’s “basing it on logic.”
Wolf: Pardon?
Barr: “Logic.” pic.twitter.com/FzzIRL2PrK
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) September 2, 2020
Carpenter, who by the way was a senior staffer for Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Jim DeMint, goes on to explain her reasoning.
Basically, she’s saying Trump is going full-force against mail-in ballots, while the Trump administration lays the groundwork to blame China for rigging the election against him. Carpenter explains how:
“Let me tell you why. Trump has said the election will be rigged. He has cast aspersions over mail-in ballots. And now the AG is suggesting foreign interference w mail in ballots. While the Admin refuses to provide oral briefings about election interference to Congress.”
Yes, the Trump administration has notified Congress it will no longer provide them with in-person intelligence briefings. Only written information.
“That means whatever written story about election interference that goes to Congress is the story,” she continues. “No pushback. And print material leaks. They will set the narrative. Barr and others are saying don’t worry about Russia. It’s China that’s the problem.”
China allegedly is in favor of a Biden presidency over as Trump presidency.
“You don’t need a crystal ball to see it. Blame China for rigging mail-in ballots,” she warns.
So whattya think Trump and friends are angling to do here. You don’t need a crystal ball to see it. Blame China for rigging mail-in ballots somehow against Trump. Keep your eyes open people.
— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) September 2, 2020
“This isn’t a cover-up. It’s what’s ahead.”
I saw this coming over the weekend when we got the news oral intel briefings were donezo. Here was my reaction. This isn’t a cover-up. It’s what’s ahead https://t.co/JKbUt5VlTp
— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) September 2, 2020
By the way, CNN Anchor and Chief National Security Correspondent Jim Sciutto seems to agree with Carpenter:
...
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/its-about-intimidation-trump-allies-suggest-using-federal-racketeering-laws-to-bully-anti-racism-activists/
no lnx
President Donald Trump and his supporters have been consistently disingenuous and misleading in their attacks on protesters, describing antifa as “terrorists” and glossing over the fact that thousands of Black Lives Matter activists all over the United States have been totally peaceful.Amplifying Trump’s message, Chad Wolf — acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — has suggested possibly using anti-racketeering laws to go after left-wing protesters. And reporter Kelly Weill examines that suggestion from a legal/civil rights standpoint in a Daily Beast article published on September 3.
“Can the United States government really use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, mostly known as a weapon the feds use to target mob bosses, to successfully prosecute protesters, as Wolf implied?,” Weill writes. “It wouldn’t be easy, legal experts say. But the chatter signals a potent new effort — bolstered by extra-deranged conspiracy theories — to crack down on protesters, and may already be having its desired effect: freaking people out.”
When Wolf was interviewed by Fox News’Tucker Carlson on Monday night, August 31, the far-right Carlson asked him, “Why haven’t we seen the leaders of antifa and BLM arrested and charged with conspiracy under, say, RICO, like the heads of mafia families were?” — to which the acting DHS secretary responded, “Well, this is something that I have talked to (Attorney General William Barr) personally about. I know that they are working on it.” And Wolf told Carlson that the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating “the heads of those organizations.”
Weill notes that in July, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas wrote a letter to Barr and the FBI calling for an investigation of antifa “under the RICO Act.” But attorney Ken White, a former federal prosecutor, is dismissive of politicians who throw the word “RICO” around casually.
White told the Daily Beast that the RICO Act “was useful, and still is sometimes, at taking down genuine organized crime. The problem is that (RICO) sounds badass so people want to use it on everything. People basically use it like an angry emoji…. I think 98% of the time it’s invoked, it’s more emotional or performative than it is substantive.”
Chip Gibbons, policy director of Defending Rights And Dissent, stressed that antifa is not an actual organization. Gibbons told the Beast, “When (Wolf) says they’re looking at the leaders of Black Lives Matter for RICO charges, who do they mean? Do they mean the board of trustees on the actual 501(c)(3) (nonprofit) organization? Do they mean the three individuals who are credited with coming up with the hashtag? These are pretty decentralized movements…. How are we going to subpoena the hotel records of antifa? It’s a nonsensical proposition, like if I said I’m going to subpoena the hotel records of feminism.”
However, Faiza Patel, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, argued that even if RICO charges didn’t hold up in the courts, they could still have a chilling effect on protesters. Patel told the Beast, “One of the things this administration has tried to do is label protesters as part of some criminal organization, because once you have the idea of an organization, then that makes it a lot easier to go after people who are related. You might not necessarily have to get the individual person who might have committed a crime; you can actually treat the entire group as being dangerous or criminal. And that gives you a lot more leverage in going after its members.”
Gibbons said of threats to use the RICO Act against demonstrators, “It’s about intimidation. If you’re a normal person and you’re disgusted by police racism but you think, ‘If I go out and protest, is the FBI going to open a file on me?,’ you might think twice about doing so.”
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/ag-barr-repeatedly-claims-he-doesnt-know-if-its-illegal-to-vote-twice-when-confronted-with-trump-comments/
an 920
trump slammed for suggesting Barr must prosecute critics like Obama to become ‘greatest’
David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement September 2, 2020
President Donald Trump is telling Bill Barr he must prosecute the president’s critics, like former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in order for him to…
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-warning-lights-are-flashing-red-how-trumps-toadies-are-helping-him-collude-with-russia/
After reviewing classified intelligence reports about Vladimir Putin’s attempts to interfere in the 2020 election over three weeks ago, Senator Richard Blumenthal tried to sound the alarm.
The warning lights are flashing red. America’s elections are under attack.
This week, I reviewed classified materials in the Senate’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility and received a similarly classified briefing on malign foreign threats to U.S. elections. I was shocked by what I learned — and appalled that, by swearing Congress to secrecy, the Trump administration is keeping the truth about a grave, looming threat to democracy hidden from the American people. On Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued astatement that only hints at the threats.
The facts are chilling. I believe the American public needs and deserves to know them. The information should be declassified immediately.
Blumenthal went on to say that what he learned makes “Moscow’s past interference and nefarious actions look like child’s play.” We still, however, have no idea of what shocked him enough to write that op-ed in the Washington Post.
What we do know is how the Trump administration reacted. Last Friday, the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, told Congress that his office would no longer brief them in person about foreign election interference, but would submit written reports. Clearly they don’t want to face probing questions from Congress. In defending his actions, however, Ratcliffe admitted that it goes beyond that.
[no twt]
ratcliffe’s initial argument doesn’t make any sense. He said that he is going to stop in-person briefings because members of Congress leaked classified information to the press. What he didn’t explain is how that would stop leaks. Classified information provided in writing is even easier to share with reporters.
In a scathing rebuke of Ratcliffe’s announcement, the Washington Post editorial board pointed out that the only so-called “leaks” came from the kind issued by Senator Blumenthal.
After the intelligence community briefed members of Congress in late July about threats to the upcoming election, Democrats expressed alarm about what they had learned — and about the fact that the information had not been shared with the American public. “The warning lights are flashing red. America’s elections are under attack,” wrote Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) in a Post op-ed, without disclosing any specifics…
[T]he only “leak” was the simple fact that the administration was withholding critical information about Russia’s interference — which, of course, is intended to help President Trump win reelection.
In that clip of Ratcliffe’s Fox News appearance, he eventually got to the point by saying that Democrats leaked information that “simply wasn’t true, that somehow Russia is a greater security threat than China.” In a case of obvious projection, Ratcliffe is telling us that the Trump administration doesn’t want Congress or the public to know what Moscow is doing to interfere in the election, but instead wants to change the narrative to focus on the distraction they’re offering about the threat posed by China. In other words, Ratcliffe is suggesting that he will now cherry-pick what intelligence is shared with Congress to provide cover for what Moscow is up to.
Added to that is a troubling story about yet another purge in the Justice Department by Attorney General Barr.
Current and former national security officials are raising concerns over Attorney General William Barr’s recent decision to remove the head of a Justice Department office that helps ensure federal counterterrorism and counterintelligence activities are legal – and replace him with a political appointee with relatively limited experience.
Barr has reassigned 23-year career professional Brad Wiegmann, who had been serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Office of Law and Policy. As ABC News reports, “The office shapes government efforts by ensuring that new policies and executive actions don’t violate federal law.”
We’ve heard stories from former Trump administration officials who have said that they often found themselves having to tell the president that the actions he wanted to take were not legal. As former DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor said, Trump would claim to have “magical authorities” to break the law.
Now Barr has removed the person whose job it is to tell the administration when they are breaking the law and replaced him with a partisan loyalist. While it might not be unprecedented to do that, the fact that it comes a couple of months before an election makes this one troubling. Here is the most telling part about Wiegmann’s replacement, Kellen Dwyer:
From 2018 to 2019, he served as a fellow at the conservative-leaning Leonine Forum, a non-profit organization that says its alumni are “committed to the cause of reintroducing the tenets of [the Catholic church] into the political, policy, legal, business, and cultural activities of society.”
The Leonine Forum was created by the Catholic Information Center (CIC), an extremist group founded by Father John McCloskey, who eventually left the organization over allegations of sexual assault. Several members of the Trump administration have close ties to the CIC, including Attorney General Barr, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and economic adviser Larry Kudlow.
What appears to be happening is that both Ratcliffe and Barr are paving the way for Putin and Trump, who speak regularly by phone, to illegally collude in their efforts to influence the election—this time from the Oval Office with the entire federal bureaucracy at their disposal.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/bill-barrs-new-order-blocking-fbi-surveillance-of-political-candidates-has-huge-loophole/
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context: no one has done ctr-intel on russia cf rod rosenstein
an 920
just keeps going. Yet again, Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, has without warning removed a high-level Justice Department official and replaced that person with a new political hire. ABC News reports that Barr has removed Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brad Wiegmann, a career employee in the National Security Division.
Wiegmann’s office “helps ensure federal counterterrorism and counterintelligence activities are legal,” in ABC’s phrasing—an oversight office reining in other government departments that attempt to overstep their legal bounds. Now he’s been booted, replaced by new political appointee Kellen Dwyer.
While there’s a lot of hemming and hawing about Barr having the legal ability to do such things if and when he wants to, replacing yet another Justice Department official just before the November elections—and one tasked with counterintelligence investigations, no less—is another bizarre move that just happens to be the thing you’d do if you were trying to 1) protect Donald Trump from government investigations or 2) force government investigations against Trump’s opponents.
The Trump-Barr purge of government officials has focused heavily on oversight officials, many of whom were investigating whether individual actions by Trump or one of his allies broke federal laws. The removal of a career oversight official who acted as legal roadblock to what national security and counterintelligence officials could do is therefore extra alarming given Barr’s amply reported personal interest in probes of Joe Biden and of U.S. law enforcement officials who investigated the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia....
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https://theintercept.com/2020/08/20/facebook-bans-antifascist-pages/
oN WEDNESDAY, Facebook announced an expansion of its “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy,” removing or restricting hundreds of pages associated with groups that it claims promote violence. Nearly 800 QAnon groups, committed to pernicious disinformation and potentially deadly conspiracy theories, have been removed. Facebook also shut down the pages of far-right militias, like the New Mexico Civil Guard, an armed vigilante organization, whose leaders sport swastika tattoos.
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Alongside groups openly committed to genocidal white supremacy, which constitute a very real threat to Black and Indigenous communities, as well as other people of color, Facebook also shut down the pages of numerous antifascist, anti-capitalist news, organizing, and information sites. The move follows a pattern now well-established by the Trump administration — and unchallenged by most every mainstream media outlet — that draws indefensible false equivalences between organized, racist fascists, and the antifascists who vigorously oppose them.
Among the pages removed were those of antifascist news and research site, It’s Going Down, a media platform that publishes news, analysis, and reports on social struggles, as well as investigative work to expose white supremacist and neo-Nazi networks. Crimethinc, a bastion of left-wing, anarchist publishing and thought since the 1990s, saw its Facebook page removed too. The pages of groups organizing around the ongoing and potent antiracist uprisings were also shut down, including the PNW Youth Liberation Front, a network of youth collectives in the Northwest committed to direct action protest.
"Lumping anarchists and anti-fascists together with far-right militias who explicitly support the current administration is a strategic move to muddy the issue,” said a statement from Crimethinc in response to the bans. “This is the same operation that William Barr” — the attorney general — “performed in creating a Department of Justice task force focused on ‘anti-government extremists’ that targets self-proclaimed fascists and anti-fascists alike. In the case of the Department of Justice, this enables them to point to far-right and militia attacks in order to demand resources with which to crack down on those who are on the front lines of defending communities against such attacks.”
Both rhetorically and through specific policies, the government has obfuscated and downplayed the threat of white supremacist extremism, while sensationalizing the risks posed by the far left.
With its latest bans, Facebook is following this same playbook.
The demonization of antifascists has become a centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s reelection propaganda, which functions both to criminalize dissent and delegitimize Black liberation struggle.Following the intolerable events of the Charlottesville, Virginia, “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, Trump famously praised “very fine” members of the white supremacist coalition and blamed “both sides” for the murderous far-right violence that occurred — a stance that’s since been crystallized in his policies.
Facebook’s decision to treat leftist social justice platforms as equivalent to racist militia groups is merely an extension of the government’s position. “For months, Donald Trump has demanded this crackdown in a series of social media posts explicitly blaming anarchists and anti-fascists for the countrywide wave of protests precipitated by persistent police violence in the United States,” said the Crimethinc statement.
EARLIER THIS MONTH, as I wrote,Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, chaired a farcical Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on “stopping anarchist violence.” The senator repeatedly chastised Democrats for failing to condemn “antifa” for a murder that was in fact carried out by the far right — and refused to be corrected. Both It’s Going Down and Crimethinc were mentioned during the hearing, within baseless overtures on the threat of the far left.
In the three decades since Crimethinc’s founding, the Facebook ban is “the first thing like this that has occurred,” said a participant in the collective, who asked for anonymity out of concern for far-right retaliation and state scrutiny. Of course, none of the antifascist groups removed by Facebook expected any better from the social media leviathan. “We ultimately aren’t surprised by this move and personally all hate Facebook,” the It’s Going Down Twitter account said, noting that it was nonetheless a “vehicle to connect with people.”
At stake is not the moral standing of Mark Zuckerburg’s turpitudinous monopoly, but rather the further entrenching of a false equivalence, which stifles antifascist dissent at a time of emboldened state and movement fascism.
Related
Leaked Documents Show Police Knew Far-Right Extremists Were the Real Threat at Protests, Not “Antifa”
It bears repeating, ad nauseam, that the far right has carried out 329 murders in the last three decades; none have been attributed to antifa.Between 2009 and 2018, white supremacist and far-right extremists were responsible for 73 percent of extremist murders in the U.S. And that’s not even to mention the state-sanctioned, racist killings carried out by the police.
There’s no doubt that a number of the leftist platforms removed in the Facebook sweep advocate for disruptive dissent and protest. Antifa practice certainly involves a willingness to physically confront organized white supremacists in the streets. But Facebook’s bans, echoing Trump’s myths, equate the “violence” of disruptive antiracist protest with the violence of neo-Nazis murdering immigrants and people of color.
“This line of thinking continues to equate protest disruption and property destruction with far-right movements who fundamentally want to harm and kill large segments of the public,” It’s Going Down tweeted.
For Facebook to treat even militant, antiracist, antifascist organizing as a violence comparable to that of white supremacist militias is a statement, in no uncertain terms, about which lives it deems to matter.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/the-downfall-of-steve-bannon-looks-really-bad-for-bill-barr-and-donald-trump-jr
no lnx twt
The downfall of Steve Bannon looks really bad for Bill Barr and Donald Trump Jr.
Written by Cody Fenwick August 21, 2020
With the arrest of Steve Bannon — the president’s former campaign chair and White House strategist — and a group of his allies on Thursday, the world received confirmation of what many have long said about the conservative movement: The right-wing, ethnonationalist, populist rhetoric is often little more than a scam to win support from the massive to fund the desires of elites.
At least, that’s the narrative told in the indictment of Bannon and others leading “We Build the Wall, Inc.” — an organization that raised money from private donors, supposedly to build parts of President Donald Trump’s border wall. (Don’t ask about the fact that Mexico was supposed to pay for the wall.) According to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, despite, Bannon’s claim that the organization was run entirely by volunteers, he and his allies was cashing in.
“While repeatedly assuring donors that Brian Kolfage, the founder and public face of We Build the Wall, would not be paid a cent, the defendants secretly schemed to pass hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kolfage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss.
Bannon, on the other hand, “through a non-profit organization under his control (‘Non-Profit-1’), received over $1 million from We Build the Wall, at least some of which [Bannon] used to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in [Bannon’s] personal expenses,” SDNY said. Bannon is fighting the charges, pleading not guilty in court on Thursday.
Bannon and Kolfage, along with Timothy Shea and Andrew Badolato, were charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering.
But it’s not just the people named in the indictment who come off looking worse.
Attorney General Bill Barr’s already tarnished reputation took another substantial hit with the announcement because it reframed actions he took two months ago. In June, Barr sought to remove Geoffrey Berman, who has been the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. But he did so in a clumsy and corrupt fashion. He met with Berman privately and tried to pressure him out of a job. When Berman refused, Barr simply announced that Berman would be stepping down, to be replaced immediately by another prosecutor from outside the office while a permanent successor could be confirmed.
Berman quickly refuted Barr’s claim, publicly stating that he did not intend to leave. This started a brief struggle until Barr caved somewhat on his demands. He still had Berman removed, but he permitted Strauss, Berman’s deputy, to take his role. She is now serving in an acting capacity, and she oversaw the indictment filed against Bannon and the others.
The episode created a sharp backlash, because there seemed to be no above-board explanation for Barr’s actions. Barr might have had legitimate reasons to replace Berman with another appointee, but there was no clear reason why Berman should leave before that person was appointed. And Barr might have had reason to fire Berman, but there’s no clear reason why Strauss wouldn’t take over in his stead — which is how succession in these offices typically functions. And there was no good reason at all why Barr should lie about Berman voluntarily stepping down — it was just an aggressive power play.
These facts all pointed to a clear conclusion: Barr had a corrupt reason for wanting to oust Berman and replace him with a hand-picked successor. In a public statement and in testimony to Congress, Berman made clear what a plausible motive would be: Replacing him with anybody but Strauss would likely impede the office’s ongoing investigations.
We now know that the case again Bannon and “We Build the Wall, Inc.” was among the cases that likely would have been slowed down. Barr has admitted he knew about the case months ago. And it’s quite clear why Barr, an unabashed partisan, would want to slow it down. Indicting yet another of the president’s allies — and his second campaign manager — surely reflects badly on Trump. It’s especially bad because the allegations involve fleecing Trump’s supporters for venal reasons, which may hit close to home for those feeling let down by his presidency heading into the November election.
It’s possible there were other investigations Barr was looking to stop as well. And it’s possible, of course, that he wasn’t trying to delay this investigation at all. But that’s precisely why Barr’s hamfisted control of the Justice Department, and his complete lack of interest in even acting like a straight shooter, is so destructive for him and the country as a whole. It makes it impossible for Americans to be confident that he’s performing his job in good faith, rather than trying to protect the president’s friends and go after his enemies.
Donald Trump Jr., too, comes off looking a lot worse out of Bannon’s scandal, because he openly endorsed the project. In a quote featured on the organization’s website, he said:
This is private enterprise at its finest. Doing it better, faster, cheaper than anything else and what you guys are doing is pretty amazing. It started from a grassroots effort and it’s doing some wonderful things for an important issue.
After the indictment became public on Thursday, the Trump Organization put out a statement to the New York Times trying to distance himself from the project:
Don gave one speech at a single We Build the Wall event over a year ago with a group of angel moms and, besides that, has no involvement with their organization. He never gave them permission to use him as a testimonial on their website and was unaware they included him as one until today’s media reports about it. His previous praise of the group was based on what he was led to believe about their supposed intention to help build the wall on our southern border and if he and others were deceived, the group deserves to be held accountable for their actions.
The statement appears to admit that when Trump Jr. said the group was “private enterprise at its finest” that does work “better, faster, cheaper” than others and is “amazing,” he had no idea what he was talking about.
But the HuffPost reported that the ties between Trump Jr. and We Build the Wall, Inc. may be more significant than the statement suggested:
As part of a fundraising promotion, We Build the Wall offered free, autographed copies of Trump Jr.’s book, “Triggered,” to people donating at least $75. And Instagram posts from Kolfage and We Build the Wall suggest Trump Jr. directly interacted with the group again in November.
“[We Build the Wall representative] FOREMAN MIKE will be in Florida TOMORROW with Donald Trump Jr. at Sandestin Golf and Beach Resort!” the organization announced in a post on Nov. 7. The next day, Kolfage posted a photo of himself with a small group of people including Trump Jr. and “Foreman Mike.”
There’s some evidence, too, that the president was backing the project before its downfall, but its thinner.
In a Jan. 25, 2019 New York Times article on Kris Kobach that discussed the project, reporter Stephanie Saul wrote:
President Trump gave the undertaking his “blessing” in a telephone conversation Wednesday night, according to Mr. Kobach.
The White House press office did not respond to requests for comment.
Trump avoided going on the record, which now looks wise.
After the indictment came out, Trump’s defenders pointed to a recent tweet of his distancing himself from the project:
[twt: " i disagreed with doing this very small (tiny) section of wall, in a tricky area, by a private group which raised money by ads. It was only done to make me look bad, and perhsps it now doesn’t even work. Should have been built like rest of Wall, 500 plus miles.
Jeremy Schwartz
@JinATX
UPDATE: Experts to inspect a controversial privately built border wall following a federal court hearing this am. Govt attorney identified 4 areas of problematic erosion along the base of 4080]
However, this tweet emerged after Barr was aware of the investigation into the Bannon, so Trump was likely aware of it, too. And the president’s fans had already donated millions to the project, some of whom were likely encouraged by the fact that the Trump’s own son had endorsed it.
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former Trump White House political strategist Steve Bannon has been charged with criminal fraud for his role in a crowd-funded campaign to build President Donald Trump’s wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced on Thursday that Bannon and several other leaders of the ‘We Build The Wall’ online fundraising campaign have been indicted for defrauding “hundreds of thousands” of donors.
“As alleged, the defendants defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors, capitalizing on their interest in funding a border wall to raise millions of dollars, under the false pretense that all of that money would be spent on construction,” said acting SDNY U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss. “While repeatedly assuring donors that Brian Kolfage, the founder and public face of We Build the Wall, would not be paid a cent, the defendants secretly schemed to pass hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kolfage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle.”
As for Bannon’s role in the scheme, SDNY alleges that funneled “over $1 million from We Build the Wall” into a nonprofit organization that he personally controlled. According to SDNY, Bannon then used at least some of that money “to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars” in his own personal expenses.
in total, Bannon has been charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
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wapo
Bipartisan leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee last year notified the Department of Justice that members of President Donald Trump’s family and close circle “might have presented misleading testimony” to the panel during its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Washington Post reports.
According to the Post, then-Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) and Vice Chairman Mark R. Warner (D-VA) referred a list of individuals,including Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner to federal prosecutors after their accounts of a pre-election meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya “were contradicted by the president’s former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates” during former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
In a separate section, the congressional panel said it had reason to believe Steve Bannon, Erik Prince and former campaign co-chair Sam Clovis “had lied to congressional investigators — a potential felony,” the Post reports.
According to the Los Angeles Times, which first reported on the referrals and viewed a copy of the panel’s letter, the committee believes Bannon may have lied about his knowledge of a meeting Prince held in the Seychelles with a Russian official tied to the Kremlin. Per the Post, “Prince had told Mueller’s team that he briefed Bannon on the meeting, which occurred before Trump’s inauguration in early 2017; Bannon denied the conversation took place.”
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oct surprise?
820 an
Former Justice Department lawyer Matt Miller said that Attorney General Bill Barr has a “tell” that Miller thinks reveals what Barr will do about his new attempt at a GOP-run Russia investigation.
The MSNBC panel discussion looked back at Barr’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, where he admitted that the White House government appointees have discussions about the 2020 campaign during Cabinet Meetings. Conducting politics under the government is strictly prohibited.
“He has a tell, and the one that you just showed is an example, where there’s an answer where you expect the attorney general to give,” Miller began. “In the confirmation hearing, the answer you expected him to give was that he would recuse himself from the Russia investigation because of his previous writings on the topic, a memo he had written that was seen as the audition for the job. And he didn’t give that answer, and I think we found out why shortly after, it was because he wanted to interfere in the Mueller probe. He’s wanted to go back and then discredit it afterward.”
Miller said that Barr’s refusal to rule out releasing the new GOP-led Russia probe at the last minute before the election as a way to somehow tie Mueller’s probe to Joe Biden. Trump has tweeted as much, claiming that he was personally wiretapped at Trump Tower and that his campaign was being monitored as ordered by the Obama administration. Nothing in Mueller’s years-long investigation found any such thing. However, Barr previously twisted Mueller’s findings into his own summary that absolved Trump from any wrongdoing.
miller expects Barr to do the same thing in this case, but right before an election. That’s the reason Miller explained, Barr refused to answer any questions about his intent on releasing the GOP-led investigation, which has already completed.
“He has two goals here, one is fairly obvious,” said Miller. “One is he intends to try to smear Joe Biden. Not because Joe Biden did anything but to just try and tar the entire Obama administration by claiming there was this plot to get Donald Trump. By the way, it was a point that Sally Yates debunked pretty effectively today. But then I also worry that there’s a second goal and that’s if Russia or any other country interferes in the election again or if Trump is caught soliciting help from a foreign government again, which he has with Russia, Ukraine and China that Barr is able to release this report that attacks what happened in 2016. And put out this fog that says, ‘all of these deep-staters that have made claims about foreign interference in the past you can’t believe. You can’t believe what they said about 2016 and you can’t believe what’s going on right now.”
See the video below:
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house judic? testimony 7/28/20 did not go great but no clear fail? perjury?
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/bill-barr-has-done-this-before/
no lnx
Barr has done this before
Written by ProPublica July 31, 2020
As violent crime continued to climb in Chicago and other cities across the country, Attorney General William P. Barr announced that the U.S. Department of Justice was mobilizing to help: Dozens of federal agents would be sent to work with local police to combat gangs and illegal guns.
“Our message to gangs, gang leaders and gang members is this: When we throw the federal book at you, it will be a knockout blow,” Barr said.
That was in 1992, during Barr’s first stint leading the Justice Department, under former President George H.W. Bush.
If it sounds too recent or familiar to have happened nearly three decades ago, that’s because Barr, now attorney general under President Donald Trump, made a strikingly similar announcement on July 22.
Some of the details were different, of course. In 1992, Barr said the FBI was shifting about 300 agents from monitoring spies from the recently collapsed Soviet Union to taking on gangs and violent crime in American cities. Eighteen of the agents would be redeployed to Chicago.
This month, Barr stood next to Trump as he announced a Chicago “surge” of more than 100 agents from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and other agencies, along with staffing increases in other cities where gun casualties were making headlines.
Residents of Chicago could be forgiven for concluding that they’ve heard this before, since, of course, they essentially have. Barr even acknowledged that federal law enforcement agencies have carried out such operations “for decades.” Every presidential administration in the last 30 years has announced it was sending more federal agents to Chicago to try to stem violent crime.
But this time the circumstances are different — the politics are shifting. After 3 ½ years of Trump’s inflammatory comments and tweets, some thinly coded and others overtly racist, his administration’s announcement is widely seen in Chicago as a political move to use the troubles of a majority-nonwhite city to fire up his supporters.
And it’s happening as a growing number of people are demanding that their governments send something into their communities other than more guys with guns.
Chicago has a long, ugly history of violence. As in other cities, violent crime surged in Chicago in the 1960s and ’70s, dropped and leveled off, then spiked again during the 1990s. But since then, as murder and shooting totals plummeted in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere, Chicago’s numbers didn’t fall as far or as fast, and they’ve climbed again during several devastating stretches in the last 10 years.
The reasons have long been debated and are probably more complex than most would acknowledge. But politicians, law enforcement leaders and many residents have repeatedly blamed Chicago’s gang culture and open-air drug markets, then called for policing strategies to attack them.
The fact that most of the hardest-hit neighborhoods have also been shelled out by segregation, business closures and job losses — including thousands of layoffs from government agencies and shuttered schools — is well known. Yet the need for immediate responses to the bloodshed, rather than those that tackle the deeper problems, always seems to consume political and financial capital in Chicago.
In 1992, the city banned loitering by people deemed to be gang members until the measure was ruled unconstitutional. Former Mayor Richard M. Daley led an effort to sue gun manufacturers for creating a public nuisance in Chicago and other cities; the case was tossed out of court. Speed bumps and cul-de-sacs were built on dozens of side streets to thwart drive-by shootings, though as police and paramedics discovered, such obstacles also made it harder for them to respond to emergencies.
Far more common have been announcements that more police will be deployed in high-crime areas, often under the banner of a new task force, program or initiative. That’s where the feds often come in — literally.
Soon after Trump took office in 2017, he called Chicago a “war zone” and blamed local leaders for being “politically correct.” He also threatened, via Twitter, “I will send in the Feds!”
Rahm Emanuel, then Chicago’s mayor and a frequent Trump sparring partner, rejected the idea of troops in the city. “I’m against it, straight up,” he told reporters. But Emanuel added that he welcomed additional resources to fight gun crimes. Within two weeks, CNN reported that 20 more ATF agents were being sent to Chicago.
Since Lori Lightfoot was elected mayor last year, she has repeatedly blasted Trump for racism and disrespect for civil rights — even as she’s been attacked in Chicago for not yet delivering on promises to reform the Police Department and drive up investment in underserved neighborhoods.
On July 20, after another weekend of appalling violence in Chicago — dozens of people were reportedly wounded in shootings and at least 12 people killed — Trump suggested at a press conference that he was again ready to send in federal agents. Lightfoot responded with a letter that criticized his administration’s “incendiary rhetoric” as well as the tactics of Department of Homeland Security agents who had seized people off the street in Portland, Oregon.
Yet Lightfoot also said the city could use other kinds of federal help, including “more federal prosecution or investigatory resources” to pursue violent crime and gun cases. She added that the government could help Chicago invest in underserved neighborhoods. “The violence our city is confronting is symptomatic of a larger public health and economic crisis.”
Trump and Barr announced the latest “surge” of federal agents to Chicago that week, describing it as part of a national crime-reduction initiative called Operation Legend. The FBI, ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshals Service and Homeland Security would together send dozens of investigators and agents to the city, with the U.S. attorney in Chicago, John Lausch Jr., overseeing the operation.
Underneath the politics and symbolism, the announcement signaled that federal and local officials were returning to their old strategy: send in more cops.
Shifting federal agents to cities under fire is “commonly done, and as a matter of fact, when I was the special agent-in-charge there, I asked for it,” said Jack Riley, who formerly served as the top agent in the DEA’s Chicago office. “It’s been called 20 different things in the past. [Operation Legend] is just the newest version of it.”
This federal surge may involve more agents than previous efforts, and Riley believes it could help tamp down violence in Chicago if it is carefully coordinated and sustained. Operations on the street should be carried out by agents who know the city, with those from out of town used in support roles. And as agents are conducting investigations and making arrests, the U.S. attorney’s office needs enough staff to prosecute the increased caseload, said Riley, who went on to serve as the No. 2 official in the DEA, overseeing global operations, before retiring.
“Are there going to be additional prosecutors?” he said. “That’s been an issue before.”
The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago received a staffing boost in 2018, but no additional prosecutors are included in the latest operation. A spokesman for the office declined to comment.
Plus, the agent surge is only likely to last until fall, when the city’s usual spike in violence typically recedes along with the warm weather. So, like previous efforts, the surge is temporary.
If those earlier short-term operations worked to reduce gun violence, it’s hard for city residents to see as shootings spike again.
Over the last three years, the U.S. attorney’s office here has prosecuted more than 500 defendants on weapons charges, records show. Some of the defendants are traffickers or leaders of other criminal enterprises. But many tend to be lower-level players caught with illegal guns that have traded hands multiple times. Law enforcement officials argue that prosecutions for illegal possession help deter others. Still, the approach hasn’t shut down the gun marketplace, as firearms continue to flow into the city from suburbs and neighboring states.
So far Operation Legend appears to be following the playbook of those earlier initiatives. The first three arrests made as part of the Chicago surge were all for illegal gun possession, according to court filings.
On July 23, the day after the latest federal deployments were announced, Black Lives Matter Chicago and 10 other organizations sued Barr and other administration officials. The groups, seeing no reason to trust the Trump administration, asked for a federal court order to protect their right to protest in the event of any Portland-style tactics. In addition, they made what amounted to a defund-the-federal-police argument, claiming federal resources would be better spent on investing in their communities than flooding them with more law enforcement officers.
“We should take their money and use it to help people facing eviction, use those resources for people who need access to food,” Amika Tendaji, an organizer with Black Lives Matter, said in an interview. “The police haven’t been able to do anything [about the violence]. We need to actually address the root causes.”
More and more leaders are signing on to this approach. Over the last week, advocacy groups, churches and more than 30 state and local elected officials added their names to a letter urging Lightfoot and Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart not to cooperate with the federal operation.
“Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated both his callous disregard for Black, indigenous, and immigrant lives, and his increasing inclination towards fascism and authoritarianism,” the letter said. “We grieve deeply the lives lost to gun violence in Chicago. … At the same time, we are clear that we cannot police ourselves out of this terrible situation.”
Chicago is now on a pace to record one of its highest annual murder totals in two decades. It’s hard to argue that the old strategies have worked.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/one-moment-in-bill-barrs-testimony-clearly-exposed-his-compete-fealty-to-trumps-delusion-and-lies
Digby Parton / Salon July 29, 2020
Attorney General Bill Barr finally showed up for his long-scheduled hearing before the House Judiciary Committee and once again proved himself to be Trump’s eager henchman. He didn’t read aloud some of the more incendiary parts of his opening statement (which as Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., observed, “reads like it was written by Alex Jones or Roger Stone”) but for all his braying about “the law” his arrogant attitude and slippery answers left no doubt about where his allegiance lies. Let’s just say Trump doesn’t have to worry about Barr’s loyalty.
The list of Barr’s odious comments is a mile long, starting with his fatuous answers regarding the question of systemic racism in policing. He evidently thinks it’s cute, just as his boss does, to insist that “more white people are shot by police than Black people” when responding to the question of why Black people, who make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, account for 25 percent of those shot and killed by police since 2015 while “non-Hispanic” whites, who are more than 60 percent of the population, only account for 45 percent. This answer is insulting to the intelligence of the American people.
Barr also obfuscated, dissembled, misled and evaded questions about his interference in cases on behalf of Trump’s cronies, the firing and reassigning of U.S. attorneys working on cases involving the president, the shocking events at Lafayette Square in June and his inconsistency in applying federal laws to benefit the president, while ignoring them when they don’t. As hard as it is to believe, he even took it upon himself to strenuously defend the president’s botched COVID-19 response in great detail, something he could have easily avoided by saying it isn’t his purview.
But no, Barr had the temerity to use some of Trump’s most spectacularly absurd excuses by blaming the Obama administration, which hasn’t been in office for three and a half years, for allegedly destroying the CDC and failing to replenish the national stockpile of PPE. If there was one moment that captured Barr’s total immersion in Trump’s ocean of self-deception and lies, it was that series of inane talking points.
There is a whole lot to worry about with what Barr is doing right now, not the least of which is covering up Trump’s corruption and pushing paramilitary responses against peaceful protests. But after listening to his testimony, I think it’s the potential for direct interference in the presidential election by Barr and the Justice Department that should have every American on high alert.
Consider that Barr’s opening statement referred to the Russia investigation as “bogus,” ignoring the fact that, among other things, Robert Mueller and multiple House and Senate committees have established that Russia interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Donald Trump. This would also indicate that Barr is completely unconcerned about another propaganda or hacking campaign happening as we speak, despite repeated warnings from the FBI the U.S. intelligence agencies and Congress.
That just isn’t something the attorney general of the United States cares about. When asked if it was OK to solicit or accept foreign assistance in an election campaign, he even responded, Indeed, he even went so far as to answer, “It depends what kind of assistance.” He caught himself, so when he was asked the same question again he said, “No.” It’s a felony, after all. But I think it’s pretty clear that he believes when Trump asks for assistance from Russia, Ukraine and China — all of which we’ve seen him do publicly — it is just fine.
On the other hand, Barr has invented out of whole cloth a new concern that hostile governments will alter the election results by “manufacturing mail-in ballots,” citing zero actual evidence but rather his “common sense” as proof. That’s because there is no evidence. Many states provide no-excuse absentee ballots and five states have total vote by mail. Oregon, for instance, has done it since 1998, without any hint of such a problem.
Earlier in the hearing, Barr had made it clear that he sent federal troops into Portland because protesters were harming a federal building. When asked why he had backed the right ofarmed protesters who stormed the Michigan state capitol, some of whom threatened the governor with lynching and beheading, he claimed not to have been aware of that and mumbled something about defending religious freedom. He indicated that he’s only concerned with federal offenses.
Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., pointed out that Trump has suggested that no ballots should be counted after Election Day and asked Barr, “If the president asks you to intervene and try to stop states from counting legal ballots after Election Day, will you do the right thing and refuse?”
Barr responded, “I will follow the law.” He separately said he would “enforce” the law. So that means if a state has issued a ruling saying that votes cannot be counted if they were postmarked before Election Day but didn’t arrive until after that, he would be willing to intervene on behalf of the president to ensure those votes weren’t counted.
Anyone who lived through the Florida 2000 election debacle should know that this is not a matter for federal law enforcement. Elections are run by the states. If there’s a dispute it goes to the courts and in a worst-case scenario to the Congress. Barr has no authority to intervene at all in how states count and tabulate their votes, but judging from his recent behavior, I doubt that would stop him. With Barr, “follow the law,” seems to mean “do whatever benefits Donald Trump and hurts his enemies.”
When Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., asked Barr whether he had discussed the presidential campaign with Trump, the attorney general said he couldn’t talk about his private conversations but blithely admitted that they talk about the campaign in Cabinet meetings and said nobody should be surprised that the election comes up. Actually, they should be both surprised and alarmed. The AG is supposed to be the most removed from politics of all high-level administration officials and neither the president nor anyone else should not be talking to him about the campaign or the election. (You may recall the furious rending of garments on the right when Attorney General Loretta Lynch met with Bill Clinton for 15 minutes in 2016.)
Perhaps most chilling was Barr’s answer to Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who asked whether Barr himself would leave office on Jan. 20, 2021, if Trump loses the election but tries to remain in the White House. “Well, if the results are clear, I would leave office,” the attorney general said. He did not elaborate further, but considering that the president is already saying that mail-in voting will somehow “rig” the election, something Barr claims to believe is thoroughly possible, his unwillingness to simply say that he would leave office if Trump loses is more than a little bit disturbing.
When Nadler asked Barr whether he had ever discussed the presidential campaign with Trump he also asked whether they had discussed the “current or future deployment of federal law enforcement” within the context of Trump’s re-election campaign. Barr answered, “I’m not going to get into my discussions with the president.”
It would have been completely acceptable for him to simply say no to such an explosive suggestion. You have to wonder why he didn’t.
no lnx
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/white-supremacists-are-using-the-protests-to-stoke-racial-tensions-while-trump-and-bill-barr-help/
no lnx twt vid
white supremacists are using the protests to stoke racial tensions — while Trump and Bill Barr help
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly July 29, 2020
The day after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers, peaceful protesters took to the streets. But the first serious incidence of violence came two days later on May 27th when a masked man started breaking windows at an auto parts store.
That set off a chain reaction of looting, fires, and rioting. Three days later, Attorney General Bill Barr made a statement, saying that “In many places it appears the violence is planned, organized and driven by anarchic and far left extremist groups using Antifa-like tactics, many of whom travel from outside the state to promote the violence.” The president echoed those remarks.
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On Tuesday, we learned something about the so-called “umbrella man” in the video above.
A masked man who was seen in a viral video smashing the windows of a south Minneapolis auto parts store during the George Floyd protests, earning him the moniker “Umbrella Man,” is suspected to be a member of the Hell’s Angels biker gang seeking to incite racial tension in a demonstration that until then had been peaceful, police said…
A subsequent investigation revealed that the man was also an associate of the Aryan Cowboy Brotherhood, a small white supremacist prison and street gang based primarily in Minnesota and Kentucky.
Police have also connected the Aryan Cowboy Brotherhood to an incident in which a Muslim woman and her daughter were harassed in Stillwater, Minnesota by a group of men wearing white supremacist insignia.
Last weekend, something similar happened in Richmond, Virginia.
Riots in downtown Richmond over the weekend were instigated by white supremacists under the guise of Black Lives Matter, according to law enforcement officials.
Protesters tore down police tape and pushed forward toward Richmond police headquarters, where they set a city dump truck on fire.
If we add all of that to the involvement of the far-right anti-government group Boogaloo Boys, it becomes clear that much of the violence we’re seeing on the streets is coming from two groups: (1) law enforcement, and (2) far-right/white supremacist groups. But as the president and attorney general defend the use of force by law enforcement to “dominate” the streets, it is significant that neither one of them has called out the actual extremists who are involved.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/gop-rep-matt-gaetz-files-a-criminal-referral-against-facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-with-william-barr
no lnx
gOP Rep. Matt Gaetz files a criminal referral against Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg with William Barr
Written by Roger Sollenberger / Salon July 29, 2020
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., on Monday asked Attorney General William Barr to open a criminal investigation into Mark Zuckerberg over allegations that the Facebook CEOlied to Congress. MIRROR FLYNN STONE?
In a letter to Barr, Gaetz accused the social media executive of making false statements to Congress on two occasions in 2018. He alleged that Zuckerberg “repeatedly and categorically denied any bias against conservative speech, persons, policies or politics” on his platform.
“On both occasions, members of Congress asked Mr. Zuckerberg about allegations that Facebook censored and suppressed content supportive of President Donald Trump and other conservatives,” Gaetz wrote.
“Mr. Zuckerberg also dismissed the suggestion that Facebook exercises any form of editorial manipulation,” he added.
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Zuckerberg made the remarks in 2018 under questioning from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., who accused Facebook of “bias and censorship.” Cruz cited a 2016 Gizmodo revealing allegations that the social media platform had knowingly suppressing conservative news. Zuckerberg responded:
I understand where that concern is coming from, because Facebook and the tech industry are located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left-leaning place. And this is actually a concern that I have, and that I try to root out in the company, is making sure that we don’t have any bias in the work that we do. And I think it is a fair concern that people would at least wonder about."
As evidence to support his claims, Gaetz directed Barr to a recent sting by Project Veritas, a right-wing organization known for its efforts to take down liberal organizations, mainstream media outlets and public figures through misinformation and deceptively edited “insider” videos.
Project Veritas published hidden-camera footage of purported Facebook content moderators apparently admitting that they delete conservative posts. Gaetz says the “whistleblowers” in the video offer “ample evidence” of the company’s “bias and manipulation.”
“According to the Veritas report and undercover footage, the adjudicators were outspoken about their political bias against Republicans and actively chose to eliminate otherwise-allowable content from the platform and from public view simply due to its political orientation,” Gaetz wrote.
“At the same time,” Gaetz added, “speech promoting violence against the president and his supporters was labeled as merely ‘political,’ and was thus allowed to stay on the platform.”
The Republican representative also claims, without citing evidence, that Facebook’s artificial intelligence content screening program is itself not politically neutral, which he alleges is a violation of the “good faith” provision of the Communications Decency Act.
Republicans — from internet trolls, up to lawmakers and President Donald Trump himself — regularly accuse Facebook and other social media platforms of anti-conservative bias.
However, Facebook launched its own project in the weeks after the 2016 election — “Project P,” for propaganda — which found dozens of pages peddling fake news ahead of Trump’s victory. Nearly all the pages were based overseas, had financial motives and “displayed a clear rightward bent,” according to the Washington Post.
Another reason why moderators may encounter a higher volume of flagged conservative content is because Facebook’s most popular content has become overwhelmingly conservative over time. “Facebook has become the home of right-wing America, while Twitter and Snap have become the home of the left,” Vanity Fair’s Nick Bilton reported earlier this year.
And while liberals have criticized Facebook for refusing to fact-check political ads — and even threatened to break up the social media platform — a number of leading conservatives have reportedly met in secret with Zuckerberg, including Tucker Carlson, Sen. Lindsey Graham, and on at least one occasion, Trump himself. Zuckerberg has not disclosed the content of those meetings.
Matt Gaetz did not respond to Salon’s request for comment. Facebook declined to comment.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/barr-continues-his-retaliation-against-trump-critics-outs-a-russia-linked-fbi-source
kos
trump-loyal Attorney General William Barr continues to use his granted federal powers to retaliate against Trump’s enemies—namely, those that would dare investigate Trump and his uncountably-many crooked allies. He has taken it upon itself to sabotage federal investigations, remove investigators and watchdogs who have taken on Trump-related cases, withhold evidence from Congress, order that testimony be withheld from Congress, and rigorously done whatever other actions would best cement conservative, fascist-premised power.
The Washington Post reports on a new instance, in which Barr ordered the declassification of a document last week that, upon delivery to senator and fellow corruption-enabler Lindsey Graham, within days resulted in the public outing of a secret FBI source. The reason? That source was one who compiled information for the now-infamous “dossier” collecting rumors and leads on Donald Trump’s dealings inside Russia, and we can presume the outing of this confidential source is in keeping with Barr’s brazenly public campaign of retaliation against those who investigated the connections between Russian election interference, in 2016, and Trump’s campaign.
Also in keeping with this administration’s fascist tendencies, whether this campaign of Trump-friendly declassifications results in people getting killed seems immaterial to Barr.
Igor Danchenko was, until last week, a source who used his Russian and Ukrainian contacts to pass information back to former British spy Christopher Steele, information that would be included in what is now known as the “Steele dossier” on Trump-Russia rumors. He spoke to the FBI, says the Post, on condition of secrecy to protect his foreign sources and his family from harm—a reasonable demand given the Putin government’s ongoing assassinations of Putin critics, journalists, and suspected spies.
While the FBI did redact Danchenko’s name from the material given to Graham, the surrounding text gave enough information to swiftly expose both Danchenko and at least one of his own alleged sources.
This seemingly intentional Barr “screw-up”, compromising promised anonymity to informants for the sake of discrediting the Robert Mueller investigation into Russian election hacking in particular, is part of a continued string of actions by an attorney general seemingly far more vested in punishing enemies than protecting national interests. It’s not hard to guess how the public identification of once-secret FBI sources will impact the willingness of future sources to come forward, especially if those sources have information about Donald Trump in particular.
Then again, that is almost certainly the intent.
While similar campaigns to publicly discredit and demonize individual federal agents, sources, and investigators have ended numerous careers—some on Trump’s orders, and some not—the exposure of Russian sources in particular adds a significant additional risk, however. Barr and Graham’s efforts to “investigate” and retaliate against those they believe have wronged Dear Leader may put foreign sources in real danger.
One gets the feeling that William Barr himself is indifferent about that. At best.
720 an portland
...Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Wednesday led 116 of his colleagues in a letter (pdf) demanding Barr and Wolf answer their questions on the ongoing Portland deployment and any planned expansion of federal law enforcement programs in U.S. cities.
“This is not legitimate law enforcement under our Constitution but a shocking slide into authoritarianism and police state tactics,” the letter reads, adding that “these new tactics are an outrageous assault on the liberties of the people and the police powers and political sovereignty of the states.”...
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/aclu-demands-special-counsel-probe-into-barr-over-police-assault-on-protesters-the-suspect-cant-be-the-investigator/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/here-are-7-suspicious-revelations-from-the-us-attorney-forced-out-by-bill-barr/
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sdny
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/6/22/william_barr_geoffrey_berman_firing
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/bill-barr-is-running-law-enforcement-like-a-middle-school-bully-because-he-used-to-be-one-op-ed/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/gross-abuse-of-prosecutorial-power-court-appointed-lawyer-rebukes-barrs-handling-of-flynn-case/
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an 620
federal judge who accused Barr of ‘distorting’ the Mueller report has read an unredacted version — and now he’s demanding some answers
Alex HendersonJune 9, 2020
The Mueller report hasn’t been in the headlines much in 2020, a year that has found reporters heavily focused on the Ukraine scandal, President Donald Trump’s acquittal on two articles…
Barr’s Potemkin efforts to deal with police violence
Nancy LeTourneau / Washington MonthlyJune 9, 2020
Three days after the killing of George Floyd, the building that housed the Minneapolis Police Department 3rd precinct was basically burned to the ground. BREAKING: The third precinct police statio
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/william-barr-lies-repeatedly-and-brazenly-about-st-johns-church-attack-on-face-the-nation/
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barr trump need bogeyman/threat to justify cop violence
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/bill-barr-and-trump-desperately-want-to-blame-antifa-for-violence-but-theyre-coming-up-dry-so-far/
no lnx alex h
President Donald Trump has turned his wrath on Antifa during the George Floyd protests, demanding Antifa be labeled a terrorist organization and accusing the movement of committing acts of violence at demonstrations. But journalists William Bredderman and Spencer Ackerman, in the Daily Beast, threw cold this week on efforts to blame the leftist group.
They found that “none of the 22 criminal complaints representing the first wave of protest charges mention Antifa in any way.”
Calling Antifa a “terrorist organization” is problematic in more than one respect. First, Antifa doesn’t begin to fit the traditional definition of terrorism and doesn’t target innocent bystanders the way that actual terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda or the Ku Klux Klan have done. Second, Antifa isn’t an organization, but a decentralized movement and collection of tactics.
Bredderman and Ackerman discuss the ideologies of defendants in the protest cases, noting that they range from “anarchism” to the far-right Boogaloo movement — and that none of the charges mention anti-fascism (which is what Antifa stands for). According to retired FBI special agent Mike German, “What it definitely demonstrates is that anti-fascism is not a driving force in the current protest violence.”
Nonetheless, Attorney General William Barr has joined Trump in blaming Antifa for violence at demonstrations. At a press conference on Thursday, Barr told reporters, “We have evidence that Antifa and other similar extremist groups, as well as actors of a variety of different political persuasions, have been involved in instigating and participating in the violent activity.”
Bredderman and Ackerman note some reasons why Trump and Barr’s claims about Antifa are so misleading.
“Despite Trump’s rhetoric about designating Antifa a terrorist organization, Antifa is an ethic rather than an actual group — and even if it were a group, there is no domestic terrorism statute for designating a non-foreign entity as a banned terrorist organization,” Bredderman and Ackerman note. “That’s not stopped a chorus of right-wing voices from fantasizing about state violence against ant-fascist Americans.”
For example, the Beast journalists point out, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas tweeted, “Let’s see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they’re facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.”
Tom Cotton
@TomCottonAR
US Senate candidate, AR
Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight.
If local law enforcement is overwhelmed and needs backup, let's see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they're facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.
We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction.
137K
6:29 AM - Jun 1, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
69.9K people are talking about this
Far-right fear-mongering around Antifa is nothing new. In November 2017, FBI Director Christopher Wray was asked if the FBI was doing anything to counteract Antifa; Wray responded, “We’re not investigating Antifa as Antifa – that’s an ideology, and we don’t investigate ideologies.”
According to German, Trump and Barr are badly misinformed where Antifa is concerned.
“Typically, when we’re talking about Antifa — which doesn’t exist as a group in the way the president imagines — it would make it difficult to associate somebody with a group that doesn’t exist as an organization,” German explained. “They’re imagining something that isn’t real.”
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an
no lnx
vanka Trump ‘urged’ president’s church photo-op — which could become a ‘defining moment’ of his time in office: NYT
President Donald J. Trump and Advisor to the President Ivanka Trump arrive to attend event supporting our nation’s small businesses through the pay check protection program Tuesday, April 28, 2020, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Written by Bob Brigham / Raw Story June 3, 2020
First daughter and senior White House advisor Ivanka Trump “urged” her father to take part in a controversial photo-op with a Bible according to a new report from The New York Times.
“After a weekend of protests that led all the way to his own front yard and forced him to briefly retreat to a bunker beneath the White House, President Trump arrived in the Oval Office on Monday agitated over the television images, annoyed that anyone would think he was hiding and eager for action,” the newspaper reported.
:{
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“He wanted to send the military into American cities, an idea that provoked a heated, voices-raised fight among his advisers. But by the end of the day, urged on by his daughter Ivanka Trump, he came up with a more personal way of demonstrating toughness — he would march across Lafayette Square to achurch damaged by fire the night before,” the newspaper reported.[9/11 rubble b43 redux?]
Hope Hicks was reportedly the brains behind the photo-op.
Paula Chertok??
@PaulaChertok
Ivanka Trump carried the Bible prop Trump posed with in her $1,540 Max Mara designer handbag in infamous photo-op 'masterminded by Hope Hicks'https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8381977/Ivanka-Trump-carried-Bible-Donald-Trump-posed-1-540-Max-Mara-handbag.html … #Maddow
Ivanka carried Bible Donald Trump posed with $1,540 Max Mara handbag
Ivanka Trump carried the bible President Donald Trump brandished in his controversial photo-op in her designer purse as she joined administration officials in the walk to St. John's Church.
dailymail.co.uk
“The only problem: A plan developed earlier in the day to expand the security perimeter around the White House had not been carried out. When Attorney General William P. Barr strode out of the White House gates for a personal inspection early Monday evening, he discovered that protesters were still on the northern edge of the square. For the president to make it to St. John’s Church, they would have to be cleared out. Mr. Barr gave the order to disperse them,” the newspaper reported.
“The scene of mayhem that preceded the walk — barely 1,000 feet from the symbol of American democracy — evoked images more commonly associated with authoritarian countries, but that did not bother the president, who has long flirted with overseas strongmen and has expressed envy of their ability to dominate,” The Times reported. “But critics, including some fellow Republicans, were aghast at the use of force against Americans who posed no visible threat at the time, all to facilitate what they deemed a ham-handed photo opportunity featuring all white faces. Some Democratic senators used words like ‘fascist’ and ‘dictator’ to describe the president’s words and actions.”
“And when the history of the Trump presidency is written, the clash at Lafayette Square may be remembered as one of its defining moments,” the newspaper noted.
Read the full report.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/01/george-floyd-protests-trump-puts-top-us-military-officer-in-charge.html
no lnx
waASHINGTON — In a contentious call with the nation’s governors Monday, President Donald Trump said he was putting America’s highest-ranking military officer “in charge” as protests over the death of George Floyd rock the United States for a seventh day.
“General Milley is here who’s head of Joint Chiefs of Staff, a fighter, a warrior, and a lot of victories and no losses. And he hates to see the way it’s being handled in the various states. And I’ve just put him in charge,” Trump told governors, according to audio obtained by NBC.
It was not immediately clear what Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley would be tasked with as it relates to the domestic unrest across the nation. The Pentagon added few details. “The chairman will continue to advise the secretary of Defense,” Pentagon spokesperson U.S. Army Lt. Col. Chris Mitchell said.
“As of this morning, 23 states and the District of Columbia had mobilized personnel in support of state and local authorities. Combined, they provided over 17,000 National Guard troops in support,” Mitchell added.
When asked to elaborate, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said she would not “get ahead of any actions that will be announced” on the matter.
“There will be additional federal assets deployed across the nation and there will be a central command center in conjunction with the state and local governments that will include general Milley, [Defense Secretary Mark] Esper and [Attorney General William] Barr, but I won’t go any further in announcing any actions,” McEnany said during a White House press briefing.
NBC News reported that Trump has considered using the Insurrection Act, which was adopted in 1807. Under the move, he would deploy troops to respond to the demonstrations. The law was last invoked during the 1992 Rodney King riots in California, at the request of then-Gov. Pete Wilson, according to NBC.[afte 63 kia? up to 1 bill$ damage?]
The latest revelation comes as Trump called for governors on Monday to use force when confronting protesters, who have taken to the streets across the U.S. to protest Floyd’s death as well as police brutality. Floyd died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. The officer was charged with third-degree murder. An independent autopsy found that asphyxiation was the cause of Floyd’s death.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/ex-fbi-official-slams-bill-barr-for-ignoring-the-right-wing-boogaloo-bois-infiltrating-protests/
Ex-FBI official slams Bill Barr for ignoring the right-wing ‘Boogaloo Bois’ infiltrating protests
Written by Bob Brigham / Raw Story May 31, 2020
Attorney General Bill Barr was slammed by the former assistant director for counterintelligence at the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Saturday for misleading Americans about the source of violence at the protests over the killing of George Floyd while in police custody.
“There’s evidence developing, Brian, that the organization we’re seeing of the most violent protesters is coming from a couple of disturbing places,” both, by the way, there’s disparate in terms in being from the right or the left. here’s what those who monitor these groups and sites are seeing.
“We’re seeing a far-right group, one group for example known as the Boogaloo Bois, who on their private Facebook page and social media outlets are calling for violence, calling for people to show up,” Frank Figliuzzi told MSNBC’s Brian Williams.
“We’re seeing evidence in the protests that right-wing dangerous militia groups are there. We’ve seen flags and symbols that come from both Boogaloo Bois and dangerous militia groups,” he warned. “On the far-left, we’re seeing some evidence developing of global anarchists showing up.”
“So we’re seeing a strange alignment occurring by some groups who are anti-government on the right and therefore anti-police because they think the police are too oppressive to them, aligning themselves with people like Black Lives Matter and saying, ‘hey, we’re one because we both don’t like the police,’ but I’m here to tell you they are not one, their intention is to destroy government and the system of justice, as opposed to calling for justice within the system.”
“What do we do about it?” Williams asked.
“Well, ordinarily we’d rely on our system and mechanisms and rule of law, but here’s two things significant that happened today that caused me to be deeply troubled about the summer ahead. The attorney general, William Barr held a press conference where he chose selectively just the intelligence that indicates there’s far-left agitators within the protest groups,” Figliuzzi noted.
Acyn Torabi
@Acyn
AG Barr: it appears the violence is planned, organized, and driven by anarchic and left extremist groups, far left extremist groups using Antifa like tactics... it is a federal crime to cross state lines or to use interstate facilities to incite or participate in violent rioting
Embedded video
5,003 people are talking about this
“He politicized intelligence. We shouldn’t be surprised by it, but we should be disturbed that the whole truth is not getting out about all the groups that pose a threat because that goes toward whether or not law enforcement will take effective action against all groups that are violent and be allowed to take such action,” he explained.
“And then the second thing that should disturb us today is within the last hour, the president of the United States has tweeted he wants to use the unlimited power of the military with regard to these protests. Well, let me remind our viewers that we have laws in the United States that prevent the military from turning into law enforcement on the streets of America,” he reminded.
“Yet we see a direction of where this is headed: politicizing the intelligence so that only the far-left becomes the bad folks here, and then a president who seems inclined to use the military on our streets,” Figliuzzi warned.
“It’s scary stuff,” Williams said.
Watch:
no lnx twet pix
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/is-bill-barr-concealing-trumps-grand-jury-testimony/
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an 520
Barr just sharply undercut ‘Obamagate’ — but still proved he can’t be trusted
Attorney General Bill Barr suggested Monday that there are still lines he won’t cross for President Donald Trump — while nevertheless proving that he absolutely cannot be trusted with the…
https://www.mediamatters.org/trumprussia/richard-grenells-flynn-unmasking-noninformation-campaign
Right-wing media froth over “Obamagate” and bully press to play along
WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ
PUBLISHED 05/15/20 2:15 PM EDT
Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, a former Fox News contributor and Republican Party stalwart who was appointed to lead the U.S. intelligence community because of his loyalty to President Donald Trump, provided a document of his own devising to Congress on Wednesday. It promptly leaked to the press. Republicans, including Trump himself, immediately seized on the content in the document as evidence of vast Obama administration malfeasance. Fox hosts spent the next two days incessantly declaring that it vindicated their conspiracy theories, turning their attention away from the coronavirus pandemic. And more credible media outlets, buffeted by the partisan claims, responded with a flurry of stories, at times failing to properly contextualize the story.
Trumpists have declared Grenell’s document a smoking gun showing that disgraced former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI about his calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, was a victim of an Obama administration conspiracy, and Fox is hyping that narrative with wall-to-wall coverage. In reality, the document provides almost no information whatsoever. It is simply a list of senior Obama administration officials who received Flynn’s name after they followed the National Security Agency’s standard process and asked the agency to unmask the identity of an individual generically referenced in an NSA report they were authorized to read. It does nothing to establish that any of the individuals named acted improperly in any way -- or even how many unmaskings were related to the Kislyak calls.
We’ve seen misinformation campaigns, where false or deceptive information is distributed, and disinformation campaigns, when that distribution is done with the full knowledge of its inaccuracy. Grenell is engaged in a noninformation campaign. He deliberately crafted and propagated a data point so vague that it is virtually meaningless on its own. But pro-Trump partisans -- particularly at Fox -- have easily picked up, misread (deliberately or not), and promoted the point, aligining it with their wild assumptions. Those furious misinterpretations have in turn spurred attention from the mainstream press, driving the conspiratorial thinking into the broader public.
This is an intentional plan that corresponds with what the president wants from his director of national intelligence. “Trump hopes enough information will be released by his intelligence appointees to muddy the waters and lend a patina of confusion about what Mr. Obama may have done, according to people familiar with his thinking,” The New York Times reported Thursday. As the president struggles in reelection polling, Trump and his Fox propagandists are using the Flynn story to try to damage the credibility of former President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s 2020 opponent.
Grenell’s noninformation campaign is the latest salvo in a years-long campaign by Trump and his Fox propagandists to turn the Russia investigation inside out, presenting the Trump associates who pleaded or were found guilty under its auspices as victims and those involved in carrying out the probe as criminals.
With vast swathes of the federal bureaucracy in the hands of partisans selected for their loyalty to the president, including the DNI and Justice Department, we should expect more of these releases -- and perhaps more dangerous actions -- in the coming months, as Trump’s supporters try to push the political debate away from the ongoing pandemic that has killed more than 80,000 Americans so far in order to secure his reelection.
The Trumpist defense of Michael Flynn
Michael Flynn is a retired general who served as Trump’s national security adviser during the 2016 presidential campaign, the transition, and the early days of his White House tenure. At various points during that timeline, Flynn was also assigned by Trump to find the Hillary Clinton emails he had publicly asked Russia to procure; was under investigation by the FBI, which was concerned with whether he was serving as a witting or unwitting agent of the Russian government; was illegally acting as an unregistered agent of the Turkish government, for which he was reportedly involved in discussions of a kidnapping plot; and was seeking Trump’s approval for a plan to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia after working as a paid adviser for the group behind the proposal.
On December 29, 2016, the day the Obama administration placed sanctions on Russia in response to its interference in the presidential election, Flynn called Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and urged him that Russia not retaliate for those sanctions. Flynn was fired as Trump’s national security adviser after reports surfaced that he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about those conversations, which opened Flynn up to blackmail from the Russian government. He would later repeatedly plead guilty as part of Mueller’s probe to lying to the FBI about those calls before renouncing that plea last year.
The position on Flynn among Trumpists like Fox host Sean Hannity is that he is an American hero, that there was no good-faith reason to probe any of his actions during that period, and that anyone involved in such an effort was a participant in the broad-ranging Obama administration conspiracy to take down Trump, which the president terms “OBAMAGATE.”
Their argument features Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak in two ways: They argue that the FBI’s interview with Flynn was a nefarious “setup” and suggest that the leak about the conversation from a “senior government official” to The Washington Post’s David Ignatius for his 2017 column, which brought the call into public light, was an illegal attempt to take down Flynn and Trump by someone who had improperly “unmasked” his identity from intelligence intercepts.
William Barr’s Justice Department showed last week that the Trump administration is putting the force of the federal government behind Fox’s conspiracy theories when it filed a dubious and virtually unprecedented motion seeking to drop the government’s case against Flynn, citing the FBI’s interview tactics. And on Wednesday, Grenell tried to use his own power as the director of national intelligence to provide grist in support of the other fork of the Flynn defense.
“Unmasking” and what Grenell’s document shows
On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that Grenell had declassified and provided to the Justice Department what the paper described as “an Obama-era document related to President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn” and “a list of Obama administration officials who sought to learn the identities of Trump associates swept up in surveillance of foreign officials.” Later that day, Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson sent a letter to Grenell and Barr asking for the document. Grenell provided it to the senators on Wednesday, and it was immediately leaked to CBS News’ Catherine Herridge, a former Fox reporter whose work often promotes Republican talking points. Herridge then published the letter on Twitter. (The document did not turn out to be precisely what the Times had reported. It had been generated on May 4, not during the “Obama era,” and dealt solely with cases involving Flynn, not “Trump associates” more generally.)
In NSA reports derived from the legal surveillance of foreign targets, analysts anonymize (“mask”) the names of U.S. persons to protect their privacy. It is routine for senior officials to ask the NSA to reveal (“unmask”) those identities in cases where they believe that information is necessary to understand the intelligence. The NSA has a standard procedure for doing this, including a review of the justification of the person seeking the unmasking. For context, Trump administration officials sought and received the unmasking of U.S. persons from the NSA more than 10,000 times in 2019 and nearly 17,000 times in 2018.
The document is a list created at Grenell’s request of several dozen “officials who submitted requests” to the NSA between Trump’s election and the end of January 2017 to unmask an identity which turned out to be Flynn, as detailed in an attached memorandum to Grenell from NSA Director Paul Nakasone. It provides the names of the officials, which include then-Vice President Biden, Cabinet secretaries, and intelligence agency leaders, and the date on which their requests were processed. It is the second version of the document -- as Nakasone detailed, the list was originally provided in alphabetical order but revised to be chronological.
That’s it.
Contrary to the insinuations from the right-wing figures, the document provides no evidence that any single unmasking was related to Flynn’s calls with Kislyak. In fact, the record suggests none of them were the original unmasking that first discovered Flynn had made the call, as that one was done by the FBI from its own intercept, not the NSA’s. Nor does it show that Flynn was in some way targeted -- by definition, unmasking occurs when senior administration officials don’t know the name of an American referenced in an intelligence report.
Indeed, there is no indication in the document that anyone listed behaved inappropriately -- in fact, it makes clear that the Obama-era unmaskings happened by the book. “Each individual was an authorized recipient of the original report and the unmasking was approved through NSA’s standard process, which includes a review of the justification for the request,” it states. It also points out that the NSA cannot confirm that any of the persons who requested the unmaskings eventually saw the information.
Grenell’s noninformation plot
Grenell is totally unqualified for his post. While previous occupants of his position ran intelligence agencies, he at most was a consumer of their products during a brief stint as U.S. ambassador to Germany. What he brings to the table instead, along with unswerving loyalty to the president, is broad experience in public relations and shaping news cycles, which he honed as a spokesperson for Republican politicians and for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, a strategic communications consultant for domestic and foreign clients, a Fox contributor, and a notably unhinged Twitter troll.
Grenell personally requested, sought revisions to, declassified, and provided the document to Congress in precisely this form, showing precisely what he wanted to become public.
If he wanted the document to include more information -- by for example, including the actual documents for which Flynn’s name was unmasked, or summaries thereof -- it would. Without that, despite the right-wing chorus linking Grenell’s document to Flynn’s Kislyak calls, it doesn’t provide evidence that any single unmasking had anything to do with them.In fact the majority of the unmaskings predate the calls and thus could not be related. Indeed, it doesn’t even indicate that Flynn was a participant in the intercepts used in the intelligence reports in which his name was unmasked, as the New York Times’ Charlie Savage points out:
If Grenell had wanted the document to include less information -- by, for example, limiting the date range to after Flynn’s December 29 calls with Kislyak, which would reduce the list from 39 names to only eight -- it would.
What he produced is a very long list of names that maximized its impact, with no information whatsoever that any of them were involved in something the least bit inappropriate. That is, presumably, exactly what he wanted to do.
Perhaps Grenell has no evidence of wrongdoing, and few or none of the unmaskings reference the Kislyak calls (which is not implausible, as the FBI derived and distributed its own intercepts of the call with no masking as part of their already in-progress counterintelligence probe of Flynn). In that case, he’s declassified and released this information for a political purpose.
Perhaps he does have that evidence, but isn’t releasing it for now so he can continue to dribble documents out and generate more news stories as the presidential election approaches. In that case, he’s withholding that information for a political purpose.
Fox’s propagandists understand that their role in this noninformation campaign is to fill in the gaps left by the document with feverish, often fact-free speculation. Fox’s Tucker Carlson described Flynn’s unmasking as a “domestic spying operation” that was “hidden under the pretext of national security,” and that the Obama administration officials involved are “amoral creeps” who committed “felonies” and should be “punished.” His prime-time colleague Hannity
by asking, “What did Barack Hussein Obama know and when did he know it? Tonight, we will unravel the biggest abuse of power scandal in American history.” He also attacked Biden for “lying” about the story and claimed on Wednesday that if the officials involved in Flynn’s unmasking don’t face “justice,” “the great American republic will disintegrate before your eyes.” Despite how little information the Grenell document provides, they are convinced that it vindicates their conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile, Fox personalities are attacking the mainstream press for not obsessing over the story, with Hannity arguing that this proves they are “Democratic shills.” On Friday, Trump himself picked up that angle, praising the Fox morning show for “covering, supremely, the greatest political scandal in the history of the United States, OBAMAGATE,” while pillorying CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times as “Fake News” for failing to do so.
It’s no coincidence that Trump and Fox are trying to bully the mainstream press into giving the story more attention. They are counting on journalists to repeat the failures of the 2016 electionand flood the zone with context-free scandal coverage that dirties up the president’s opponent. That’s the play Trump is calling, and the leaders of the Justice Department and intelligence community are eagerly supporting the effort, and will likely continue dropping noninformation and disinformation until Election Day.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/heres-how-barr-is-advancing-trumps-quest-to-become-president-for-life-biographer-david-cay-johnston/
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5/20 djt going after mueller/collusion, flynn, OBAMAGATE?! (unmask names, no one cd know one was flynn]
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/the-media-is-taking-the-bait-on-trumps-fake-scandal/