This is what the American government has come to. Attorney General William Barr, nominated by President Donald Trump and confirmed by the United States Senate under control of the Republican Party, has closed down the Justice Department into Russian interference in the 2016 elections and attempts by the Trump administration and others to suppress the investigation. This with the delivery of the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Before making the Mueller report available for public (and congressional) consumption, General Barr delivered a public brief that sought mightily to exonerate Mr. Trump and others. Once the Mueller Report became public it was apparent that General Barr vastly overstepped the facts in his assessment of the report. On 1 May General Barr testified before a Senate committee, which includes a number of Democratic senators, one of them being Senator Maize Hirono of Hawaii. Senator Hirono was not withholding in her assessment of General Barr’s actions and his character. This from CNS News:
Mr. Barr, now the American people know that you are no different from Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway or any of the other people who sacrificed their once-decent reputation for the grifter and liar who sits in the oval office.
You once turned down a job offer from Donald Trump to represent him as his private attorney. at your confirmation hearing, you told Sen. Feinstein that, quote, the job of attorney general is not the same as representing, end quote, the president.
So you know the difference but you’ve chosen to be the president’s lawyer and side with him over the interest of the American people.
To start with, you should never have been involved in supervising the Robert Mueller investigation. You wrote a 19-page, unsolicited memo, which you admit was not based on any facts, attacking the premise of half the investigation and you also should have insisted that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein recuse himself. He wasn’t just a witness to some of the president’s obstructive behavior. We now know he was in frequent, personal contact with the president, a subject of the investigation. you should have left it to career officials.
Then once the report was delivered by the special counsel, you delayed its release for more than two weeks. You let the president’s personal lawyers look at it before you even deemed to let congress or the public see it. During the time you substituted your special counsel’s legal conclusion in a four-page letter to congress. And now we know, thanks to a free press, that Mr. Mueller wrote you a letter, objecting to your so-called summary.
When you called Mueller to discuss his letter, the reports are that he thought your summary was giving the press, Congress, and the public a misleading impression of his work. He asked you to release the report summaries to correct the misimpression you created, but you refused.
When you finally did decide to release the report over a congressional recess and on the eve of two major religious holidays, you called a press conference to once again try to clear Donald Trump before anyone had a chance to read the special counsel’s report and come to their own conclusions. But when we read the report, we knew Robert Mueller’s concerns were valid and that your version of events was false.
You used every advantage of your office to create the impression that the president was cleared of misconduct. You selectively quoted fragments from the special counsel’s report, taking some fo the most important statements out of context and ignoring the rest.
You put the power and authority of the office of the attorney general and the Department of Justice behind a public relations effort to help Donald Trump protect himself.
Finally, you lied to Congress. You told Rep. Charlie Crist that you didn’t know what objections Mueller’s team might have to your march 24th so-called summary. You told Sen. Chris Van Hollen that you didn’t know if Bob Mueller supported your conclusions, but you knew. You lied. And now we know.
A lot of respected nonpartisan legal experts and elected officials were surprised by your efforts to protect the president. But I wasn’t surprised. You did exactly what I thought you’d do. That’s why I voted against your confirmation. I suspected protect the president and, indeed, you did.
In 1989 — this isn’t something you hadn’t done before — in 1989 when you refused to show Congress an OLC opinion that led to the arrest of Manuel Noriega. In 1992 when you recommended pardons for the subjects of the Iran-contra scandal. And last year, when you wrote the 19-page memo telling Donald Trump a president can’t be guilty of obstruction of justice and then didn’t recuse yourself from the matter.
From the beginning, you are addressing an audience of one. That person being Donald Trump. That’s why before the bombshell news of yesterday evening, 11 of my Senate colleagues and I called on the Department of Justice inspector general and office of professional responsibility to investigate the way you have handled the Mueller report. I wanted them to determine whether your actions then complied with the department’s practices and policies and whether you had demonstrated sufficient impartiality to continue to oversee the 14 other criminal matters that the special counsel referred to in other parts — to other parts of the department of justice.
But now we know more about your deep involvement in trying to cover up for Donald Trump. Being attorney general of the United States is a sacred trust. You have betrayed that trust. America deserves better. You should resign.
If you read much of this blog, you will know CNS News is a conservative mouthpiece that seeks to protect us from liberal bias in the mainstream media. To wit, “The liberal media are terrified of the truth, especially when it leads to uncomfortable questions about their own leftist worldview. CNSNews covers the stories that the liberal media are afraid to touch. It drives the national debate through real, honest journalism — not by misrepresenting or ignoring the facts.” Which leads one to wonder exactly what service CNS provides, since all of the above is available from the “liberal media.” What CNS did not show us was what followed the above remarks. Senator Hirono continued with:
I have some questions for you.
See? They left out the fun part. Senator Hirono stripped AG Barr down to his shorts, and then she announced she had some question she wanted him to answer. The woman has balls.
It was Federal Judge John E. Jones III who introduced me to the phrase “breathtaking inanity.” In 2005 he presided over a case involving some creationists who sought to promote religious dogma in a public school. As the trial progressed it became apparent to the judge and to all who observed that two creationists involved in the defense had made glaring misrepresentations under oath. His 139-page verdict contains the following language:
Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an
activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court.
Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction
on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a
constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the
Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which
has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers
of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal
maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.
You want breathtaking inanity? I will give you breathtaking inanity. Here is breathtaking inanity. From South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham:
After her time ran out, Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said, “You have slandered this man from top to bottom. If you want more of this you’re not going to get it.”
Yes, you spotted it. Slander must, by definition, be dishonest. But Senator Graham apparently has no sense for the dishonest. Positively breathtaking.
