https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/12/william-barr-russia-ig-report
Politics & Finance Writer
Vanity Fair
Bess writes:
Last March, after Robert Mueller submitted the results of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and obstruction of justice by Donald Trump and his campaign, but before the world got to see it, Attorney General William Barr sent a summary of the findings to Congress. In it, Barr wrote that the Mueller probe did not come to a conclusion about whether the president had obstructed justice, leading the A.G. to decide on his own not to charge him. Trump, naturally, was thrilled by this assessment, but others, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were not content to take Barr’s word for it, saying, effectively, that Barr was a bootlicking hack who could not be trusted, in light of the fact that the guy literally got the job by sending an unsolicited 19-page memo to the Justice Department in which he called the special counsel’s inquiry “fatally misconceived,” described Mueller’s actions as “grossly irresponsible,” and insisted “Mueller should not be permitted to demand that the president submit to interrogation about alleged obstruction.”
Pelosi, of course, turned out to be right: Mueller’s report, in fact, found numerous instances of obstruction by Trump that, were Mueller’s hands not tied by Justice Department guidelines that say you can’t indict the president, could have resulted in Trump being charged with a crime, a far cry from Barr’s rosy interpretation of the findings. That didn’t stop Barr from continuing to undermine the almost two-year-long investigation by his good friend, likening it to the birther movement, claiming that, actually, it’s “not a crime” for the president to demand that staffers lie to investigators, and coordinating with the White House to make Trump look good. And now it appears that Barr is still trying to discredit the entire Russia investigation, even if it means going against the word of his own agency, according to the Washington Post:
Attorney General William P. Barr has told associates he disagrees with the Justice Department’s inspector general on one of the key findings in an upcoming report—that the FBI had enough information in July 2016 to justify launching an investigation into members of the Trump campaign, according to people familiar with the matter. The Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, is due to release his long-awaited findings in a week, but behind the scenes at the Justice Department, disagreement has surfaced about one of Horowitz’s central conclusions on the origins of the Russia investigation. The discord could be the prelude to a major fissure within federal law enforcement on the controversial question of investigating a presidential campaign.
Barr has not been swayed by Horowitz’s rationale for concluding that the FBI had sufficient basis to open an investigation on July 31, 2016, these people said…. The Russia investigation was opened after the FBI was told of statements made by a then Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, that the Russians possessed hacked Hillary Clinton emails. Papadopoulos’s alleged comments were key because they were made well before any public allegation that Russian intelligence operatives had hacked the Democratic National Committee. The attorney general has privately contended that Horowitz does not have enough information to reach the conclusion the FBI had enough details in hand at the time to justify opening such a probe…the prospect of the nation’s top law enforcement official suggesting the FBI may have wrongly opened an investigation into a presidential campaign, even after the inspector general announces the agency was justified in doing so, will probably generate more partisan battles over how the Justice Department and the FBI operate.
People familiar with Horowitz’s report told the Post that while it included some criticism of the FBI, it did not agree with Trump’s claim that the investigation was a politically motivated “witch hunt,” an assessment Barr, as Trump’s chief toady, obviously cannot abide. While the special counsel’s probe may seem like ancient history, it is actually a key part of the impeachment inquiry; last month the general counsel for the House of Representatives asked a federal appeals court to grant Congress access to secret grand jury evidence from the Russia investigation, saying that “there is evidence, very sadly, that the president might have provided untruthful answers…. Did the president lie? Was the president not truthful in his responses to the Mueller investigation? The House is trying to determine whether the current president should remain in office. This is unbelievably serious and it’s happening right now, very fast.”
Covering for Trump re: Russia isn’t the only criticism that has been (justifiably!) lobbed in Barr’s direction of late. Democrats were also enraged by the Justice Department’s quick decision not to investigate Trump over his attempt to convince Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, and telling the acting director of national intelligence he had no obligation to send an “urgent” whistle-blower report to Congress that has become the basis of the impeachment inquiry. “The attorney general has gone rogue,” Pelsoi told CNN in September, adding that “he has for a long time now.”
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Bess doesn’t even get to Barr’s “maliciously incompetent” mismanagement of the unconstitutional Immigration Courts in support of Trump’s racist White Nationalist agenda.
PWS
12-05-19