Barr None
A-G’s efforts to subvert Mueller cause confusion
March 25th, 2019
OK, I’m going to beobvious the labor here and tell you that I think William Barr’s third-grade book report version of the Mueller Report is somewhat short of credible.
Barr, you’ll recall, was the architect of the Iran-Contra pardons issued in the final day of the George HW Bush administration that basically destroyed a six year investigation of some of the worst felonies committed since the previous time a Republican was president. Back then, William Safire referred to Barr witheringly as “the Coverup-General” and here we are, some 23 years later, and we still have a Coverup-General, and it’s the same despicable toady.
Safire was a speechwriter for Nixon and Agnew (‘nattering nabobs of negativism’) and he found Barr contemptible in his willingness to subvert the legal process in service to party.
Safire’s dead, but the evil spawn of the far-right takeover of the GOP live on.
Barr’s letter is nothing more than a last-ditch effort to confuse the Mueller Report with Trump administration talking points. We still don’t know what’s in the Mueller report. We know that Mueller did not indict Trump for treason or even conspiracy against the United States, but that was never part of his remit. He could recommend such a course to the Justice Department or the House of Representatives, and he still might. And even Barr couldn’t manage to pretend that serious evidence of obstruction of justice didn’t exist; the best he could manage was that the Report “does not exonerate him [Trump].”
So we watch to see if Congress can wrest the report from Barr’s greasy paws and bring most, if not all of it into the light of day. We’ve gotten the talking points from Trump’s dancing monkey; now let’s see the actual report.
Even if Barr and Trump do manage to bury the report, there are three grand juries and at least a half dozen state investigations underway to determine the extent of Trump criminality in everything from using inaugural donations as a laundry for foreign influence peddling to the wild shenanigans surrounding the Trump Tower in Moscow to the demand that Moscow ferret out Hillary’s emails. Even without whatever Mueller has, Trump faces decades in prison for the potential charges he will face.
But Congress will subpoena the report, and possibly Mueller himself. Barr can’t prevent that, and Trump might face a revolution if he tried.
And remember, we still don’t know what is in that report. All Barr did was show up with an empty plastic bag draped over a hanger and grandly announce our tuxedo was back from the cleaners.
The media, in general, got completely played. I even heard a lot of them transposing Barr’s book report with the Mueller tome, and saying Mueller exonerated Trump. Most TV journalism is a vast wasteland, but even for them, that was a limp performance.
The right wing online circus weighed in, of course. One meme read, “Why are so many liberals in tears over learning that their president is not a traitor?”
I still think he’s a traitor, or at least conspiring against the United States for personal gain. (In just about any other country, conspiracy against that country would be considered treason, but the US has a very specific definition of the term ‘treason’ that sorta takes Trump off the hook.) If anyone’s crying, it’s because they just realized that Trump and the Republicans may have so badly broken the United States that it may no longer have any legal address to rid itself of an enemy in high office. That would be a death knell for any country. That would leave any thinking person in tears.
Well, Barr gave the empty-headed goosesteppers of the far right something to cheer about, and managed to confuse the equally empty-headed fluffers who purportedly keep us informed, but I doubt it’s going to last for very long.
Just the things Trump has openly admitted to should have gotten him impeached two years ago. Maybe the United States is that badly broken, in which case expect bloody and horrible times ahead.
Or maybe it’s like 1940, where the United States was suffering massive attacks on life and property from Germany on the high seas (the equivalent of a 9/11 every two weeks) and needed 18 months or so to gather the resolve to crush their vicious tormentors.
It may be that Trump himself, vicious and heedless in what he seems to believe is a victory, will trigger that himself. He has already said he would “call for organizations to fire members of the media and former government officials who he believes made false accusations about him”.
Ever heard an American President say anything like that? Nope. Not even Nixon.
Still, he needs to maintain the pretense that Barr’s Cliff’s Notes version is a substitute for the actual report, and not the real thing. And he has to do something about all those other investigations going on.
At which point, people will have to decide if they want to simply surrender to this vicious five-and-dime despot and his brown-shirt devotees, or put up a fight.
