Tag Archives: Bill Barr

Donald Trump, Republicans

Is it time for a Barr reappraisal? Not a chance.

A headline at TPM’s Editor’s Blog asks, “A Barr Reappraisal?” and suggests an affirmative response from a reader, based on the recent report that the investigation of Hunter Biden, begun in 2018, was kept secret (from the press and the President). Reader JG suggests, since the investigation (if made public) “would have been weaponized in the campaign,” we must give Barr credit for keeping it under wraps. JG offers the view that Barr has used “DoJ as a shield for Trump, not a sword to go after political enemies.”

Josh Marshall is skeptical, “I need to see a lot more to convince me we’re getting the full or true story here. As it is the facts just run too counter to Barr’s tenure and that of the DOJ for the last four years. Something does not add up.”

I agree and suggest an alternative to JG’s view: Just because something could be “weaponized,” it doesn’t follow that it would be effective politically to weaponize it (as the Trump campaign certainly would have done). Bill Barr has reason to regard himself as a savvier operator than most of the sycophants surrounding Trump. It is hardly a stretch to believe that in his judgment revealing the indictment would have generated as many votes for Biden as for Trump. (Furthermore, Barr stayed out of the line of fire — from Democrats, the press, Trump, and Trump’s accolytes — by keeping the report quiet. There is little reason to think that any flak from a leak would have “effected a different outcome in the election,” to borrow a phrase.) And so Barr didn’t leak the report before the election.

Whether this pragmatic judgment is right or wrong, it’s defensible; and furthermore, given the evidence of the past year and a half, it’s a more plausible account of Barr’s motivation than the idea that he kept the indictment secret because ethical or professional or reputational constraints held him back.

It is far more likely that he saw no point in releasing the information, no clear advantage to the Trump campaign. It’s laughable, after all we’ve seen since Barr came on board, to think that leaking an investigation of Joe Biden’s son was a bridge too far for the A.G.

Last week, Bill Barr said, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” separating himself from Trump. While this is striking, in the sense that Barr has acted, at times, like another Trump sycophant. He is not and never was simply a Trump flunky.

Instead, he has been a devoted partisan of the Republican Party. That partisanship led to his defenses of the Republican president — when the the party’s and Trump’s interests coincided (fortifying a strong executive, undermining the Mueller investigation, pushing back against Nancy Pelosi’s House, and so on).

As I posted earlier, “Bill Barr is carrying water for the Republican Party ….” Trump’s interests (to salve his wounded ego and pump up his brand) and the GOP’s interests (winning two senate seats) diverged in a way that frightened the Republican Congressional leadership. So — placing party first, as he has always done — Barr separated himself from Trump.

There’s no paradox, no change of heart, no signs of “Barr’s limits” (in Marshall’s words). There’s an unflagging allegiance to the Grand Old Party. Same as it ever was for Bill Barr — going back decades.

(Image: Bill Barr and Donald Trump at the 38th Annual National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service via Wikimedia Commons.)

Donald Trump, Republicans

Bill Barr is an abject GOP partisan; hence, he is publicly contradicting Donald Trump

To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election. . . .

There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that. — Attorney General William Barr

Much is being made of Bill Barr’s public comments that reject Trump’s whining that Joe Biden won only because of election fraud. Which raises questions.

Has Barr had a change of heart? Is he trying to resuscitate his tattered reputation? Has he belatedly decided to act as a principled attorney general?

None of the above. Bill Barr is carrying water for the Republican Party, as he has consistently done throughout his tenure in the Trump administration (and in previous Republican administrations).

Donald Trump is traveling to Georgia this weekend to campaign for two Republican senators. If Democrats win both races, Mitch McConnell is no longer majority leader. The party desperately needs Donald Trump to gin up the base so Georgia Republicans turn out to vote. Too much bellyaching about a fraudulent election by the narcissist-in-chief could discourage Trump’s legions and keep them at home.

Republicans, who have played along for weeks with Trump’s refusal to concede his defeat and his complaints of being cheated (because of fear of what their mercurial leader may do or say), are concerned about how these bizarre hysterics will affect the Georgia election. Someone needs to nudge the President nearer the real world so he doesn’t sandbag the GOP this weekend.

Bill Barr is bold enough to deliver a reality check to the President when partisan duty summons. The message has four days to sink in (and perhaps other GOP partisans will join the chorus).

(Image: The AG at May 13, 2019 candlelight vigil via Wikimedia Commons.)

Democracy, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Attorney General Bill Barr will go to any lengths to do Donald Trump’s bidding

Donald Trump’s Attorney General, Bill Barr, spoke at Hillsdale College yesterday. While his remarks on numerous themes drew a great deal of attention, Dahlia Lithwick focuses on his continuing attempts — with Trump — to undermine confidence in balloting on November 3 (“Bill Barr Would Like to Undermine Your Faith in the Election”).

Barr, like Trump, is no longer content to blame foreigners and malign faceless vote tamperers. He also warned Kass that greedy mail carriers were apt to get in on the action: “A secret vote prevents selling and buying votes. So now we’re back in the business of selling and buying votes. Capricious distribution of ballots means (ballot) harvesting, undue influence, outright coercion, paying off a postman, here’s a few hundred dollars, give me some of your ballots.” Just to recap, then: Your mail-in ballot is unsafe because foreigners want to forge it, Democratic governors want to steal it, antifa operatives plan to harvest it, oh, and Dot, your friendly neighborhood letter carrier will also gladly break the law in order to sell it. This narrative need not be provable or coherent; it’s enough that it’s rinsed and repeated on a near-daily basis in the media.

What Barr is actually performing here is the time-honored, Bannon-christened, Putin-sanctioned electoral practice known formally as flooding the zone with shit. What he wants most of all is for voters to doubt the capacity for the November election to be conducted fairly. That is why he told Blitzer that any effort to make voting safer in the midst of a pandemic—and of course that’s what the push for mail-in balloting was attempting to redress—is by definition tantamount to “playing with fire.” Under the pretense of concern for voter confidence, Barr jowlishly invents one reason after another to undermine it. . . .

Jonathan Chait, though he focuses on criminal prosecutions, observes that Barr and Trump are in sync regarding the role of the DOJ (“William Barr Lays Out Terrifying Theory for Corrupting Justice Department”):

Barr’s philosophy of the Justice Department is functionally indistinguishable from Donald Trump’s. The main difference is the level of sophistication in which they are expressed. Trump’s view is summarized by his aphorism “The other side is where there are crimes” — which is to say, by definition, Trump and his allies are innocent and whatever his opponents are doing is illegal. It’s either “lock her up!” or “dirty cops!,” depending on which party is at issue. Barr’s theories have multisyllabic terms and are decorated with historical references but boil down to the same two-track approach to justice.

Bill Barr is the Attorney General Donald Trump has long sought. Trump complained to Don McGahn [as quoted in the Mueller Report, v. II, p. 50], “I don’t have a lawyer,” and expressed the wish that Roy Cohn were his attorney.

Bill Barr will go to any lengths — will “invent one reason after another” and employ “multisyllabic terms that are decorated with historical references” — to do Trump’s bidding.

2020 General Election, Democracy, Donald Trump

Plan B surfaces in Philadelphia for a free and fair election — and no red mirage — in 2020

Last month, election expert Richard Hasen assured us that “there is still time to keep the presidential election fair.” Of course time is not the limiting factor. Noting Donald Trump’s attacks on the integrity of voting and unsupported GOP claims of voting fraud, including a “particularly ludicrous” scenario that Bill Barr has raised repeatedly, Hasen offers several steps to ensure a free and fair election.

For Congress: offer funding for the states to cover the additional costs of running an election during a raging pandemic. “This should not be a partisan issue,” he writes, though of course it is. Congress could also provide oversight of the Postmaster General to ensure that no measures impair mail delivery prior to the election. But if Mitch McConnell is opposed, Congress will be stymied.

For the states:  implement procedural reforms to ensure a timely and transparent process. Again, a sticking point will be among Republicans in key states in position to block any procedural changes. Nonetheless, Democrats are in charge in some states, while in others, Republican officials are on board with free and fair elections.

For voters: request mail-in ballots soon and vote early.

For the media: educate the public that counting all ballots will take many days, that this is not evidence of fraud, and that no candidate can credibly declare victory before enough votes have been counted to determine a winner.

The media has begun to communicate this message. That’s good news and so are steps that several states have begun to take to streamline the process of voting and tabulating votes.

The bad news is that Congressional funding (and effective oversight of the post office) aren’t on the horizon. And, in some states, there will be few checks on Republicans who are willing to engage in mischief.

In a previous post, I suggested that the fiasco in Florida in 2000 could well be a less ugly version of election larceny headed our way in 2020. Thus, Democrats’ Plan A for voting — encouraging voters to vote by mail — was too vulnerable to the possibility of Republicans stealing another election.

Pennsylvania is a key battleground with a history of voting breakdowns, as Politico reports:

With concerns about an Election Day debacle rising in this critical swing state, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf privately convened a group of Philadelphia Democrats recently to underscore the consequences of another vote-counting fiasco like the one that took place in the June primary.

The city took more than two weeks to count all of its votes due to a massive surge in mail voting amid the coronavirus pandemic — and a repeat performance might make it unclear who won the presidential election in the key battleground state long past Nov. 3.

The fear: if an Electoral College victory hinges on Pennsylvania, and there are hundreds of thousands of ballots yet to be counted, Donald Trump could cry fraud and claim victory. We’ve seen this coming for months. Trump has sought to delegitimize vote by mail, making it more likely that his supporters will vote in person on election day, while Democrats — taking heed of the raging coronavirus — have urged their voters to cast ballots by mail. This raises the possibility that Trump could be ahead in the count in the early morning hours of November 4, while Biden’s winning votes have yet to be totaled. That’s the red mirage [see definition at Chidi’s Corner], which we could see in a number of states across the country.

Even if Trump is behind, he and Fox News Channel will be free to raise a ruckus if votes are being tallied many days later. And of course even if Biden wins and takes office, the outrage and chaos manufactured by Trump and company could be a Trumpian GOP theme throughout the Democratic president’s tenure in the White House.

Hasen has endorsed legislative changes to streamline voting and counting votes. And called on Congress to help fund such efforts. Republicans, who control the Pennsylvania General Assembly, have resisted Democratic Governor Tom Wolf’s proposals to do so. Nor has Congress acted.

Fortunately, a first step of Plan B — free of Republican obstruction — has surfaced in Philadelphia. The nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life has awarded the city a $10 million grant

to help fund upgraded equipment, satellite offices, personal protective equipment and other materials. Wolf has also raised more than $5 million to help municipalities implement mail-in voting and educate voters about their options, said Jeff Sheridan, his political adviser.

City election officials said the additional money puts them in a vastly better position than they were in June. They expect to open at least 800 polling places in Philadelphia in November, compared to fewer than 200 during the primary. Most of the $10 million in nonprofit funding is going toward costly equipment that will enable them to print, sort and scan ballots more quickly, according to the city’s grant agreement.

That’s good news. Here’s hoping funding for free and fair elections surfaces in other states across the country.

(Image from Center for Tech and Civic Life award letter.)

Democracy, Republicans

Release of v. 5 of the report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is a man bites dog story

The Republican-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has released what is probably its final report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, which goes beyond what we learned from the Mueller report. The 966-page fifth volume provides more details and establishes more conclusively that Trump’s claim — “It’s all a hoax” — is a lie.

▪ “The Committee found that the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.” (p. 5)

▪ “Manafort hired and worked increasingly closely with a Russian national, Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer. . . . Kilimnik and Manafort formed a close and lasting relationship that endured to the 2016 U.S. elections and beyond.

Prior to joining the Trump Campaign in March 2016 and continuing throughout his time on the Campaign, Manafort directly and indirectly communicated with Kilimnik, Derispaska, and the pro-Russian oligarchs in Urkraine. On numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik.” (p. 6)

▪ “The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump because the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.

[Redacted] WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian influence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence effort. The Committee found significant indications that [redacted] …

While the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a russion election interference effort” (p. 7)

SSCI report on Russian interference in 2016 election, v. 5, p. vii.

Writing at Lawfare, Benjamin Wittes suggests that, in their statement asserting that “the Committee found no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government in its efforts to meddle in the election,” Senate Republicans on the committee have misrepresented the report they signed off on.

Wittes draws three conclusions from the report: First, the report’s findings validate and go further than the Mueller report. Second, the findings undercut Bill Barr’s efforts to portray the Russian investigation as illegitimate “spying” on the Trump campaign. And, finally [emphasis added]:

Third, while I have contempt for the rhetoric of these Republican senators and I find it almost mind-boggling to try to reconcile the text of this report with their votes in the impeachment only a few short months ago, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the public service they have done here. Yes, they are lying about having done it—pretending they found things other than what they found and did not find the things they actually found. And yes, they are almost religiously evading the moral, legal, and democratic consequences of what they found.

But unlike their counterparts in the House of Representatives, they allowed this investigation to take place. They ran a bipartisan, serious investigation. They worked with their Democratic colleagues to insulate it from an environment rife with pressures. And they produced a report that is a worthy contribution to our understanding of what happened four years ago.

This report may represent the most significant example of bipartisanship in American politics in 2020. It is an extraordinarily rare instance of senators working across the aisle on a fiercely partisan issue that has become nearly extinct.

In their 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein write: “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Documenting and illustrating the truth of that conclusion has been the most consistent theme of this blog. As someone who has followed politics since my teenage years in the mid-1960s, it has been fascinating and horrifying to see the Republican Party run itself off the rails. Bipartisanship, a collegial Senate, and even placing U.S. security interests above the Republican party line, are in the last stages of extinction.

Let’s acknowledge that we’re not quite there yet — not 100%.

(Although Marco Rubio now heads the panel, I suspect that we can attribute this milestone to the relationship between Senators Richard Burr and Mark Warner, and their respective authority as leaders to direct the work of the committee and to make decisions for their side of the party divide, for this success. Just like in the good ole days.)

Note however that this exception reveals the Republican Party’s comprehensive success in evading accountability and truth: Republican voters don’t trust the mainstream media, and will hear (if they hear anything at all of this report) only mischaracterizations on Fox New Channel and in other conservative media. So, the Republican senators who allowed the release of this report could rest assured that their false statement — which relies on “lying,” “pretending,” and “almost religiously evading the moral, legal, and democratic consequences of what they found” — will be taken at face value by Donald Trump and his base.

Republicans, in other words, will accept the fraudulent cover story as true. Should the actual substance of the report come to their attention, that will be rejected as “fake news.” In 2020, a singular gesture of bipartisanship doesn’t leave us much to celebrate.

(Image: screengrab of Reuters video.)

Democracy, Donald Trump, Off the Rails

Donald Trump, with help from John Yoo, finds “powers that nobody thought the president had”

We’re signing a health care plan within two weeks, a full and complete health care plan that the Supreme Court decision on DACA gave me the right to do. So we’re going to solve — we’re going to sign an immigration plan, a health care plan, and various other plans. And nobody will have done what I’m doing in the next four weeks. The Supreme Court gave the president of the United States powers that nobody thought the president had, by approving, by doing what they did — their decision on DACA. And DACA’s going to be taken care of also. But we’re getting rid of it because we’re going to replace it with something much better. What we got rid of already, which was most of Obamacare, the individual mandate. And that I’ve already won on. And we won also on the Supreme Court. But the decision by the Supreme Court on DACA allows me to do things on immigration, on health care, on other things that we’ve never done before. And you’re going to find it to be a very exciting two weeks. — Donald Trump in an interview with Chris Wallace

When I listened to this interview today, I was baffled by the claim of “powers that nobody thought the president had.” Wallace apparently didn’t know what to make of it either, since he jumped to a question about Mary Trump’s book.

Today, a report by Axios (“Scoop: Trump’s license to skirt the law”) provides the context, an article by John Yoo (the man who defended waterboarding as a national policy, even if it violated federal statutes) in National Review (“How the Supreme Court’s DACA Decision Harms the Constitution, the Presidency, Congress, and the Country”).

The article offers Yoo’s reasoning in the first three sentences:

Suppose President Donald Trump decided to create a nationwide right to carry guns openly. He could declare that he would not enforce federal firearms laws, and that a new “Trump permit” would free any holder of state and local gun-control restrictions.

Even if Trump knew that his scheme lacked legal authority, he could get away with it for the length of his presidency. And, moreover, even if courts declared the permit illegal, his successor would have to keep enforcing the program for another year or two. [Emphasis added.]

Yoo finds justification for this interpretation within the 5-4 opinion written by the Chief Justice (with the 4 liberals concurring). As Yoo puts it (quoting from the text of the opinion):

“Even if it is illegal for DHS to extend work authorization and other benefits to DACA recipients,” Roberts found, DACA “could not be rescinded in full without any consideration whatsoever of a” non-deportation policy other than on the ground of its illegality.

According to Chief Justice Roberts, the Constitution makes it easy for presidents to violate the law, but reversing such violations difficult — especially for their successors.

Yoo criticizes this decision in National Review, because he believes it allows a president to unduly tie the hands of his successors. (I’m not an attorney, so I may be missing something in thinking that Yoo finds torture at the hands of the federal government more acceptable than deferring deportations of immigrants whose parents brought them into the country as children without legal documentation.)

Regardless of Yoo’s objections, the White House sees a green light for expanding presidential power beyond even the creative imagination (prior to Roberts’ DACA decision) of Bill Barr’s justice department.

This is scary stuff for anyone who has had occasion to fear Trump’s authoritarian impulses.

I’ve concluded a couple of posts recently with warnings (regarding a raging COVID-19) that things will get worse. With Trump in a rage about his polling, the economy, and an out of control epidemic he has tried his best to ignore, we can count on this: Things will get worse — much worse — before January 20, 2021.

(Image: King George III via wikipedia.)