Attorney General William Barr

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Attorney General William Barr

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 28, 2019 2:04 pm

Justice under AG Barr began vast surveillance program without legal review – in 1992, inspector general finds

Brad Heath
Updated 1:11 p.m. ET March 28, 2019

A USA TODAY investigation revealed that a secret program collecting phone call data for international calls started in 1992. USA TODAY

WASHINGTON – The Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr launched a vast surveillance program that gathered records of innocent Americans’ international phone calls without first conducting a review of whether it was legal, the department’s inspector general concluded Thursday.

It happened in 1992, the last time Barr served as attorney general.

The secret program, run by the Drug Enforcement Administration, ultimately gathered billions of records of nearly all phone calls from the United States to 116 countries, with little oversight from Congress or the courts, a USA TODAY investigation found. It provided a blueprint for far broader phone-data surveillance the government launched after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Justice Department’s inspector general said both the DEA and the Justice Department “failed to conduct a comprehensive legal analysis” of its authority to gather those records.

The program was the government’s first known effort to gather records on Americans in bulk, sweeping up information related to millions of Americans regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. Attorney General Eric Holder ordered the DEA to halt the collection in 2013, after leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden sparked an uproar about the government’s data dragnets.

The DEA obtained those records using administrative subpoenas that allow the agency to collect records "relevant or material to" federal drug investigations without seeking authorization from a judge. The Inspector General said the government did not pause to consider whether its powers allowed it to collect records unrelated to a specific investigation, though former officials familiar with the program have acknowledged that they thought it was an aggressive understanding of the law.


Former Attorney General William Barr is flanked by then-Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., prior to Barrís nomination hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Nov. 12, 1991. (Photo: John Duricka, AP)

The Inspector General’s report identified areas in which the program would be vulnerable to legal challenges, but did not reach a conclusion about whether it was lawful.

DEA spokeswoman Katherine Pfaff said in a statement that the agency was taking steps to improve its use of administrative subpoenas to gather data, and that the agency's policies "continue to be vetted through a rigorous legal review."

The DEA program did not intercept the content of Americans' calls, but the records – which numbers were dialed and when – allowed agents to map suspects' communications and link them to troves of other police and intelligence data. Agents used those records to search for connections between Americans and overseas drug trafficking groups, though the Inspector General said the drug agency also permitted other agencies to use the records in different types of criminal investigations.

At its peak, the program harvested records of nearly all calls from the United States to Mexico, Canada, nearly all of Central and South America and much of the rest of the world.

The program, known within the drug agency as USTO (a play on call going from the United States to other countries), was carried out in part by the department’s Criminal Division, run at the time by Robert Mueller.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/pol ... 299438002/


Has "Cover-Up General" William Barr Struck Again?
Barr's history of helping Republican presidents in legal crises may explain why Trump brought him back in to head the Justice Department

Thom Hartmann
Back in 1992, the last time Bill Barr was U.S. attorney general, iconic New York Times writer William Safire referred to him as “Coverup-General Barr” because of his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s involvement in “Iraqgate” and “Iron-Contra.”

General Barr has struck again—this time, in similar fashion, burying Mueller’s report and cherry-picking fragments of sentences from it to justify Trump’s behavior. In his letter, he notes that Robert Mueller “leaves it to the attorney general to decide whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime.”

As attorney general, Barr—without showing us even a single complete sentence from the Mueller report—decided there are no crimes here. Just keep moving along.

Barr’s history of doing just this sort of thing to help Republican presidents in legal crises explains why Trump brought him back in to head the Justice Department.

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

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

But Bush’s biggest concern wasn’t that he’d have to leave the White House to retire back to Connecticut, Maine, or Texas (where he had homes) but, rather, that he may end up embroiled even deeper in Iran-Contra and that his colleagues may face time in a federal prison after he left office.

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

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

Was the Iran-Contra criminal conspiracy limited, as Reagan and Bush insisted (and Reagan confessed on TV), to later years in the Reagan presidency, in response to a hostage-taking in Lebanon? Or had it started in the 1980 campaign with collusion with the Iranians, as the then-president of Iran asserted? Who knew what, and when? And what was George H.W. Bush’s role in it all?

Walsh had zeroed in on documents that were in the possession of Reagan’s former defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, who all the evidence showed was definitely in on the deal, and President Bush’s diary that could corroborate it. Elliott Abrams had already been convicted of withholding evidence from Congress, and he may have even more information, too, if it could be pried out of him before he went to prison. But Abrams was keeping mum, apparently anticipating a pardon.

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

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

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

Safire ultimately came refer to Barr as “Coverup-General” in the midst of another scandal—one having to do with Bush selling weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein—as the Attorney General was already covering up for Bush, Weinberger, and others from the Reagan administration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America knew that both Reagan and Bush were up to their necks in Iran-Contra, and Democrats had been talking about impeachment or worse. The independent counsel had already obtained one conviction, three guilty pleas, and two other individuals were lined up for prosecution. And Walsh was closing in fast on Bush himself.

photo5_13.png
So, when Bush shut the investigation down by pardoning not only Weinberger, but also Abrams and the others involved in the crimes, destroying Walsh’s ability to prosecute anybody, the New York Times ran the headline all the way across four of the six columns on the front page, screaming in all-caps: BUSH PARDONS 6 IN IRAN AFFAIR, ABORTING A WEINBERGER TRIAL; PROSECUTOR ASSAILS ‘COVER-UP.’

Bill Barr had struck.

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

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

History shows that when a Republican president is in serious legal trouble, Bill Barr is the go-to guy.

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier in Bush’s administration, Barr had succeeded in blocking the appointment of an investigator or independent counsel to look into Iraqgate, as Safire repeatedly documented in the Times. In December, Barr helped Bush block indictments from another independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, and eliminated any risk that Reagan or George H.W. Bush would be held to account for Iran-Contra.

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

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

And Walsh didn’t take it lying down.

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

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

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

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

Barr successfully covered up the involvement of two Republican presidents—Reagan and Bush—in two separate and perhaps impeachable “high crimes.” And months later, newly sworn-in President Clinton and the new Congress decided to put it all behind them and not pursue the matters any further.

Now, by cherry-picking Mueller’s report and handing Trump the talking points he needed, Barr has done it again.

The question this time is whether Congress will be as compliant as they were in 1993 and simply let it all go.

Both Trump and senior Republican leadership are already calling for a repeat of ’93; what remains to be seen is if the press and Democratic leadership will go along like they did back then.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019 ... ruck-again


The Barr Gambit
By Josh Marshall
March 28, 2019 1:53 pm
A former federal prosecutor has some thoughts on the Barr Gambit …

A few thoughts on the Barr Gambit, which I think will go down as a singular achievement in the annals of intellectual dishonesty and bad faith legal jujitsu:

1. It is undisputed that the Russian government brazenly interfered in the 2016 election to support Donald Trump. In so doing, the Russians and those acting on their behalf committed a variety of federal crimes including computer hacking and conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Those crimes were committed to benefit (a) Vladimir Putin and the interests of the Russian government; and (b) Donald J. Trump. It is also undisputed that Trump and his campaign joyfully used and weaponized the information the Russians stole against Hillary Clinton. Trump personally trumpeted the Wikileaks disclosures 141 times during the campaign, and his surrogates countless more times. While Mueller’s team apparently “did not establish” (i.e., did not find enough evidence to charge criminally) that Trump personally conspired with the Russian government to commit the underlying crimes, there is no question that he was (along with Putin) the single biggest beneficiary of those criminal efforts.

2. Mueller apparently pulled together significant evidence that the President attempted to obstruct the investigation into these crimes. But to support his decision not to prosecute the President for obstruction of justice, Barr relied in part on Mueller’s conclusion that he could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the President was involved in an underlying criminal conspiracy. Therefore, Barr’s reasoning goes, Trump lacked corrupt intent to obstruct because, at least in part, he was not involved in any underlying crime. This argument is both legally wrong (obstruction charges don’t depend on the existence of an underlying crime, just an investigation or proceeding), and it flies in the face of one simple fact: Trump was a prime beneficiary of the undisputed criminal conduct that did occur. He of course had a strong personal interest in seeking to obstruct this investigation for a variety of reasons. If you receive and use stolen money, even if you weren’t involved in the theft, you have a strong interest in thwarting any efforts to investigate the underlying theft. Why? Because you don’t want to lose the right to hold onto your money. Same here. This investigation posed a direct threat to the Presidency. It also posed a direct threat to prying open Trump’s shady business empire. Barr’s argument might hold water if the Russian election interference was intended to help Hillary and Trump’s campaign was not the subject of the investigation. As it stands, the President had a deep personal stake in the outcome of the investigation and it appears he used his executive power to thwart it. That cannot be countenanced.

3. The non-charging decision on obstruction by Mueller cannot be explained as a failure of evidence. On conspiracy or coordination, it appears Mueller made a clear decision not to charge because of a lack of evidence. As too many members of the media seem to get wrong, this was not a “no evidence” situation, but rather a failure to get to the required level of admissible evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. And the level of proof had to be something in between probable cause (you can’t get 500 search warrants without it) and proof beyond a reasonable doubt. I have no problem with that decision from a prosecutorial discretion standpoint. There was lots of evidence of an underlying conspiracy, but it was always going to be very difficult to prove the President’s direct involvement with sufficient admissible evidence (classified intercepts from foreign governments won’t do it). And Manafort and Stone holding the line seems to have been the stopped the Mueller team short. Mueller made a decision not to charge conspiracy because of a lack of evidence, so why not obstruction? If it’s a 50-50 call and a pure “jump ball” that’s easy. You decline. If it’s “more likely than not,” the civil standard, you also decline. Even if it’s “clear and convincing” evidence that doesn’t rise to the level of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, you decline the case. So what is going on here? To me, the only answer is that they had a chargeable obstruction case but stopped short of making a decision to charge the President–because he’s the President. It could have been the policy not to indict a sitting President, it could have been the legal and policy arguments around executive authority, or it could have been out of deference to the legislative branch and its impeachment prerogatives. Any way you cut it, I just can’t see Mueller shying away from a tough evidentiary call. If we ever get to see it, I fully expect the actual Mueller report to contain a devastating case against the President for obstruction of justice. This is why we should expect to see Barr, the White House, and the Republicans in Congress fight like hell to keep as much of the report as possible away from the public and House Judiciary. Democrats cannot let this go.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-barr-gambit
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Re: Attorney General William Barr

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 28, 2019 8:23 pm

Sarah Kendzior

"Within the Trump camp, you see participants from Watergate, Iran-Contra, War in Iraq, 2008 crash. This is an American criminal cabal that goes unpunished, and is now linked with other criminal cabals in Russia and around the world." -- @gaslitnation


"Before the Barr Report came out, we were finally seeing coverage of other buried transnational crimes, like Jeffrey Epstein's underage sex trafficking ring. That crime did not disappear. It all needs to be examined." -- @gaslitnation


"Look what was in the news before the Barr Report. You had Cohen testifying that Trump operates like a mob boss: threats, crime, violence. You had Epstein back in the courts. You had Kraft and China. You had horror over Kushner's threat to US security."


"None of these crises went away because Barr wrote a truncated summary of a report no one has seen. All he did was give the media and the government an excuse to look away. But do not take that excuse. We are no safer than we were before." -- @gaslitnation

"Trump is a Kremlin asset, but the intel community does not want to admit to another historic failure on their watch. If the FBI admits the Trump family is guilty, then they admit that they are guilty themselves of not doing their job." --

At 55:00 on @gaslitnation, we ask yet again why Comey took Russian mob boss Semyon Mogilevich off the FBI's most wanted list in Dec 2015 after the Trump team had met with Russians, despite Mueller's proclamation that he'd remain on the list until captured

At one hour in on @gaslitnation, we discuss the FBI's long history of failing to combat the Russian mafia, including failed attempts at flipping oligarchs and mafiosos: "They thought gangsters would turn on their masters, but that is not how it works."
..............................

The Barr Report
GN34_FinalMix_WithAd.mp3
This week Sarah and Andrea discuss the Barr Report and the Mueller probe – which are two separate things since Attorney General Barr has prevented the public from viewing the actual Mueller report. We note yet again the lack of efficacy of the Mueller probe and the many mistakes his team made along the way (in particular, the lenient plea deals and lack of indictments), break down what’s behind the atrocious media coverage of a document no journalist has actually seen, examine the motives of the grifters and DC elites who (unlike us) portrayed Mueller as a failproof savior, and take another hard look at the failure of the FBI and other investigative bodies to stop Trump’s criminal goon squad when they had the chance. As we’ve said repeatedly at Gaslit Nation, the crisis in the US was never about Trump vs Mueller, but about corruption and exploitation – about massive institutional failure that worsened over multiple decades, culminating in a kleptocracy backed by a transnational crime syndicate. We discuss what’s next for the US and the world as the Trump team ramps up its autocratic goals.


https://www.patreon.com/posts/25676321
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Re: Attorney General William Barr

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 29, 2019 6:50 am

REMINDER: in 1991 and 1992 then attorney general Bill Barr also supported pardons for Republicans involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, when Reagan illegally sold arms (1,500 American missiles) to Iran

Image
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William Barr Supported Pardons In An Earlier D.C. 'Witch Hunt': Iran-Contra
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/14/68455379 ... ran-contra
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Re: Attorney General William Barr

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 29, 2019 9:29 am

Bill Barr’s Very Strange Memo on Obstruction of Justice

The memo on obstruction of justice by Bill Barr, the once and future attorney general, is a bizarre document—particularly so for a man who would supervise the investigation it criticizes.

As the Wall Street Journal first reported, Barr, whom the president has nominated to succeed Jeff Sessions as attorney general, sent the unsolicited memo—dated June 8, 2018—to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to offer his view of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible obstruction of justice by the president. The document elicited questions over whether Barr would need to recuse himself from overseeing the investigation as attorney general, along with outrage from congressional Democrats: both Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking member on the Senate intelligence committee, have demanded that Trump withdraw Barr’s nomination. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary described the memo as “troubling.”

But the legal quality of the memo itself is a different question. Over at Just Security, Marty Lederman has what he describes as a “first take” on Barr’s memo, which is to say a detailed critique of it on both constitutional and statutory grounds. On National Review’s website, by contrast, Andrew McCarthy declares the memo a “commendable piece of lawyering” and “exactly what we need and should want in an attorney general of the United States.”

Whatever Barr’s memo is, it is not that. Because whether one agrees with his view of the law (as does McCarthy) or recoils at it (as does Lederman), one thing attorneys general of the United States should certainly not do is make up facts. And ironically for a memo laying out the argument that Bob Mueller has made up a crime to investigate, the document is based entirely on made-up facts. Lederman mentions this point at the outset of his analysis:

the first huge and striking problem with Barr’s memo is that he unjustifiably makes countless assumptions about what Mueller is doing; about Mueller’s purported “theory” of presidential criminal culpability; about Mueller’s “sweeping” and “all-encompassing” “interpretation” of the statute and Constitution; about “Mueller’s core premise[s]”; . . . about “unprecedented” steps Mueller is proposing to take; about “Mueller’s proposed regime”; about “Mueller’s immediate target”; about Mueller’s presumed failure to “provide a standard” for what constitutes “corruptly” trying to impede proceedings; about Mueller’s “demands” that the President submit to interrogation; etc.

To read this memo, you’d think Barr were replying to a legal brief that Mueller had submitted in support of a prosecution of the President for obstruction of a federal proceeding. Yet as Barr concedes at the outset, he was “in the dark about many facts.” Indeed, he presumably was “in the dark” about virtually everything he wrote about. From all that appears, Barr was simply conjuring from whole cloth a preposterously long set of assumptions about how Special Counsel Mueller was adopting extreme and unprecedented-within-DOJ views about every pertinent question and investigatory decision—and that Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein was allowing him to do so, despite the fact that Mueller is required to “comply with the rules, regulations, procedures, practices and policies of the Department of Justice” and to “consult with appropriate offices within the Department for guidance with respect to established practices, policies and procedures of the Department.”

Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that Barr’s entire memo is predicated on two broad assumptions: first, that he knows Mueller’s legal theory, and second, that he understands the fact pattern Mueller is investigating. “It appears Mueller’s team is investigating a possible case of ‘obstruction’ by the President predicated substantially on his expression of hope that the Comey [sic] could eventually ‘let ... go’ of its investigation of Flynn and his action in firing Comey,” Barr writes in his second paragraph.

Neither assumption is, in our judgment, warranted. Unlike Barr, we don’t purport to know what Mueller’s obstruction theory is. It’s a subject about which one of us has been puzzling over a long period of time and in a number of articles. We also don’t purport to know what fact patterns Mueller is focusing on. But here’s a limb onto which we are prepared to venture: the reality is more complicated than the facts Barr has “assumed” for purposes of predicating nearly 20 pages of legal analysis. In fact, it’s a lot more complicated.

Barr assumes for the purpose of his memo that Mueller is only interested in presidential conduct sanctioned by Article II, specifically that his investigation revolves around Trump’s actions toward Comey. “As I understand the theory,” he writes, Mueller’s team has built their case on a novel and, in his view, unsupported interpretation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2), the “residual clause” of § 1512, which prohibits witness tampering. § 1512(c)(2) holds that, “Whoever corruptly … otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so [is guilty of the crime of obstruction”—and Barr is concerned that Mueller is interpreting it to sanction an overly broad range of behavior.

Moreover, Barr takes the view that a facially lawful action taken by the president under his Article II authority cannot constitute obstruction as a matter of constitutional law. He expresses concern that allowing this interpretation to proceed could have “disastrous implications” for the executive branch and the presidency, potentially opening the door to criminal investigations of “all exercises of prosecutorial discretion.” He also writes, “if a [Justice Department] investigation is going to take down a democratically-elected president it is imperative… that any claim of wrongdoing is solidly based on a real crime—not a debatable one.” (All emphases in original).

It’s not clear why Barr adopts such a simplistic understanding of Mueller’s operating theory, but the sequence of events leading up to his submitting the memo in early June may offer some insight. At some point, probably in March or April of this year, the president’s legal team received a list of subjects that the special counsel’s office wanted to discuss with Trump in an interview. In late April 2018, the New York Times published a condensed list of those questions.

Several weeks later, on June 2, the Times published a letter from Trump’s then-lawyer, John Dowd, to Mueller, in which Dowd responded to Mueller’s request to question the president regarding 16 areas of interest—which essentially mirrored the reported list of questions. In that letter, Dowd explained to the special counsel why he is advising against the president granting the interview, including that he does not believe there is a cognizable offense for an obstruction investigation under 18 U.S.C. § 1505, which prohibits tampering with evidence and impeding legal “proceedings.” Dowd argued both that the president’s actions were authorized by Article II of the Constitution and that an FBI investigation does not count as a “proceeding.” His letter was mocked by a number of commentators on this latter point; Charlie Savage at the Times pointed out that by citing § 1505, instead of § 1512, Dowd was making things easy for himself. § 1512, unlike the statute Dowd cited, does not require that a proceeding be pending.

The Dowd letter, despite its flaws, sparked a certain amount of speculation in conservative media that Mueller lacked an actual crime to investigate—at least as to the obstruction cone of his investigation. A few days after the Times published the Dowd letter, for example, the National Review stated in an editorial that “The letter implies that these two events [the request to Comey regarding Flynn and his subsequent firing] remain the gravamen of the special counsel’s obstruction probe. If that is so, there is no obstruction case.” The editorial goes on to say that, “a prosecutor may not charge obstruction based on the president’s exercise of his constitutional prerogatives.” And it asserts that, in both instances, the president was acting within his constitutional authority:

In short, unless there is a smoking gun against the president that is lurking unseen even in the private jousting between Trump’s team and Mueller, the special prosecutor should be wrapping up the obstruction aspect of his probe rather than extending it via a court fight over the president’s testimony.

In was against this backdrop, on June 8, that Barr sent his memo to Rosenstein and Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel Steven Engel, a memo that shifts the discussion from § 1505 to § 1512 but also adopts the working understanding of the obstruction theory from Dowd’s letter.

The problem is that the facts are almost certainly more complicated than that.

Looking back at the New York Times list of subjects Mueller sought to discuss with Trump, many of those topics go well beyond core Article II-authorized management of the executive branch. For example, Mueller wanted to ask about what Trump knew “about phone calls that Mr. Flynn made with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, in late December 2016.” Why Flynn lied about his communications with Kislyak is one of the key questions at issue in the case. And Barr himself makes clear that if a president induces someone to lie, that’s not an act protected by Article II.

Analysis of Trump’s inducing Flynn to lie would, of course, involve facts not in evidence, and it would almost certainly involve a different statute. But that’s precisely the point. How does Barr know what conduct Mueller is focused on or under what law?

There are other such examples—a number of them, in fact. Mueller wants to discuss “efforts . . . made to reach out to Mr. Flynn about seeking immunity or possible pardon.” That sounds more like a witness tampering investigation than a broad theory of obstruction under § 1512(c)(2). Mueller appears to want to discuss Trump’s efforts to get intelligence community leaders to lean on Comey to drop the Flynn matter and his “reaction to the news that [Mueller] was speaking to” those leaders. He’s also interested in the public bullying of Sessions and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, both fired. Again, why is Barr so sure this is all a broad “residual” § 1512 theory of obstruction?

It may well be that Mueller’s theory of the case involves a narrower conception of what Article II permits the president to do than that which Barr holds. But our suspicion is that Mueller is looking not narrowly at the specific acts on which Dowd and Barr focused, but on a broader pattern of activity, some but not all of which involves facially valid exercises of Article II powers.

At a press conference today, Rosenstein declared that the Mueller investigation “is being handled appropriately.” When asked to weigh in on the memo, Rosenstein said that, “Bill Barr was an excellent attorney general during the approximately 14 months that he served in 1991 to 1993” and he predicted that he “will be an outstanding attorney general when he is confirmed next year.” But he added that the department’s handling of the obstruction matter has been “informed by our knowledge of the actual facts of the case, which Mr. Barr didn’t have.”

We suspect those “actual facts” will complicate the Article II analysis—both the facts under investigative scrutiny and the facts as to the range of statutes against which that evidence is being considered.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/bill-barrs- ... on-justice



William Barr’s Unsolicited Memo to Trump About Obstruction of Justice

Last month, news broke that in June 2018, President Trump’s current nominee for attorney general, William P. Barr, sent an unsolicited 20-page memo to the Justice Department critiquing special counsel Robert Mueller’s current investigation into Russian election interference.

Barr, who previously served as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, penned the memo as “a former official deeply concerned with the institutions of the Presidency and the Department of Justice.” The memo questions the scope of Mueller’s investigation, and it argues that Mueller should not be permitted to demand answers from the president about possible obstruction of justice based on attempts by Trump to pressure former FBI Director James Comey to drop his investigation of Trump’s ex-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

The fact that Barr sent Trump this memo, and may have subsequently been rewarded with a nomination to join Trump’s cabinet, raises serious concerns. To start, the memo’s legal theories advance an overly expansive view of presidential power. More specifically, the memo prompts questions about whether Barr would order Mueller to halt further inquiry into possible obstruction by the president if the Senate confirms him. It even raises questions about whether Barr deliberately sought to curry favor with Trump by taking a position favorable to him in order to secure a top government position.

Legal commentators are divided in their interpretation of the Barr memo. Marty Lederman, a former top Obama administration lawyer, attacks the memo for “conjuring from whole cloth a preposterously long set of assumptions” about Mueller’s investigation. He also critiques Barr’s analysis, more broadly, for its sweeping views of the president’s constitutional role and prerogatives, including the notion that the president has “absolute” and “all-encompassing” constitutional authority over actions by executive branch officers in carrying out law enforcement powers given to them by Congress, including decisions about criminal investigation and prosecution. In a New York Times op-ed, Daniel Hemel and Eric Posner go further, arguing that Barr’s memo “seriously damages his credibility and raises questions about his fitness for the Justice Department’s top position.”

Others, however, have been more muted in their critiques. For example, Jack Goldsmith, who served as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, offers a qualified defense of Barr’s memo, maintaining that Barr’s positions on executive power have “significant support” in precedent. While that view may not be surprising coming from a former top lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, perhaps Goldsmith’s more interesting point is that a close reading of the Barr memo suggests that Barr has not already made up his mind to stop Mueller’s investigation into obstruction by Trump. Rather, Goldsmith suggests, the memo may actually and openly concede a plausible path to Trump’s eventual guilt. Goldsmith points to Barr’s statement that he is “in the dark about many facts” and Barr’s recognition that, at least in some circumstances, the president can commit obstruction of justice by sabotaging a proceeding’s truth-seeking function — for example, by encouraging perjury or inducing a witness to change his or her testimony.

That is a critical concession, according to Goldsmith, and it reduces the importance of what has been the most attention-grabbing argument in the Barr memo — that Mueller could not pursue an obstruction charge if Trump merely “hoped” Comey would drop his investigation of Flynn or fired Comey without proof that Trump sought to impair evidence-gathering.

Even if Goldsmith is right that Barr has not entirely prejudged Mueller’s investigation, however, the memo is worrying and should trigger intensive scrutiny by the Senate during the upcoming confirmation hearings.

The Senate needs to press Barr on his views of executive power, which will have ramifications far beyond the Mueller investigation. The Senate should not confirm any attorney general whose extreme views of presidential power diverge from Supreme Court precedent and a proper regard for our constitutional separation of powers. My colleagues have already described how Barr previously laid the groundwork for massive violations of Americans’ privacy rights in creating the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection program. The Barr memo enhances our fears about how its author might further erode constitutional rights if he is again appointed attorney general.

The Senate needs to probe Barr on his views of obstruction of justice and how he might interpret the federal obstruction law if he knew more about the facts. In particular, the public needs to know under what circumstances Barr would halt Mueller’s obstruction investigation. Even if Barr was acting as a well-intentioned former public servant, and not as a suppliant for a client, it is essential to scrutinize how his positions on the presidency could affect the ongoing investigation into possible malfeasance by this particular president. And the Senate must likewise demand answers from Barr on whether, and to what extent, he will use claims of executive privilege to keep secret portions of Mueller’s report, stymying further investigation by Congress.

Senators should ensure that the nation’s top law enforcement official isn’t going to stand in the way of a full and accurate account of key events in the Trump presidency.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/executive-bra ... on-justice
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Re: Attorney General William Barr

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Apr 02, 2019 4:55 pm

emptywheel


I know @bradheath already made this point, but worth emphasizing that William Barr gave the first legal approval for bulk dragnets.
Image

William Barr approved a big dragnet but didn't tell anyone in Congress about
Image
https://twitter.com/emptywheel


Via @Thom_Hartmann, here's a 1992 column by William Safire referring to Bill Barr as the "Coverup-General."
Image
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Re: Attorney General William Barr

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 04, 2019 1:03 pm

Attorney General Bill Barr Has Made A Huge Miscalculation
Victor Lipman
uncaptioned image
Attorney General Bill Barr's credibility has been called into question. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) ASSOCIATED PRESS
The leaking has started.

With these following words yesterday the New York Times formalized what many close observers of the Mueller investigation had suspected: Attorney General William Barr's controversial four-page letter about Mueller's work was likely more spin than fact. "Some of Robert S. Mueller's III's investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry," the Times reported, "and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated."

Indeed, by injecting himself deeply into the Mueller investigation process, the attorney general initially had given the president a huge political gift which the savvy marketer quickly turned into a powerful message of "no collusion and complete and total exoneration." Never mind this wasn't 100% true - it had a great positive ring to it. But was it even close to being fair and accurate?

"One sign of how angry Mueller's team is," wrote lawyer and professor Seth Abramson on Twitter, "is that they appear to be *strongly* implying bad faith on the Attorney General's part, inasmuch as multiple members of the Mueller team told the New York Times they'd provided their own summaries to the AG - which he then promptly *ignored*."

Management without credibility

Management without credibility is generally doomed to failure, sooner or later. By pushing the bounds of credibility in his initial communique and then assuming he could use his positional power to control how and when he released the rest of the Mueller Report, the attorney general was making a calculation that he could tightly control the message in the president's favor. But in so doing he was also taking a risk of compounding the problem by piling cover-up upon cover-up, scandal upon scandal. His refusal to be transparent has made him a subpoena magnet for the Democrats.

There was always an uneasy tension between the way Barr "auditioned" for the job with a 19-page memo ripping the Mueller probe and his avuncular, lawyerly, moderate manner in confirmation hearings. But when push came to shove and he actually had the Mueller Report in his hands, he came up with an odd product citing remarkably little of Mueller's actual work and words... while tilting favorably toward the president. But now Barr's credibility is being called into question. Did the attorney general produce a fair and balanced Mueller summary, or carefully crafted legalistic spin?

Which would ultimately seriously frustrate the report's authors.

The leaking has started.

Attorney general or spin doctor?

As I've said before in this space, I'm not a Democrat, I'm a registered political Independent. No fan of Bill and Hillary. Or Obamacare. But I do like to see truth and credibility in our leadership.

So it's disturbing to see the highest lawmaker in the land apparently adding to the Mt. Everest of disinformation already existing in these hyper-partisan times.

Personally I believe the attorney general made a huge miscalculation in how far he believed he could control the message and push the "spin cycle." He now finds his own reputation on the line. Does he want he remembered as a highly accomplished lawyer with credibility, or a political operative? Attorney general or spin doctor?

Right now I'm afraid the scale is tilting toward the spin side. "He looks like he's protecting his guy," law professor Neal Katyal said last night on MSNBC. (The "guy" of course being the president.) "It's looking even more like a cover-up," Katyal concluded, "and why the report has to be released."

The leaking has started.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipm ... ac2a322e78




Neal Katyal

This is absurd. Barr has had 13 days to go to court &ask to have the grand jury material released, as Jaworski did in Watergate (+other sp prosecutors). He hasn't even bothered. That laconic pace poorly contrasts with his clearing of Donald Trump of obstruction charges in 48 hrs.

New from Department of Justice on Barr letter and Mueller report.
Image
https://twitter.com/KellyO/status/1113817501425655813
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Re: Attorney General William Barr

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 04, 2019 8:10 pm

Did you know Barr publicly called Mueller obstruction probe “asanine” and around same time interviewed for Trump’s defense team?


What Has Bill Barr Done to Earn the Benefit of the Doubt?
by Luppe Luppen
April 4, 2019

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Washington now waits as Attorney General William Barr redacts Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report about his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and Congressional Democrats maneuver to extract an unredacted copy plus Mueller’s underlying evidence from the Department of Justice’s grasp. Outside of a small circle of Justice Department officials who have read the nearly 400-page report, few can say for certain how consistent the whole report is with the four page summary Barr released of its principal conclusions, how much important new information its pages contain, and how much of that information will eventually come to public light–all of which remain hotly contested subjects that evolve with nearly every breaking news report.

Despite the uncertainty, some familiar figures have stepped forward to offer their advice on how much faith we should put in the process unfolding within the Department of Justice.

“Bill Barr, our attorney general, deserves the benefit of the doubt,” former FBI Director James Comey counseled in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday. “Give him a chance to show us what he feels like he can’t show us. I have to imagine that… Mueller wrote the report with an eye toward it being public some day, so I can’t imagine a lot needs to be cut out of it. But let’s wait and see. The attorney general deserves that chance.”

Comey’s comments echoed the views of his friend, Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes, who published an article in The Atlantic on Monday entitled, “Bill Barr Has Promised Transparency. He Deserves the Chance to Deliver.” Wittes argued that the categories of information Barr has proposed to withhold are reasonable and legitimate, if “potentially abusable,” and his stated time frame for producing a redacted document is sufficiently short, so the prudent course is to assume his good faith and allow him to make good. “There will be plenty of time,” Wittes wrote, “to criticize his failures if and when they materialize.”

By Wednesday night, cracks were beginning to show in Barr’s purported commitments to transparency. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post, soon followed by NBC, published stories reporting that some on Mueller’s staff had grown frustrated with Barr’s limited disclosures, which they felt did not properly characterize the “alarming and significant” evidence they had gathered on the issue of obstruction. “There was immediate displeasure from the team when they saw how the attorney general had characterized their work instead,” one U.S. official said, according to the Washington Post. “It was much more acute than Barr suggested,” another person told the paper.

These revelations are second-hand and anonymously sourced, but they may begin to answer how Attorney General Barr rewards those who afford him the benefit of the doubt.

Nevertheless, in Comey’s and Wittes’s views, there is a larger principle at stake. By exhorting the American people to just lay off the Attorney General for a few weeks, Comey and Wittes have the issue backwards. The question is not what the country can do for Bill Barr in these difficult times; it’s what Bill Barr can do for the country. It’s Barr’s job–and every public servant’s job–to maintain the public’s confidence in the proper functioning of the government. That job extends to the point, if Barr’s impartiality is compromised, of stepping aside from this particular investigation in favor of another Department of Justice official who can inspire the public’s trust.

Any Attorney General overseeing an investigation of the President who appointed him faces a complicated task in maintaining public confidence that he is upholding the rule of law. When the chips are down, ordinarily fuzzy distinctions between the interests of the elected President and the interests of the American people may become stark dividing lines, and the people need a basis to trust that the Attorney General will serve their interests over those of his political party or his patron in the White House.

Bill Barr’s long record, unfortunately, affords little basis for trust.

Barr has been implicated in high level cover-ups before. In Barr’s first stint as Attorney General, he recommended that President George H.W. Bush grant full pardons to six former officials from the Reagan administration who were caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal, including Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. “There were some people arguing just for Weinberger,” Barr later recounted, “and I said, ‘No, in for a penny, in for a pound.’” President Bush’s pardons brought the long-running scandal to an end just as many observers believed it was about to reach the president’s doorstep. In response, independent counsel Lawrence Walsh bitterly remarked that “the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.”

Barr has both a body of writings that suggest he has prejudged matters under his purview as Attorney General and significant conflicts of interest. In the Spring of 2017, Barr penned an op-ed supporting the President’s firing Comey. “Comey’s removal simply has no relevance to the integrity of the Russian investigation as it moves ahead,” he wrote. In June 2017, Barr told The Hill that the obstruction investigation was “asinine” and warned that Mueller risked “taking on the look of an entirely political operation to overthrow the president.” That same month, Barr met with Trump about becoming the president’s personal defense lawyer for the Mueller investigation, before turning down the overture for that job. In late 2017, Barr wrote to the New York Times supporting the President’s call for further investigations of his past political opponent, Hillary Clinton. “I have long believed that the predicate for investigating the uranium deal, as well as the foundation, is far stronger than any basis for investigating so-called ‘collusion,’” he wrote to the New York Times’ Peter Baker, suggesting that the Uranium One conspiracy theory (which had by that time been repeatedly debunked) had more grounding than the Mueller’s investigation (which had not). Before Trump nominated him to be attorney general, Barr also notoriously wrote an unsolicited 19-page advisory memo to Rod Rosenstein criticizing the obstruction component of Mueller’s investigation as “fatally misconceived.” The memo’s criticisms proceeded from Barr’s long-held and extreme, absolutist view of executive power, and the memo’s reasoning has been skewered by an ideologically diverse group of legal observers, including Wittes.

For any Department of Justice employee other than the Attorney General, this record would have surely constituted, among other things, “circumstances that would cause a reasonable person with knowledge of the facts to question [the] employee’s impartiality.” A standing regulation and DOJ policy would generally result in such an employee not being able to participate in the Special Counsel’s investigation. However, that policy oversight mechanism does not apply to the Attorney General, who has no supervisor within the Department of Justice and thus determines when his own recusal is required. Unlike prior occupants of the job of Attorney General, including Jeff Sessions, Barr also steadfastly refused to say in advance that he would accept the recommendation of Department ethics officials if they advised him to recuse.

Barr’s close political relationship with President Trump, his consideration of employment as Trump’s personal defender in the Mueller investigation, his media statements on the investigation, and his unsolicited memo attacking the investigation all would cause a reasonable person to question his ability to impartially oversee that investigation and–in deciding the obstruction question that Mueller left open–to make perhaps its most consequential decision. Nevertheless, Barr did not step aside. He released a statement announcing his decision not to recuse himself from oversight of the Mueller investigation that cited the advice of unnamed ethics officials, but declined to explain their reasoning.

As many observers have acknowledged, President Trump’s sustained public outrage at his first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, on account of his recusal early in the Russia investigation made it exceptionally difficult for any of Sessions’ successors to recuse himself or herself, no matter how warranted. Successfully navigating this difficulty, using his long experience in government and his stature among Republicans, would have been an avenue for Barr to earn and maintain the broader public’s trust. Refusing both to recuse himself and to explain his reasons why recusal was not warranted, Barr chose to side-step the difficulty; his decision served the president’s preferences, but it is difficult to see how it contributed to public trust in the his oversight of the Mueller investigation.

Comey himself, not long ago, faced an Attorney General whom he thought should have recused herself from an investigation, and he did not give her the benefit of the doubt. Shortly after Loretta Lynch met Bill Clinton on her plane on the tarmac of Phoenix Sky Harbor airport during the 2016 campaign, Comey decided to hold his historic press conference usurping the Justice Department and attempting to wrap up the Clinton email investigation. “I remember [the tarmac meeting] being a factor, an important factor, in my decision to step away from the Attorney General,” Comey told Congressional investigators. “I was very concerned about the appearance of that interaction.”

Notably, the tarmac meeting with Hillary Clinton’s spouse and the other marks against Lynch that prompted Comey’s press conference (i.e. her use of the term “matter” rather than “investigation” and a classified document Comey thought to be false) objectively pale in comparison to those against Barr (i.e. the 19-page memo, numerous media statements undermining the Mueller investigation, and a meeting with Donald Trump himself to discuss employment directly related to the Mueller investigation). The demerits that made Lynch, in Wittes’ description, “a compromised figure” in 2016 were matters of suspicion and the appearance of impropriety. Bill Barr in 2019, by contrast, really had written a legally questionable memo prejudging an element of the investigation and held a meeting about the investigation with the principal subject of the investigation. It’s puzzling why, as FBI Director, Comey would use the powers of his office to push aside Lynch while, as a private citizen, urging that a more compromised Attorney General ought to be given the benefit of the doubt.

The grounds for redaction included in Barr’s summary provide additional reasons to doubt his intentions. Barr makes no effort to situate the project he’s undertaking to redact the results of an investigation into the President in terms of constitutional principle or precedent. As an example, Barr presented the potential existence of grand jury information in the Mueller report as a problem that can only be solved by identifying that information and removing it before it is transmitted to Congress. Wittes told his readers that Barr’s take on this subject was “simply correct” and effectively insurmountable. “In the short term,” Wittes wrote, “there is no way to give this material to Congress, let alone make it public; it would require substantial litigation to do so.” That’s not true. In previous investigations of the president, special or independent prosecutors easily obtained judicial authorization to share grand jury material with Congress. For Ken Starr, it required a perfunctory ex parte proceeding, and for Leon Jaworski, it required one court hearing, in each case not “substantial litigation.” Barr left any discussion of seeking a court’s permission out of his letter, and he failed to explain why he wasn’t following the precedent of past investigations. (Barr also omitted discussion of whether he could provide the grand jury information to certain members of Congress without judicial authorization, as some legal experts have posited). The balance of the information Barr claims to be redacting–classified material, ongoing investigations, and derogatory information about third persons–is routinely turned over from the Executive Branch to Congress on a confidential basis in other contexts. Indeed even in the context of the Mueller investigation, the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee received all three categories of information from the Department of Justice during the last Congress.

In summary, Barr has a record of helping another U.S. president cover up an uncomfortable investigation, he has publicly announced views undermining the Mueller investigation, his direct interactions with the president concerning the Mueller investigation present a clear conflict of interest, his consideration of whether to recuse himself was conclusory and corrosive of trust in the Justice Department, and his handling of the Mueller report to date has been misleading and reportedly frustrating to the people who conducted the investigation. The American people need an Attorney General in whom they can repose their trust, particularly when the President’s conduct is in question. Has Bill Barr earned that trust? If he hasn’t, we really can’t afford to give it to him for free.
https://www.justsecurity.org/63510/what ... the-doubt/
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Re: Attorney General William Barr

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 04, 2019 9:30 pm

letter1.jpg

letter2.jpg

letter3.jpg


House Judiciary chair urges Attorney General William Barr to 'immediately' release summaries in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia report
House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler urges Attorney General William Barr to "immediately" publicly release any summaries within special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia report.
Nadler bases his latest request on "troubling" reports that Mueller's team had prepared summaries of their findings from the nearly two-year Russia probe.
Nadler also asked for "all communications between the special counsel's office and the Department [of Justice] regarding the report."
Kevin Breuninger | @KevinWilliamB


House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., on Thursday urged Attorney General William Barr to "immediately" publicly release any summaries within special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia report.

Nadler, whose committee voted a day earlier to authorize a subpoena for an unredacted copy of the confidential report, based his latest request on "troubling" reports that Mueller's team had prepared summaries of their findings from the nearly two-year Russia probe.

Those reported summaries were not used by Barr in his initial letters to lawmakers sharing information about the report — a decision that has frustrated some members of the special counsel's team, who believe Barr may have inadequately described Mueller's findings, according to NBC News.

"I write to you regarding troubling press reports relating to your handling of Special Counsel Mueller's report, and to urge that you immediately release to the public any 'summaries' contained in the report that may have been prepared by the Special Counsel," Nadler told Barr in a letter, revealed Thursday afternoon.

Nadler also asked for "all communications between the special counsel's office and the Department [of Justice] regarding the report."

Nadler cited earlier reports from The New York Times and The Washington Post, which referenced government officials and other people familiar with the investigators' frustrations.

Democrats have questioned, and sometimes criticized, Barr's decision to prepare his own four-page summary of the principal conclusions from Mueller's nearly 400-page report, less than two days after that report had been delivered to the Justice Department on March 22.

The report ended the special counsel's 22-month probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, as well as possible collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign and possible obstruction of justice by President Donald Trump himself.

Barr's brief version said that Mueller did not find sufficient evidence to merit a charge of obstruction of justice against the president. Barr also said that the special counsel did not establish collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Trump and his supporters have celebrated the findings as interpreted by Barr, claiming vindication after more than a year of the president lambasting the probe a "witch hunt."

Trump tore into the Times' report in a Thursday morning tweet, claiming without evidence that the newspaper used "no legitimate sources, which would be totally illegal, concerning the Mueller Report."

A Justice Department spokeswoman said in a statement: "Given the extraordinary public interest in the matter, the Attorney General decided to release the report's bottom-line findings and his conclusions immediately — without attempting to summarize the report — with the understanding that the report itself would be released after the redaction process."

Republicans have slammed as "political theater" the Democrats' vote to authorize a subpoena for the "full and complete" Mueller report and its underlying evidence.

But Nadler said in his letter that "Congress is entitled to the entire record" without redactions.

"But we have a common obligation to share as much of that record with the public as we can," Nadler continued. "Additionally, if the Special Counsel's summaries fit the summary you provided on March 24, that would alleviate substantial concerns that the House Judiciary Committee may wish to discuss when you appear to testify. If there is significant daylight between his account and yours, the American people should know that too."
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/04/nadler- ... aries.html
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Re: Attorney General William Barr

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 05, 2019 9:43 pm

WALL OF SEPARATION BLOG
William Barr Wants To Bring ‘God’s Law’ To America
Dec 10, 2018 by Rob Boston
President Donald Trump on Friday announced that he’s nominating William P. Barr to be the next attorney general of the United States. We’ve been looking into Barr’s record, and some troubling things have emerged.

Just last month, Barr joined former attorneys general Edwin Meese III and Michael B. Mukasey in a Washington Post column praising the views of Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general forced out by Trump. The three laud Sessions in part for his October 2017 directive “to all executive departments containing guidance for protecting religious expression.” The Sessions order, Americans United pointed out, is just a blueprint for using religion to discriminate. Americans United criticized the guidance for insisting that religious organizations have a right to take taxpayer money and discriminate against employees and the people they serve. The language, AU said, could give federal government workers the right to use their religious beliefs as a reason to discriminate and deny services to other Americans.

Some older statements by Barr are equally troubling. Barr, who served as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush from November of 1991 until the end of Bush’s presidency early in 1993, gave at least two speeches in 1992 during which he attacked church-state separation and secular government.

Addressing a conference of governors on juvenile crime in Milwaukee on April 1, 1992, Barr blasted public schools for no longer providing moral instruction. He asserted that public schools had undergone a “moral lobotomy” and blamed it on “extremist notions of separation of church and state.”

About six months later, Barr struck again. During an Oct. 6, 1992, speech in Washington, D.C., to the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, a traditionalist Catholic group, Barr called for the imposition of “God’s law” in America.

“To the extent that a society’s moral culture is based on God’s law, it will guide men toward the best possible life,” Barr said. He also attacked “modern secularists” for supposedly ushering in cultural decline, remarking, “The secularists of today are clearly fanatics.”

Once out of office, Barr continued promoting these themes. In a 1995 essay he penned titled “Legal Issues In A New Political Order,” Barr asserted, “Traditional Judeo-Christian doctrine maintains that there is a transcendent moral order with objective standards of right and wrong that exists independent of man’s will. This transcendent order flows from God’s eternal law – the divine will by which the whole of creation is ordered.”

In the essay, Barr blamed the alleged moral decline of America on the rights movements of the 1960s, asserting that “a steady and mounting assault on traditional values” spawned “soaring juvenile crime, widespread drug addiction and skyrocketing venereal diseases.”

Elsewhere in the essay, Barr bemoaned no-fault divorce laws, legal abortion and laws designed to “restrain sexual immorality, obscenity or euthanasia.” He also attacked the Supreme Court’s ruling in Lee v. Weisman, a 1992 ruling that upheld the high court’s decisions from 1962 and ’63 barring public schools from compelling children to take part in prayer and worship.

(I should note that Barr’s paper, originally published in Catholic Lawyer, is poor scholarship. It contains a fake quote by James Madison lauding the Ten Commandments.)

So what’s Barr’s answer to all of this? He proposed that Catholic education is the solution – and that you pay for it.

“From a legal standpoint, our initial focus should be on education and efforts to strengthen and finance education,” observed Barr. “This means vouchers at the state level and ultimately at the federal level to support parental choice in education. We should press at every turn for the inclusion of religious institutions.”

Barr seems to be uncomfortable with things like secular government, church-state separation, religious pluralism and indeed the realities of modern life. He will face confirmation hearings in the Senate. In light of his alarming past statements, members need to ask him some tough questions.

Photo: Screenshot from C-SPAN.
https://www.au.org/blogs/wall-of-separa ... to-america



Seth Abramson


(FACTS) In 1992, then-AG/current AG Bill Barr helped orchestrate a pardon of Bud McFarlane—co-founder of IP3, the outfit behind Trump's secret transfer of nuclear tech to MBS. McFarlane worked with Flynn on the latter plot; both men were at the Mayflower with Trump in

1/ Yes—I'm saying that McFarlane and Flynn were working with the Saudis beginning in '15, then Trump invited both men to his foreign policy rollout in April '16, then 60 days later a Saudi cutout came to Gates offering pre-election collusion, then in August Trump Jr. accepted it.


2/ Then, after Trump won, Flynn and Kushner met with Kislyak on December 1—and Russia was *absolutely essential* to the IP3 plan McFarlane and Flynn devised—and then just 96 hours later, who comes to Trump Tower? Bud McFarlane. Folks—Russia is just a small piece of what's coming.


3/ Why don't you hear about this much in the media? Not because they understand it and don't think it's important, but because they don't understand it. They're going to do what they always do: wait for EDNY to indict and then claim either they were on it all along or no one was.


4/ I only understand it because I'm writing a book on it—and have just read 200 articles on it from around the world: Israel, Saudi Arabia, England, Russia, Qatar, and (yes) a few great pieces in American news outlets that unfortunately were never linked up to the Russia scandal.


5/ I was first to locate and post the picture below: Bud McFarlane and Sergey Kislyak entering Trump's April 2016 Mayflower event—where Trump rolled out his foreign policy. They're coming in from a 24-person VIP event with Trump. Hey media, maybe write about what's in Bud's hand?
Image


6/ As camera shutters start going crazy, the 24 VIP attendees to Trump's pre-Mayflower Speech event enter the ballroom. What an *interesting group* to have special access to Trump and his advisers for an hour—just before Trump unveiled his foreign policy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1921&v=eQA3n2YVtqM
https://mobile.twitter.com/SethAbramson ... 0921696257
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Re: Attorney General William Barr

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Apr 08, 2019 10:55 am

NEW: On the same day [Jun 8, 2018] Bill Barr submitted his 19-page audition memo excoriating Mueller's obstruction probe to DOJ, Barr was invited to meet with DOJ officials. Barr's lunch meeting with DOJ then occurred on Jun 27.
Image
Image
https://twitter.com/dcpoll/status/1114191748660637696
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Re: Attorney General William Barr

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Apr 09, 2019 11:05 am

William Barr is Attorney General of the United States in name only. More accurately, he works only for Donald Trump as his personal shit shield and the Constitution can go fuck itself.



William Barr Testifies on President's 2020 Justice Department Budget Request


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr37xda-Ovk

Rep. Brenda Lawrence to AG Bill Barr: "Sir, Congress passes laws, the president doesn't."

Wow. AG Barr doesn't even know if the DOJ has a budget for violent extremism.

AG Barr says he does not intend to ask a court for an exception to release grand jury material in the Mueller investigation.


AG Barr says he doesn't "plan" to use a claim of executive privilege to block the release of any of the Mueller report, but won't rule it out.


Asked why he didn't ask Mueller or anyone from Mueller's office to help him compose his letter to the public, Barr says: "It was my letter."

AG Barr says the "bottom line [of the Mueller report] is binary. Charges or no charges."

... but that wasn't the bottom line, because Mueller didn't say "no charges" on obstruction. *Barr* made it binary to let Trump off the hook.

Biggest takeaway from AG Barr's testimony thus far: He won't say if anyone at the White House has been briefed on the Mueller report, but did say that he doesn't believe the public or even Congress should see the unredated report.

AG Barr just admitted that he believes the Trump administration's efforts to undo Obamacare will likely fail.

Asked if he or anyone on his team consulted or checked with anyone at the White House before releasing his letter on the Mueller report, Bill Barr paused and then asked "are you talking about the March 24 letter?"




Ex-federal prosecutor Joyce Vance says on MSNBC

that there's no reason Barr couldn't have answered yes or no unless his goal was to "protect the president rather than to inform the Congress."

A.G. Bill Barr refuses to answer Nita Lowey's questions about whether the White House has seen the Mueller report or been briefed on the report beyond his four page memo.


Barr Does Not Plan To Seek Release Of Grand Jury Materials

By Allegra Kirkland
April 9, 2019 11:34 am
Attorney General Bill Barr has no plan to try to seek the public release of secret grand jury materials included in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

“My intention is not to ask for it at this stage,” Barr testified Tuesday before the House Appropriations subcommittee.

Democrats on the committee asked if Barr intended to seek a court order to make those materials public, as House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) has pressed him to do. He offered only to listen to Nadler’s case on why that would be necessary.

The attorney general also testified that he had grand jury material in mind when he made the decision to write a March 24 letter offering what he claimed were Mueller’s “principal conclusions.” He confirmed that he declined to use the multiple report summaries that Mueller’s team had reportedly already prepared. Every page of the report Barr received from the special counsel’s office was marked by the indication that it may contain secret grand jury material, he testified.

Barr said he took the restriction barring the release of grand jury material seriously, citing a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling last week affirming that there were only five exemptions that would allow a court to release grand jury materials.

Barr struck a somewhat defensive tone in explaining his letters to Congress characterizing the report. He repeatedly insisted that he tried to use “as much of the special counsel’s own language” as possible without revealing any classified grand jury information.

Rep. Charlie Crist (D-FL) asked about press reports that members of Mueller’s team were frustrated that Barr did not accurately describe their extensive, serious findings about President Trump’s obstruction of justice.

“I suspect that they probably wanted more put out,” Barr replied. “But in my view I was not interested in putting out summaries or trying to summarize because I think any summary regardless of who prepares it not only runs the risk of, you know, being under-inclusive or over-inclusive but also would trigger a lot of discussion and analysis that really should await everything coming out at once.”

Democrats have argued that by releasing a four-page letter on March 24 essentially clearing the President of any wrongdoing, Barr was in fact triggering this discussion and framing the narrative about Mueller’s conclusions.

Though Barr testified repeatedly that he tried to use Mueller’s own wording, his initial letter to Congress included just a few direct quotes from the special counsel.

In an earlier exchange with Rep. Tom Graves (R-LA), Barr suggested that in his mind, the Mueller investigation was all but settled.

“No collusion, no obstruction,” Graves said. “It’s over. It’s done.”

“Well, the letter speaks for itself,” Barr said.

“I thought it did too,” Graves added.

Graves also asked whether any lawmaker who released the full report or any redacted information would be in violation of the law, offering Nadler as an example.

“I don’t want to speculate about all the circumstances that would be involved,” Barr said. “I don’t intend at this stage to send the full unredacted report to the committee. So I’m not sure where he would get it. If he got it directly from the counsel, that would be unfortunate. I doubt that would happen.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/barr ... t-released
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Re: Attorney General William Barr

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Apr 10, 2019 8:06 am

trump's Roy Cohen

Barr Forms Team to Review FBI's Actions in Trump Probe
Chris Strohm
Attorney General William Barr has assembled a team to review controversial counterintelligence decisions made by Justice Department and FBI officials, including actions taken during the probe of the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016, according to a person familiar with the matter.

This indicates that Barr is looking into allegations that Republican lawmakers have been pursuing for more than a year -- that the investigation into President Donald Trump and possible collusion with Russia was tainted at the start by anti-Trump bias in the FBI and Justice Department.

Attorney General William Barr Testifies Before House Appropriations Subcommittee
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
“I am reviewing the conduct of the investigation and trying to get my arms around all the aspects of the counterintelligence investigation that was conducted during the summer of 2016,” Barr told a House panel on Tuesday.

Barr’s inquiry is separate from a long-running investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters. The FBI declined to comment. Barr said he expected the inspector general’s work to be completed by May or June.

The issue came up as Barr testified before a Democratic-controlled House Appropriations subcommittee. Most of the questioning concerned demands for Barr to give lawmakers Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s full report and the evidence behind it. But the issue is sure to get more attention when Barr appears Wednesday before the panel’s GOP-led Senate counterpart.

Read more: Barr Says He Plans to Release Mueller’s Report ‘Within a Week’

Republican Lindsey Graham, who’s a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has already pledged to pursue the issue in the Judiciary Committee he leads.

“Once we put the Mueller report to bed, once Barr comes to the committee and takes questions about his findings and his actions, and we get to see the Mueller report, consistent with law, then we are going to turn to finding out how this got off the rails,” he said in a March 28 interview with Fox News.

He said Tuesday that he plans to defer his questions about the Russia investigation until Barr appears before his Judiciary panel on May 1.

Sessions Probed

Some Justice Department officials have argued that a review into the FBI is necessary based on a pattern of actions, including a criminal investigation that agents opened into former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2017 for misleading lawmakers about his contacts with Russians when he was a senator advising Trump’s campaign. The case against Sessions was eventually closed without charges.

“That’s great news he’s looking into how this whole thing started back in 2016,” Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said Tuesday of Barr’s interest in the issue. “That’s something that has been really important to us. It’s what we’ve been calling for.”

Before they lost control of the House in last November’s election, Jordan and Republican allies including Devin Nunes of California conducted a two-year campaign to show players in the FBI and Justice Department were out to get Trump.

They interviewed more than 40 witnesses, demanded hundreds of thousands of Justice Department and FBI documents, and held a bombastic hearing in attempts to bring attention to their suspicions.

‘Salacious’ Dossier

Republican Representative Robert Aderholt of Alabama asked Barr during Tuesday’s hearing if the Justice Department is investigating “how it came to be that your agency used a salacious and unverified dossier as a predicate for FISA order on a U.S. citizen?”

Aderholt was referring to the “Steele Dossier” that had been put together as opposition research against Trump, including with funding from Democrats.

Congressional Republicans -- and the president -- have alleged that officials improperly relied on that dossier to obtain a secret warrant to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. They say that was the start of the probe that Trump calls a “witch hunt” and that Mueller took over after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey.

In congressional testimony last year, though, Comey rejected the underlying thesis -- that the Russia investigation was prompted by the dossier. “It was not,” Comey told House lawmakers.

Rather, he said, the probe began with information about a conversation that a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser -- known to be George Papadopoulos -- “had with an individual in London about stolen emails that the Russians had that would be harmful to Hillary Clinton.”

— With assistance by Steven T. Dennis
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... rump-probe
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
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Re: Attorney General William Barr

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Apr 10, 2019 12:17 pm

BASTARD!!!!!!

Norman Ornstein

Not surprisingly, right-wing sites are headlining Barr statement as "Obama spied on Trump." His loose language and inappropriate references are reprehensible.



Josh Marshall

Everybody needs to stop pretending Barr isn't fully embracing Trump's war on the rule of law

Barr Says He Thinks ‘Spying Did Occur’ By Intel Agencies On Trump’s Campaign
Kate Riga

AFP/Getty Images
Attorney General William Barr said he thinks that “spying did occur” by intelligence agencies on the Trump campaign in 2016 during an appearance Wednesday before the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Barr was elaborating on his intent to investigate the “genesis and conduct” of intelligence activities directed at the Trump campaign in 2016.

“There were a lot of rules put in place to make sure that there’s an adequate basis before our law enforcement agencies get involved in political surveillance,” he said, referring to his upbringing in the Vietnam era. “I’m not suggesting that those rules were violated but I think it’s important to look at that. And I’m not talking about the FBI necessarily, but intelligence agencies more broadly.”

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), ranking Democrat on the committee, pushed back. “You’re not suggesting, though, that spying occurred?”

Barr stuttered and paused for a few seconds. “I think spying did occur, yes,” he said. “I think spying did occur.”

“The question was whether it was predicated, adequately predicated,” he added. “I’m not suggesting that it wasn’t adequately predicated, but I need to explore that. I think it’s my obligation.”

Barr’s comments followed a report that the attorney general was putting together a team to review the counterintelligence decisions made by the Justice Department and FBI while they were investigating Russian election meddling and the Trump campaign.

When questioned later on in the hearing by Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), Barr said that he is “not putting together a panel” to investigate the intelligence agencies’ activities.

Towards the end of the hearing, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) gave Barr a chance to rephrase his “spying” comment. Barr largely demurred, offering up “unauthorized surveillance” as a description of what he was investigating.

He did ask to enter a point of clarification into the hearing a few questions later.

“I want to make it clear, thinking back on all the different colloquies here that I am not saying that improper surveillance occurred,” Barr said. “I’m saying that I am concerned about it and looking into it. That’s all.”

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker ... p-campaign
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Re: Attorney General William Barr

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 11, 2019 8:59 am

WHOSE ATTORNEY?
Barr Sounds More and More Like Trump’s Roy Cohn
The attorney general contradicts himself on Mueller and obstruction and starts talking like a true-believer on intelligence agencies ‘spying’ on the Trump campaign.
Barbara McQuade

04.10.19 5:19 PM ET
OPINION
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Shutterstock
Attorney General William Barr’s testimony before Congress on Wednesday highlighted the inherent contradiction in his letter about Robert Mueller’s investigation. The problem is not that Mueller did not make a charging decision about obstruction. The real problem is that Mueller did make a charging decision about conspiracy.

Barr was asked questions about Mueller’s investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Russia relating to interference with the 2016 election. Barr seemed to move interchangeably between the view that, on the one hand, a president cannot be indicted while in office, and, on the other hand, that the Russia investigation should be analyzed like any other criminal case. But these are two different things. You can’t have it both ways. If a sitting president cannot be indicted, then Congress gets to decide whether to charge a crime through impeachment, not a prosecutor through the normal analysis of criminal statutes.

Barr’s March 25 letter to Congress stated that Mueller concluded that his investigation did not establish conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to influence the election, but that Mueller refrained from making a “traditional prosecutorial judgment” when it came to obstruction. (Again, a president can’t be indicted.) Barr wrote Mueller’s decision “leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime.” Congress and the public still do not have access to Mueller’s report, and it has been unclear why Mueller’s declination to make a decision meant that the decision was to be made by Barr.

On Wednesday, Sen. Patrick Leahy pressed Barr to explain why Mueller’s decision meant that the attorney general must decide the question. After all, since the Department of Justice taken the position that a sitting president cannot be indicted, isn’t the only recourse for a president’s misconduct for Congress to decide whether it amounts to a high crime or misdemeanor for which impeachment is appropriate? And wasn’t the whole point of appointing a special counsel to insulate the decision-maker from the executive branch chain of command to avoid a conflict of interest?

During the hearing, Barr conceded that when Mueller submitted his report, Mueller did not say that he intended to leave the obstruction decision to Barr. But Barr would not concede that Mueller intended to leave the obstruction decision to Congress. Instead, Barr said that he made the decision himself because “that’s generally how the Department of Justice works. Generally, grand juries are to investigate crimes and a prosecutor’s role at the end is binary. There are charges or no charges, or is this a crime or not a crime?” And for good measure, he added, “I’ve had some experience in that field.”

But a special counsel’s investigation of a president is anything but the general practice of the Department of Justice. A special counsel’s role is not binary. In fact, one could argue that a special counsel should make no charging decision at all, instead, collecting the evidence and then turning it over to Congress to decide whether the facts amount to a high crime or misdemeanor for which impeachment is appropriate.

Barr’s letter dissects the elements of the criminal statute for obstruction, applies the Justice Department’s Principles of Federal Prosecution that are used in normal criminal cases, and uses the standard of proof as guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But these are the standards that apply in a normal criminal case, not in an impeachment proceeding. It seems that by taking the position that a sitting president cannot be indicted, it follows that the standard for analyzing alleged misconduct of the president should not be the standard that is used to obtain indictments. Instead, Congress should be permitted to analyze the conduct under its own standards.

“But all of this talk about obstruction masks the real point, which is that if Mueller had no business deciding the obstruction question, then why did he decide the conspiracy question?”
Barr’s decision should also be viewed with some skepticism because of the unsolicited 19-page memo he sent to DOJ leadership last summer in which he expressed the somewhat unique view that a president cannot obstruct justice as a matter of law if he is exercising executive power, such as by asking the FBI director to stop investigating a matter or firing him. Barr’s March 25 letter stated that he reached his decision “without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president,” citing the 2000 Office of Legal Counsel memo regarding prosecution of a sitting president. His letter did not say, however, that he reached his conclusion without regard to the position taken in his 19-page memo.

Barr raised further concerns about his objectivity when he referred to the FBI investigation into Trump’s campaign as “spying.”

He stated that he would be “reviewing both the genesis and the conduct of intelligence activities directed at the Trump campaign during 2016,” even though a “substantial portion” of these matters are already being investigated by DOJ’s inspector general. Although the FBI’s conduct should not be immune from scrutiny, government officials typically refer to intelligence activities as “surveillance” or “collection.” The use of the loaded term “spying” raises skepticism of his impartiality.

In addition, Barr stated, “I think there was probably failure among a group of leaders there at the upper echelon.” He has reached this conclusion even though he hasn’t “set up a team yet” to investigate. Barr’s testimony revealed a mindset that is consistent with the Trump narrative of an FBI that is out to get him. This is the attorney general appointed by Trump after Trump criticized Barr’s fired predecessor, Jeff Sessions, for failing to protect him. Does Trump finally have his Roy Cohn?

But all of this talk about obstruction masks the real point, which is that if Mueller had no business deciding the obstruction question, then why did he decide the conspiracy question? Unless Barr provides members of Congress with Mueller’s full report, they are unable to fulfill their duty to serve as a check on the president and will have no choice but to conduct their own investigation into both questions.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/barr-soun ... ref=scroll
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Re: Attorney General William Barr

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 12, 2019 10:29 am

WORRY
Bill Barr Is the Most Dangerous Man in America
The banality of the AG’s droning Hill testimony hides its evil purpose: to protect the president, not the rule of law.
Rick Wilson
04.11.19 2:19 AM ET
OPINION

Every great authoritarian enterprise comes to its apotheosis more from the soulless, mechanical efficiency of armies of bureaucrats and police than from the rantings of whatever Great Leader or revolutionary firebrand mounts the podium. A four-hour, spittle-flecked speech in Berlin, Havana, Moscow, or Kigali is, in the end, less consequential than the memos and slide decks of competent people given over to the service of evil.

Bad governments don’t start as nihilist terror; they’re the work of people who look like your neighbors. They build anodyne policy directives to justify the acidic erosion of the rule of law. They put the tools of government and administration to darker and darker purposes while compartmentalizing inevitable excesses in the name of political expediency.

The gray, heavy-set man who sat before two congressional committees over the last two days embodies the triumph of the banality of Washington's bureaucratic class, a droning Kabuki performer leading the House and Senate committees through several hours of monotone testimony intended to disguise the explosive consequences of his appointment as attorney general.

WHOSE ATTORNEY?
Barr Sounds More and More Like Trump’s Roy Cohn

Barbara McQuade

William Barr’s tone was calm, but his agenda was clear: His job is to protect Donald Trump, no matter the prerogatives of Congress or any consideration of the rule of law. Bill Barr is not the attorney general of the United States. He is the Roy Cohn whom The Donald has craved since become president; an attorney general who sees his duty as serving Trump.

Barr won the job by writing a memo before he knew a single fact contained in the Mueller report. Its tacit and overt promises were irresistible to Trump: As attorney general, Barr would protect this president from charges of obstruction. Barr knew then, and knows now, that he has an audience of one: Donald Trump. Like Barr’s job-application memo, every word of his testimony this week screamed out obedience to the president.

Unlike Watergate, Barr’s cover-up is happening in real time and on live television, as the chief law enforcer of the United States promised without a flicker of emotion that he will redact the Mueller report as he sees fit. He dared Congress to challenge his decision to hide relevant material from their eyes and those of the American people. He refused to provide a co-equal branch of government with information to which it is legally entitled. This is a partisan political decision that will ramify into a hundred bad outcomes.

“Unless Democrats get the entire report, Barr, Trump, and Fox will write the history of this sorry affair.”
Barr is the attorney general of the Trump regime, and protection of the maximum leader is his sole mission. He is a weapon, not a servant.

Barr knew what he was doing when he claimed Wednesday that the Trump campaign was “spied on.” He was teeing up the upcoming show trials of Trump’s “enemies” in the Department of Justice and the FBI that the president’s craziest supporters in Congress, and at his rallies, have been screaming for. Together with allies like Lindsey Graham, Barr needs to not only feed Trump’s revanchist agenda, but to throw up chaff to confuse the results of the Mueller report that may somehow see the light of day.

COME AGAIN?
Barr: ‘I Think Spying Did Occur’ on Trump Campaign

Audrey McNamara

Barr is also openly weaponizing the Department of Justice to potentially sully the future public, private, and legal testimony of members of the DOJ, FBI, and intelligence community who have seen the damning data on Trump and his claque. The goal is to intimidate anyone who would investigate Trump’s vast portfolio of corruption and obstruction of justice, both before and after he took office. It goes far, far beyond the Russia probe; it is an investigation that by its nature aims to terrify all future witnesses and whistleblowers into silence.

By acceding to Trump’s demands for political revenge and refusing to call out the language of witch hunts, crooked cops, angry Democrats, and treasonous enemies within, Barr sent a message to every member of the DOJ and intelligence community—even before reaching his own investigative conclusion—that they can either follow the Trump line, or potentially face persecution and prosecution.

As usual, anyone counting on the Democrats not to blow it this week was disappointed. Democrats failed to hold Barr to any meaningful account in the hearings this week, asking questions in an oblique, diffident manner that mirrored Barr’s cool affect. They whispered when they needed to shout. They threw underhand softballs when they should have brought the heat. They were lulled into a trance, still believing they can shame the shameless or trap Barr and Trump with some kind of bluff.

The fact the Democrats aren’t already in court to get the full, unredacted Mueller report is exactly the kind of behavior that happens in nations slipping from democracy to authoritarianism. They think this is procedural and political, not existential. There are no brakes, no white knight in DOJ to come to the rescue, and unless Democrats get the entire report in court, Barr, Trump, and Fox will write the history of this sorry affair.

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U.S. Attorney General William Barr takes part in the "2019 Prison Reform Summit" in the East Room of the White House in Washington, U.S., April 1, 2019.
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Barr exudes just enough of the comforting style of the Washington insider to quiet the fears of many in the House and Senate. He comes across as pedestrian and legalistic, bordering on dull, but he’s the most dangerous man in America.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/william-b ... ref=scroll



William Barr Sends Troubling Signals Ahead of Mueller Report Release

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The Mueller report has been sitting in the Justice Department for nearly two weeks. Attorney general William Barr told Congress Wednesday he’s hoping the public will finally get a look at the 300-plus page document sometime within the next week, ending a bizarre period of dissembling and fumbling by Barr that has left America with more questions than answers about the seriousness of what Mueller uncovered.

That public release, when it comes, will thankfully end the current liminal period where Barr’s own summary of the report—which he subsequently denied was a summary—has stood as the only public statement on the final findings of a 22-month probe that led to charges against dozens of individuals—including Russian intelligence officers—and yielded around $50 million in forfeitures and fines, yet evidently stopped short of indicting the president or his family themselves. So far, the public has seen less than 70 words of Mueller’s own conclusions, not a single complete sentence among them.

Yet two days of testimony on Capitol Hill Tuesday and Wednesday have done little to calm growing concerns that Barr is acting to obfuscate the worst findings of Mueller’s two-year probe as special counsel.

The investigation was hardly the wide-ranging, any-and-all-crimes hunt that critics had alleged.
At nearly every turn, Barr stonewalled and seemed to contradict himself or Justice Department precedent. He argued consistently that the report was nuanced enough he couldn’t discuss or release it piecemeal, even though he himself rushed out his “topline conclusions” in just 48 hours. He declined to explain Mueller’s reasoning for refusing to make a “traditional prosecutorial decision” on the question of whether Donald Trump obstructed justice, an important answer given how Barr stepped in to offer his own verdict—even as he quoted Mueller saying the report “does not exonerate” the president on obstruction. And, perhaps most confounding, Barr said he did not plan to ask for a court’s permission to release the grand jury testimony included in Mueller’s report, as was done in Watergate and Whitewater.

Barr’s performance on Capitol Hill deepened the sense of unease about the coming unveiling of the Mueller report, and how much of it would be made public. In the days since Barr released his summary, Trump wrongly declared “total EXONERATION,” while Mueller’s own team appears to be whispering about their unhappiness with Barr’s summary. While their report concluded that the Trump campaign’s behavior in 2016 fell short of a provable conspiracy, that doesn’t mean the behavior wasn’t troubling.

Particularly worrisome, Barr seemed to be adopting the president’s call for “investigating the investigators,” raising the specter—long pushed by figures like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos and the fever dreamers on Fox News—that the whole premise of the FBI’s 2016 investigation, codenamed CROSSFIRE HURRICANE, was somehow illegitimate. The theory involves some vague and incorrect dot-connecting between the FISA surveillance warrant that targeted Carter Page (which began months before he joined the campaign), the so-called Steele Dossier (which even Senator Lindsey Graham has said he urged his Senate colleague John McCain to turn over to the FBI back in 2016), the “unmasking” scandal-that-wasn’t, and the supposed corruption of FBI agent Peter Strzok and lawyer Lisa Page.

Trump himself has trumpeted the conspiracy theory previously—and did so again Wednesday morning, saying that the Russia probe was “an illegal investigation.” As he told reporters, “It was started illegally. Everything about it was crooked. Every single thing about it was crooked.”

Barr seemed to buy into the swampy end of the conspiracy theory during his testimony Wednesday, saying he believed “spying did occur,” and “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal.” Barr cited no new information, or previously unknown evidence, to back his conclusion. “I believe there is a basis for my concern, but I’m not going to discuss the basis for my concern,” Barr said.

If anything, Mueller’s investigation has shown just how right the FBI was.

Hearing that line of commentary from the nation’s top law enforcement officer was distressing, given that all public evidence has shown that the special counsel investigation of Trump’s campaign was by the book. The idea of a deep state conspiracy to undermine then-candidate Trump is laughable given the public evidence, not the least of which was how silent the FBI and Justice Department actually kept throughout the campaign. As Strzok himself has pointed out, had he actually been trying to undermine Trump, he could have picked up the phone and called any reporter in the country at any point during the campaign. He didn’t.

If anything, Mueller’s investigation has shown just how right the FBI was to be interested in figures associated with the Trump campaign in 2016. The campaign chair and deputy chair were both involved in a money laundering conspiracy while working as unregistered foreign agents of Ukraine during the campaign; national security advisor Michael Flynn was involved in his own work on behalf of the government of Turkey; the candidate’s personal lawyer was engaged in his own money laundering and tax fraud scheme, while attempting to do business with the Russian government on the candidate’s behalf and lying about it to the American public. Any one of the above would have been a normal political scandal; the combination makes Donald Trump’s campaign the most criminal political enterprise in modern American history.

In fact, after enduring literally years of presidential shouts of “WITCH HUNT!” the wrap-up of Mueller’s probe has made clear that the investigation was hardly the wide-ranging, any-and-all-crimes hunt that critics had alleged.

Mueller was no Ken Starr, an independent counsel who set out to investigate a decades-old failed real estate development and eventually brought charges against the president for an affair that hadn’t even occurred when Starr began his case.

Mueller’s approach was targeted and narrow; he won guilty pleas and overwhelming trial court convictions in the cases he did bring. He was rigorous in his legal definitions; Barr noted in his summary that Mueller used an exacting and high bar for “collusion.” And his overall manner conservative, referring out “non-core” criminal matters to other investigators.

Given Mueller’s conservative approach, it’s all the more important that Barr let the public see the special counsel’s own words and his own decisionmaking—especially given that Mueller went out of his way to say he “does not exonerate” Trump.

https://www.wired.com/story/william-bar ... testimony/



New Attorney General William Barr is proud he helped Elliott Abrams get a pardon for Iran-Contra

Kudos from colleagues are nice. An attorney general who already helped you cover up crimes in Latin America once is even better.

Feb 14, 2019, 3:21 pm
William Barr was confirmed by the Senate as attorney general Thursday, 27 years after he helped ensure Elliott Abrams was pardoned for his Iran-Contra crimes. CREDIT: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
William Barr was confirmed by the Senate as attorney general Thursday, 27 years after he helped ensure Elliott Abrams was pardoned for his Iran-Contra crimes. CREDIT: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Elliott Abrams — hired by President Donald Trump to run United States policy toward one of the several Latin American countries where he previously engineered coups, broke U.S. laws, and encouraged right-wing political violence in the name of anti-communism — isn’t having a particularly good week.

But though Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Joaquin Castro (D-TX), and Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) ensured on Wednesday that Abrams would not be able to swiftly sidestep his past career as an enabler and, at times, creator of right-wing dictatorships across the same region he is now supposed to help stabilize, the embattled war criminal can still cling to some bright spots as he returns to officialdom.

One such comfort came in the form of a trans-ideological cadre of national security experts who immediately ran interference for Abrams on social media, including senior staff members at the Center for American Progress, Georgetown Strategy Group, and Harvard’s Kennedy School. (ThinkProgress is an editorially independent news organization housed at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.) The outpouring of support for a man whose crimes against humanity are more voluminous than the crimes for which he was convicted and then pardoned under U.S. law has already been ably catalogued by Splinter.

The friendly tweets from colleagues might have helped Abrams’ mood. Thursday’s confirmation of William Barr as attorney general is a much more practical and tangible boon to him. As Abrams tackles the challenges of his new job – and gets blown up on C-SPAN by a newly emboldened group of progressive elected leaders who don’t cotton to the apologias his think-tank friends purvey – the pardoned criminal can at least know that the same guy who made sure he got pardoned the last time he did crimes for a president will be the attorney general this time around too.

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Lack of demand hasn’t stopped Trump from opening tons of land to oil and gas drilling

Barr was intimately involved in securing pardons for Abrams and five other members of the Iran-Contra conspiracy back in 1992 — and speaks with pride of the achievement.

“I went over and told the President I thought he should not only pardon Caspar Weinberger, but while he was at it, he should pardon about five others,” Barr told historians from the University of Virginia’s Miller Center in 2001.

Then-Defense Secretary Weinberger and the “five others” for whom Barr successfully secured pardons — Abrams; then-CIA bigwigs Duane Clarridge, Alan Fiers, and Clair George; and former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane — had intentionally subverted laws specifically designed to stop Reagan’s no-holds-barred approach to proxy wars against communist governments in Latin America. Abrams cut a deal with Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor who handled the affair until the pardons Barr helped engineer cut his work off at the knees, and was allowed to plead guilty to having lied to Congress in lieu of facing more serious charges.

Barr went on to detail his role in President George H. W. Bush’s decision to officially scrub out the criminal convictions of the men who engineered the illegal arms-for-cocaine scheme that circumvented federal laws intended to stop the Reagan-Bush administration from continuing to fund anti-communist guerillas who sought to depose the Nicaragua’s revolutionary government.

Barr, who was also attorney general when the pardons ended Walsh’s investigation, said, “I certainly did not oppose any of them. I favored the broadest—There were some people arguing just for Weinberger, and I said, ‘No, in for a penny, in for a pound.’”

“Elliott Abrams was one I felt had been very unjustly treated,” he added.

The pardons Barr engineered not only killed Walsh’s investigation but obscured the moral realities of what the Iran-Contra gang had done — thus opening the door for the reputational rehab evident in the think-tank set’s defensiveness during Wednesday’s hearing.

In both the specific nature of his crimes and the way in which he navigated the criminal investigation of them, Abrams’ conduct in the Iran-Contra affair raises direct echoes of the still-unfolding probe of the present administration’s interactions with Russian interests in more recent history. With Barr now just an oath of office away from presiding once again over the Justice Department at a time when aides to a sitting president stand accused of lying to Congress, his views on the pardons of Abrams, Oliver North, and other key Iran-Contra criminals are chilling, CIA expert and Legacy of Ashes author Tim Weiner told ThinkProgress.

“Elliott Abrams was a willing member of a criminal conspiracy. And he confessed, and absolution is good for the soul, and I’m sure he loves his children. He was not the most morally reprehensible of this gang,” Weiner said. “But the pardons were the final chapter in a six-year attempted cover-up of a crime.”

Barr’s depiction of Abrams as particularly hard done by in the case is “transparently false, legally dubious, and morally suspect,” Weiner said.

“You plead guilty to a crime because you’re guilty. And the crime to which [Abrams] pleaded guilty was in furtherance of a massive attempt, that ran from the White House to the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA, to hide pertinent facts from the American people,” he said. “The overwhelming evidence shows this was a criminal conspiracy in which Abrams pleaded guilty to participating.”

Barr – whose career in Washington began with a multi-year stint at the Central Intelligence Agency – did not expound specifically on his belief that Abrams’ individual convictions represented a particular injustice in the Iran-Contra affair in that interview.

This week, Barr was confirmed by the full Senate scarcely 24 hours after Abrams scrambled to field questions about a career littered with dead Latin American bodies. Many of the episodes from Abrams’ career that members highlighted Wednesday did not even directly involve Iran-Contra, but it is his direct role in that criminal conspiracy to violate federal law by funneling guns to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and money to Nicaraguan murderers that made him famous.

“The mindset was that the president of the United States can do anything he wants, screw the congress, screw the laws, and screw the consequences. That is not a reflection of the principles of American democracy,” Weiner said.

It does, however, reflect the legal thinking at times put forth by the lawyers who represent Trump today as he navigates his own legal entanglements. Roger Stone’s recent arrest specifically involves alleged lying to Congress, the same charges for which Barr insisted that Abrams be pardoned 30 years ago.

Abrams’ re-entry into public service comes roughly two years after he had a State Department job offer pulled because he had been too critical of Trump during the 2016 election. Abrams’ apparent rehabilitation in the president’s eyes is likely driven by the Iran-Contra middle-man’s vast experience with brutalist and undemocratic meddling in Latin America – a suddenly valuable skill set in an administration taking unusual and risky diplomatic actions toward Venezuela’s teetering political situation after years of stomach-turning privations.

Those who engage in apologetics for Reagan’s brutal and criminal policies in Latin America tend to do so in earnest, said Weiner, who has studied and reported on the intelligence community’s history and related matters for more than three decades. But the sincerity of their convictions about the moral questions that drove violent anti-communist coups and subversions across much of the developing world simply does not square with the law in the case for which Abrams was pardoned at Barr’s behest.

Abrams and his allies helped engineer decades of brutality, social decay, poverty, and imperialism-by-other-names in Latin America. Barr helped ensure they got away with it — leaving that region to be shaped by their lawlessness and the political forces they empowered.

“Those who supported the right-wing response to the Sandinista government probably are getting a lot of satisfaction out of the fact that more than 30 years later, Daniel Ortega has become a thug, that the Chavistas and Maduro in Venezuela are shockingly anti-democratic, and that the right wing throughout the western hemisphere is in ascendance,” Weiner said. “The wheel has come around.”


https://thinkprogress.org/elliott-abram ... ca426a978/



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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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