Barr-Iran-Contra Revisited. Republicans - Donald Trump

[thoughtone]

source: Truthout

Trump’s Attorney General Nominee Helped Bush Sr. Get Away With Murder

President George H.W. Bush listens to Deputy Attorney General William Barr at a White House portico ceremony announcing Barr's nomination to succeed Attorney General Dick Thornburgh on October 16, 1991, in Washington, DC.


Donald Trump has been president for almost 700 days now. In all that time, I have managed to find exactly one redeeming quality in the man: I thoroughly enjoyed the prodigious hard time he gave his now-departed attorney general, Jefferson Beauregard Sumpter Appomattox Shiloh Both Bull Runs Sessions III. Even that small pleasure, however, is poisoned.

Aside from Scott Pruitt, who managed to defoliate the Environmental Protection Agency while stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down or glued to a desk, Sessions was Trump’s most effective cabinet secretary by far and away. His backlit segregationist tendencies, his ruthless pursuit of child-parent separation at the southern border, and his retrograde approach to the criminal legal system and the so-called “war on drugs” all conspired to make me loathe Sessions without restraint. Trump hated Sessions because Sessions wouldn’t protect him from Robert Mueller, which thoroughly spoiled my enjoyment of that spectacle while it lasted.

The Trump-Sessions passion play ended a day after the 2018 midterms with all the class and collegiality of a car accident, to the great surprise of nobody. Three weeks later, we are three weeks away from the arrival of a new Congress, which will have on its plate Trump’s nominee to replace Sessions. Trump has tapped William Barr to be his next attorney general. In the context of the ongoing Mueller investigation, the nomination of Barr is both appalling and unsurprising in equal measure.

What a piece of work is this guy. Barr was assistant attorney general, and then attorney general, during the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush (who at last report remains dead despite his ongoing appearances in the news cycle). The most noteworthy line item on Barr’s résumé is his decision to officially recommend pardons for six of the top scoundrels — Caspar Weinberger, Robert McFarlane, Elliot Abrams, Duane Clarridge, Alan Fiers and Clair George — in the Iran-Contra “scandal.”

“The Reagan administration had been negotiating with terrorists (despite Reagan’s repeated public position that he would ‘never’ do so),” wrote Peter Kornbluh of Iran-Contra. “There were illegal arms transfers to Iran, flagrant lying to Congress, soliciting third country funding to circumvent the Congressional ban on financing the contra war in Nicaragua, White House bribes to various generals in Honduras, illegal propaganda and psychological operations directed by the CIA against the US press and public, collaboration with drug kingpins such as Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, and violating the checks and balances of the constitution.”

“Scandal,” they call it. Sometimes it’s the “Iran-Contra affair,” as if Oliver North were cheating on Daniel Ortega behind the Shah’s back. In point of fact, it was a felony festival in which missiles and other war weapons were sold to Iran to pay for the slaughter of civilians, nuns and schoolteachers in Central America. It was a genuinely murderous piece of business, and H.W. Bush was in it up to his knobby little patrician chin. The pardoning of those six men guaranteed that Bush Sr. would die comfortably in his own bed, and Barr did his part to make sure that escape from justice was seamless.

Dick Cheney’s belief that the executive branch is beyond the rule of law began during his time as a staffer to Donald Rumsfeld in the Nixon White House, but those beliefs grew fangs and claws during the Iran-Contra investigations. The same, as it turns out, can be said for Barr, who journalist Jeremy Scahill describes as a “fanatic who believes in a dictatorship of executive power.”

With unitary executive adherent Brett Kavanaugh firmly ensconced on an already hard-right Supreme Court and Mueller’s work nearly completed, the peril of an attorney general who cleaves to presidential invincibility is manifestly unnerving. There is little need to dust off the Iran-Contra files to explain what a menace Barr is to the cause of justice. Very recently, he made it abundantly clear that he considers Mueller’s investigation to be an invasive waste of time, and has cheered Trump’s call for investigations into Hillary Clinton and other political opponents.

All that and a bag of chips: Barr would be a terrible nominee even without his Iran-Contra unitary executive baggage, because he brings to the table everything that made Jeff Sessions a terrifying attorney general. Barr, like Sessions, is a merciless regressive on the topics of mass incarceration and mandatory minimum sentencing. He does not believe in abortion rights, even in the case of rape, and has actively opposed providing equal rights to the LGBTQ+ community for decades.

The ACLU states that Barr’s record “suggests that he will follow Jeff Sessions’ legacy of hostility to civil rights and civil liberties.” The Drug Policy Alliance concurs: “It’s hard to imagine an attorney general as bad as Jeff Sessions when it comes to criminal justice and the drug war, but Trump seems to have found one.”

Barr must be confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, and “is likely to face tough questions at a Senate confirmation hearing,” according to The Washington Post. Under normal circumstances, I would dismiss the idea of a stalwart Democratic minority rising to the occasion, but that was before Trump went Full Baby Huey on Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi in the Oval Office on Wednesday. Trump’s tantrum – “I am proud to shut down the government!” he declared at one point — certainly doesn’t change the math in the Senate, but it could help make for some interesting hearings when the time comes.

As attorney general in 1992, Barr already helped one president literally get away with murder, obstruction of justice and other grievous crimes. In the eyes of most, this makes him abominable. In the eyes of Trump, this makes him the perfect man for the job, again.

 

[thoughtone]

source: Bloomberg

Top Democrat Sees ‘Cover-Up’ If Barr Denies Full Mueller Report

Democrats demanded that Attorney General William Barr provide Congress with unclassified access to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s entire report along with underlying evidence on Sunday, vowing to take the challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said providing Congress with anything less would be equivalent to a “cover-up” and subvert the legislative branch of the government from holding the president accountable, a fight the party is willing to take to the nation’s highest court.

“Once you say that a president can not be indictable no matter the evidence as a matter of law, to then follow the principle that you can’t then comment on the evidence or publicize it is to convert that into a cover-up,” Nadler told “Fox News Sunday,” one of three television appearances for the morning.

Representative Jerrold Nadler

“If that is the case, and they can’t hold him accountable, the only institution that can hold a president accountable is Congress, and Congress, therefore, needs the evidence and the information,” he said.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is rallying Democratic lawmakers to deliver a unified message demanding Mueller’s report be unclassified and made public in full, as congressional leaders await a summary of his findings from the Justice Department, possibility as early as Sunday afternoon or evening.

Pelosi and six top committee leaders held what they termed an emergency conference call on Saturday with Democratic House members. The call provided no new insight on Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether anyone in President Donald Trump’s campaign coordinated with that effort, according to lawmakers who took part.

The heads of the committees primarily involved in investigations of the Trump administration led the discussion, including Nadler and Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff. The major thrust followed what Pelosi had earlier in the day outlined in a “Dear Colleague” letter -- that Congress must see the full report, plus its underlying documents and findings.

Several congressional Democrats made the rounds of political talk shows Sunday amplifying the message that they are ready to subpoena the full report and underlying documents, or even to obtain testimony or a briefing from Mueller, Barr or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

“That report needs to be made public ASAP, so we can evaluate the body of evidence on the issue of conspiracy and look at why Bob Muller decided not to indict,” Schiff said on CBS "Face the Nation" Sunday.

“It is not going to be satisfactory for the attorney general of the Justice Department to brief eight of us, the so-called Gang of Eight, in a classified setting and say, ‘OK, we discharged our obligation, we don’t have to tell the rest of the country anything,”’ he said. “That’s not going to fly.”

Democrats are attempting to keep pressure on Trump with their own investigations into his actions as president and his business dealings before taking office. But neither they nor Republicans know yet whether the conclusion of Mueller’s investigation will accelerate or tamp down further probes.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

Pelosi said transparency is even more urgent given Barr’s letter on Friday that he may advise certain lawmakers this weekend on the “principal conclusions” from Mueller’s 22-month investigation.

“We are insisting that any briefings to any Committees be unclassified so that Members can speak freely about every aspect of the report and not be confined to what DOJ chooses to release publicly,” Pelosi said in her letter.

Barr is planning to release his summary of Mueller’s findings as early as Sunday, according to a Justice Department official. Pelosi said Congress must get Mueller’s entire report so that the relevant committees can proceed with oversight and with potential legislation to address any issues the investigation may raise.

 

[thoughtone]

 

[QueEx]

Interesting . . . (the Empire Strikes Back???):

Barr Forms Team to Review FBI's Actions in Trump Probe

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

© Bloomberg Attorney General William Barr testifies before the House Appropriations subcommittee on April 9. ​

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.


“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,” which 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.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...ons-in-trump-probe/ar-BBVMonj?ocid=spartanntp

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[thoughtone]

Interesting . . . (the Empire Strikes Back???):

Barr embraces right wing talking points says the Trump campaign was spied on, but doesn't provide evidence

 

[thoughtone]

Get ready for more of the same for the Barr release of the Mueller report. And the moderates will be silent. Which is why the right wing ghouls keep doing it!


source: Just Security

Barr’s Playbook: He Misled Congress When Omitting Parts of Justice Dep’t Memo in 1989

On Friday the thirteenth October 1989, by happenstance the same day as the “Black Friday” market crash, news leaked of a legal memo authored by William Barr. He was then serving as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It is highly uncommon for any OLC memo to make headlines. This one did because it was issued in “unusual secrecy” and concluded that the FBI could forcibly abduct people in other countries without the consent of the foreign state. The headline also noted the implication of the legal opinion at that moment in time. It appeared to pave the way for abducting Panama’s leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega.

Members of Congress asked to see the full legal opinion. Barr refused, but said he would provide an account that “summarizes the principal conclusions.” Sound familiar? In March 2019, when Attorney General Barr was handed Robert Mueller’s final report, he wrote that he would “summarize the principal conclusions” of the special counsel’s report for the public.

When Barr withheld the full OLC opinion in 1989 and said to trust his summary of the principal conclusions, Yale law school professor Harold Koh wrote that Barr’s position was “particularly egregious.” Congress also had no appetite for Barr’s stance, and eventually issued a subpoena to successfully wrench the full OLC opinion out of the Department.

What’s different from that struggle and the current struggle over the Mueller report is that we know how the one in 1989 eventually turned out.

When the OLC opinion was finally made public long after Barr left office, it was clear that Barr’s summary had failed to fully disclose the opinion’s principal conclusions. It is better to think of Barr’s summary as a redacted version of the full OLC opinion. That’s because the “summary” took the form of 13 pages of written testimony. The document was replete with quotations from court cases, legal citations, and the language of the OLC opinion itself. Despite its highly detailed analysis, this 13-page version omitted some of the most consequential and incendiary conclusions from the actual opinion. And there was evidently no justifiable reason for having withheld those parts from Congress or the public.

Public and Congressional pressure mounts

When first asked by reporters about the OLC opinion that Friday, Barr said he could not discuss any of its contents. “I just don’t discuss the work of the office of legal counsel,” he said. “The office … provides legal advice throughout the Administration and does it on a confidential basis.”

The idea that Barr and the administration would not even discuss the content of the opinion could not withstand public pressure. Barr’s stance was especially untenable because his OLC opinion reversed a prior OLC opinion (an unusual event), and the Justice Department had released that prior opinion in full to the public just four years earlier.

President George H.W. Bush was asked about the Barr legal opinion at a news conference on the day the story broke. “The FBI can go into Panama now?,” a reporter asked in connection with the legal opinion. Bush responded that he was “embarrassed” not to know about the OLC opinion. “I’ll have to get back to you with the answer,” the president said.

Within hours, Secretary of State James Baker tried to make some reassuring public comments about the content of the OLC opinion. “This is a very narrow legal opinion based on consideration only of domestic United States law.” Baker said. “It did not take into account international law, nor did it weigh the President’s constitutional responsibility to carry out the foreign policy of the United States.”

It’s not known whether Baker had first cleared his statement with the Justice Department as is often the case for such matters. But his description of the OLC opinion would turn out to be not just misleading, but false.

The Chair of the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on civil and constitutional rights, Rep. Don Edwards, then wrote to the Attorney General requesting the opinion, but he was rebuffed. An assistant attorney general wroteback. “We are unable to provide you with a copy of the 1989 opinion because it is the established view of the Department of Justice that current legal advice by the Office of Legal Counsel is confidential,” she stated. But there was no categorical prohibition, as Barr himself would later admit in testifying before Congress. The assistant attorney general’s letter itself included one glaring counterexample. “I am enclosing a copy of the 1980 opinion,” she wrote, and she noted that the Department had released the 1980 opinion to the public in 1985.

So why not release the 1989 opinion? Was there something to hide?

Barr provides a “redacted opinion” to Congress

On the morning of Nov. 8, 1989, Barr came to Congress to testify before Rep. Edwards’ subcommittee. Some of the events that unfolded also bear a remarkable resemblance to Barr’s handling of the Mueller report to date.

First, Barr started out by saying that the history of internal Justice Department rules was a basis for not handing over the full opinion to Congress. “Chairman. Since its inception, the Office of Legal Counsel’s opinions have been treated as confidential,” Barr said.

That statement was misleading or false, and Chairman Edwards knew it.

Edwards quickly pointed out that the Department had released a compendium of opinions for the general public, including the 1980 one that Barr’s secret opinion reversed. “Up until 1985 you published them, and I have it in front of me—‘Opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel’—the previous opinion.”

Barr retreated. “It has been the long established policy of OLC that except in very exceptional circumstances, the opinions must remain confidential,” Barr replied. The reference to “very exceptional circumstances” backtracked from what Barr had just said and what the letter sent to Rep. Edwards by the assistant attorney general had claimed.

But even the assertion that OLC opinions were released only in “very exceptional circumstances” could not withstand scrutiny. The Justice Department had shared OLC opinions with Congress on many occasions during the 1980s, as a letter by Rep. Edwards to the Justice Department later detailed.

Barr then pointed out his willingness to provide Congress with “our conclusions and our reasoning.” This was the 13-page written testimony which contained a detailed recounting of the views expressed in the OLC opinion. Chairman Edwards complained that Barr had violated the rules of the House by submitting his written testimony only that same morning of the hearing, rather than 48 hours in advance. Barr’s timing meant that members of the committee and their staff were not well equipped to analyze or question the OLC’s analysis. But at least they had the OLC’s views in writing. Or did they?

Barr’s description of the OLC’s views included that as a matter of domestic law the President has the authority to authorize actions by the FBI in foreign countries in violation of customary international law.

Without the benefit of the OLC opinion, Professor Koh explained how Barr could be hiding important matters by asking Congress and the public to trust just the 13-page version. Koh wrote:

“Barr’s continuing refusal to release the 1989 opinion left outsiders with no way to tell whether it rested on factual assumptions that did not apply to the earlier situation, which part of the earlier opinion had not been overruled, or whether the overruling opinion contained nuances, subtleties, or exceptions that Barr’s summary in testimony simply omitted.”

Koh’s words proved prescient.

What Barr left out of his report to Congress

I am not the first to notice that Barr’s testimony omitted parts of the OLC opinion that would have earned the Justice Department scorn from the halls of Congress, legal experts, and the public.

Over one and a half years after his testimony, Congress finally subpoenaed Barr’s 1989 opinion. Another House Judiciary subcommittee issued the subpoena on July 25, 1991. The administration first resisted, but within a week agreed that members of Congress could see the full opinion. That same month, the Washington Post’s Michael Isikoff obtained a copy of the OLC opinion. The Clinton administration, within its first year in office, then published the OLC opinion in 1993 making it publicly available for the first time.

Omission 1: President’s authority to violate the U.N. Charter

Isikoff was drawn to a major issue that Barr had not disclosed in his testimony. The 1989 opinion asserted that the President could violate the United Nations Charter because such actions are “fundamentally political questions.”

That proposition is a very difficult one to sustain, and as Brian Finucane and Marty Lederman have explained, Barr was wrong. The 1989 opinion ignored the President’s constitutional duty to “take care” that US laws, including ratified treaties, be faithfully executed. And the opinion conflated the so-called political question doctrine, which is about whether courts can review an executive branch action, with the question whether an executive branch action is authorized or legal.

What’s more important for our purposes is not whether the 1989 opinion was wrong on this central point, but the fact that Barr failed to disclose this “principal conclusion” to Congress.

There was a reason Isikoff considered the conclusion about the U.N. Charter newsworthy. That’s because it had not been known before. The leading analysis of the Barr opinion is in a forthcoming article in Cornell Law Review by Finucane. He observes, “The members of the subcommittee appear to have been unaware of the opinion’s treatment of the U.N. Charter and the witnesses did not volunteer this information during the hearing.”

Professor Jeanne Woods, in a 1996 law review article in Boston University International Law Journal, also observed the large discrepancy between Barr’s 13-page testimony and what it failed to disclose. “Barr’s congressional testimony attempted to gloss over the broad legal and policy changes that his written opinion advocated.… A careful analysis of the published opinion, and the reasoning underlying it, however, reveals the depth of its deviation from accepted norms,” Professor Woods wrote.

Omission 2: Presumption that acts of Congress comply with international law

Woods also noted that the OLC opinion failed to properly apply the so-called “Charming Betsy” method for interpreting statutes. That canon of statutory construction comes from an 1804 decision, Murray v. The Schooner Charming Betsy, in which the Supreme Court stated, “an act of Congress ought never to be construed to violate the law of nations if any other possible construction remains.” In other words, Congress should be presumed to authorize only actions that are consistent with U.S. obligations under international law. As Professor Curtis Bradley has written, since 1804 “this canon of construction has become an important component of the legal regime defining the U.S. relationship with international law. It is applied regularly by the Supreme Court and lower federal courts, and it is enshrined in the black-letter-law provisions of the influential Restatement (Third) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States.”

Barr’s opinion not only failed to apply the Charming Betsy presumption in favor of international law; the opinion applied what might be called a “reverse Charming Betsy.” Barr had reasoned that “in the absence of an explicit restriction” concerning international law, the congressional statute should be read to authorize the executive branch to violate international law. “Because, as part of his law enforcement powers, the President has the inherent authority to override customary international law, it must be presumed that Congress intended to grant the President’s instrumentality the authority to act in contravention of international law when directed to do so,” the opinion stated (emphasis added).

That part of the OLC’s analysis has not withstood the test of time. Indeed, there was good reason to keep it buried.

Omission 3: International law on abductions in foreign countries

Finally, Barr’s testimony failed to inform Congress that the 1989 opinion discussed international law.

Barr’s written testimony said that the opinion “is strictly a legal analysis of the FBI’s authority, as a matter of domestic law, to conduct extraterritorial arrests of individuals for violations of U.S. law.” During the hearing he added that “the opinion did not address … how specific treaties would apply in a given context.” The State Department’s legal adviser who appeared alongside Barr supported this characterization of the opinion by saying:

“The Office of Legal Counsel, as the office within the Department of Justice responsible for articulating the Executive Branch view of domestic law, recently issued an opinion concerning the FBI’s domestic legal authority to conduct arrests abroad without host country consent. Mr. Barr has summarized its conclusions for you. As Mr. Barr has indicated, that opinion addressed a narrow question — the domestic legal authority to make such arrests…. My role today is to address issues not discussed in the OLC opinion — the international law and foreign policy implications of a nonconsensual arrest in a foreign country.”

But the OLC opinion had addressed some questions of international law and how a specific treaty—the U.N. Charter—might apply in such contexts. The 1980 opinion, which the 1989 one reversed, included strong statements about the international legal prohibition on abductions in other countries without the state’s consent. In analyzing Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, the 1980 opinion quoted from a famous United Nations Security Council resolution which condemned the abduction of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina by Israeli forces. The 1980 OLC opinion stated, “Commentators have construed this action to be a definitive construction of the United Nations Charter as proscribing forcible abduction in the absence of acquiescence by the asylum state.”

The OLC’s 1989 opinion took a very different view. It stated, “The text of Article 2(4) does not prohibit extraterritorial law enforcement activities, and we question whether Article 2(4) should be construed as generally addressing these activities.” The opinion also engaged in what many legal experts would consider controversial if not clearly wrong claims about international law. As one example, the 1989 opinion stated, “because sovereignty over territory derives not from the possession of legal title, but from the reality of effective control, logic would suggest there would be no violation of international law in exercising law enforcement activity in foreign territory over which no state exercises effective control.” The fact that the opinion had to resort to such a claim of “logic,” rather than jurisprudence or the practice and legal views of states, indicated its shallowness.

In fairness to Barr, these statements of international law were not the principal conclusions of the opinion. And, once again, it is not so relevant to our purposes whether these statements of law were wrong. What’s relevant is that Barr represented to Congress in his written and oral testimony that the OLC opinion did not address these legal issues, even though it did.

* * *​

In the final analysis, Barr’s efforts in 1989 did not serve the Justice Department well. He had long left government service when the OLC opinion was finally made public. The true content of the opinion, given what Barr told the American people and testified before Congress, remains much to the discredit of the Attorney General.

 

[QueEx]

Get ready for more of the same for the Barr release of the Mueller report. And the moderates will be silent. Which is why the right wing ghouls keep doing it!

"Giuliani says Trump’s rebuttal to Mueller report is almost complete" -- which, if true, means that Team Trump has already had access to Mueller's report and has had time to prepare a rebuttal to SHAPE OPINION before the public has had opportunity to FORM OPINION.

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[MASTERBAKER]

 

[QueEx]

 

[QueEx]

Mike Luckovich Copyright 2019 Creators Syndicate

 

[QueEx]

Mueller:

Barr’s letter did not capture ‘context’ of Trump probe

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III submitted his investigation to the Justice Department in March.
(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Washington Post
By Devlin Barrett and
Matt Zapotosky
April 30 at 7:16 PM


Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wrote a letter in late March complaining to Attorney General William P. Barr that [his] four-page memo to Congress describing the principal conclusions of the investigation into President Trump “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s work, according to a copy of the letter reviewed Tuesday by The Washington Post.

At the time the letter was sent on March 27, Barr had announced that Mueller had not found a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian officials seeking to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Barr also said Mueller had not reached a conclusion about whether Trump had tried to obstruct justice, but Barr reviewed the evidence and found it insufficient to support such a charge.​

Days after Barr’s announcement, Mueller wrote a previously unknown private letter to the Justice Department, which revealed a degree of dissatisfaction with the public discussion of Mueller’s work that shocked senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the discussions.

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”​

The letter made a key request:

that Barr release the 448-page report’s introductions and executive summaries, and made some initial suggested redactions for doing so, according to Justice Department officials.​

Justice Department officials said Tuesday they were taken aback by the tone of Mueller’s letter, and it came as a surprise to them that he had such concerns. Until they received the letter, they believed Mueller was in agreement with them on the process of reviewing the report and redacting certain types of information, a process that took several weeks. Barr has testified to Congress previously that Mueller declined the opportunity to review his four-page letter to lawmakers that distilled the essence of the special counsel’s findings.

In his letter, Mueller wrote that the redaction process “need not delay release of the enclosed materials. Release at this time would alleviate the misunderstandings that have arisen and would answer congressional and public questions about the nature and outcome of our investigation.”

Barr is scheduled to appear Wednesday morning before the Senate Judiciary Committee — a much-anticipated public confrontation between the nation’s top law enforcement official and Democratic lawmakers, where he is likely to be questioned at length about his interactions with Mueller.

A day after the letter was sent, Barr and Mueller spoke by phone for about 15 minutes, according to law enforcement officials.

In that call, Mueller said he was concerned that news coverage of the obstruction investigation was misguided and creating public misunderstandings about the office’s work, according to Justice Department officials.


When Barr pressed him whether he thought Barr’s letter was inaccurate, Mueller said he did not, but felt that the media coverage of the letter was misinterpreting the investigation, officials said.

In their call, Barr also took issue with Mueller calling his letter a “summary,” saying he had never meant his letter to summarize the voluminous report, but instead provide an account of the top conclusions, officials said.

Justice Department officials said in some ways, the phone conversation was more cordial than the letter that preceded it, but they did express some differences of opinion about how to proceed.

Barr said he did not want to put out pieces of the report, but rather issue it all at once with redactions, and didn’t want to change course now, according to officials.

Throughout the conversation, Mueller’s main worry was that the public was not getting an accurate understanding of the obstruction investigation, officials said.


“After the Attorney General received Special Counsel Mueller’s letter, he called him to discuss it,” a Justice Department spokeswoman said Tuesday. “In a cordial and professional conversation, the Special Counsel emphasized that nothing in the Attorney General’s March 24 letter was inaccurate or misleading. But, he expressed frustration over the lack of context and the resulting media coverage regarding the Special Counsel’s obstruction analysis. They then discussed whether additional context from the report would be helpful and could be quickly released.

“However, the Attorney General ultimately determined that it would not be productive to release the report in piecemeal fashion,” the spokeswoman’s statement continues. “The Attorney General and the Special Counsel agreed to get the full report out with necessary redactions as expeditiously as possible. The next day, the Attorney General sent a letter to Congress reiterating that his March 24 letter was not intended to be a summary of the report, but instead only stated the Special Counsel’s principal conclusions, and volunteered to testify before both Senate and House Judiciary Committees on May 1 and 2.”

Some senior Justice Department officials were frustrated by Mueller’s complaints, because they had expected that the report would reach them with proposed redactions the first time they got it, but it did not. Even when Mueller sent along his suggested redactions, those covered only a few areas of protected information, and the documents required further review, these people said.

Wednesday’s hearing will be the first time lawmakers will get to question Barr since the Mueller report was released on April 18, and he is expected to face a raft of tough questions from Democrats about his public announcement of the findings, his private interactions with Mueller, and his views about President Trump’s conduct.

Republicans on the committee are expected to question Barr about an assertion he made earlier this month that government officials had engaged in “spying” on the Trump campaign — a comment that was seized on by the president’s supporters as evidence the investigation into the president was biased.

Barr is also scheduled to testify Thursday before a House committee, but that hearing could be canceled or postponed amid a dispute about whether committee staff lawyers will question the attorney general.

Democrats have accused Barr of downplaying the seriousness of the evidence against the president.

In the report, Mueller described ten significant episodes of possible obstruction of justice, but said that due to long-standing Justice Department policy that says a sitting president cannot be indicted, and because of Justice Department practice regarding fairness toward those under investigation, his team did not reach a conclusion about whether the president had committed a crime.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...82d3f3d96d5_story.html?utm_term=.555b90f3e35a


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[QueEx]

Attorney General Barr has always been a cover-up specialist

Illustrated | AP Photo/John Duricka


The Week
By Ryan Cooper
May 3, 2019


It's clear that Attorney General William Barr has been an utter stooge for President Trump — just as dishonest as Rudy Giuliani, but far more effective.

In his hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday, he spun, dissembled, concocted ridiculous hairsplitting arguments, and as Nancy Pelosi said Thursday, lied outright to Congress.

His performance has elicited a lot of stunned commentary from centrist journalists and politicians, who thought that Barr was one of the storied "honorable" Republicans. Moderate Sens. Doug Jones (D-Al.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) now say they regretvoting to confirm him.

But Barr's defense of Trump comports perfectly with his previous career. Cover-ups are just what he does best — and he's probably just getting started.


At the hearing, Barr continually insisted that his wildly deceptive four-page summary of the Mueller investigation was in fact totally fair and balanced — despite the fact that, as we recently learned, Mueller himself sent a letter to Barr angrily complaining about the summary the very next day. It "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office's work and conclusions," Mueller wrote. "There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation," which "threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations."

Indeed, it turns out that Mueller and his staff had already prepared a summary as well, but Barr didn't release it until the full redacted report came out — obviously because he wanted to spin the coverage to protect Trump.

This is also reportedly the crux of Pelosi's allegation that Barr lied to Congress. He told Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) at a previous hearing that he didn't know why Mueller's staff had objected to the summary, when in fact he had already received the letter.

But as Mother Jones' Pema Levy outlines, this is just par for the course over Barr's whole career.

Iran-Contra Scandal
When he was attorney general for George H.W. Bush, he advised the president in the final days of his administration to pardon six peoplewho were neck-deep in the Iran-Contra scandal.

The Reagan administration had illegally funneled money to right-wing Contra death squads in Nicaragua by secretly selling arms to Iran, and Bush himself was widely expected to be implicated in the upcoming trial of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (who was pardoned and thus never went on trial).

The whole investigation was effectively stymied. Prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh said at the time: "the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed."​

Secret legal opinion justifying the straight-up kidnapping of foreign criminal suspects
As Jamelle Bouie detailed in The New York Times, while an assistant attorney general in 1989, Barr wrote a secret legal opinion justifying the straight-up kidnapping of foreign criminal suspects, without asking their governments' permission. The U.S. military duly took Panamania dictator Manuel Noriega into custody, after a fruitcake operation involving blasting rock music day and night at the church where he had sought sanctuary. When Congress got wind of the memo, they demanded to see it, but he gave them a 13-page summary of the memo instead. Lo and behold, when Congress finally got its hands on the whole memo years later, Barr's summary turned out to be a complete crock. It "omitted some of the most consequential and incendiary conclusions from the actual opinion," as Ryan Goodman summarized on the Just Security blog. Imagine that!
​

When Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) nailed him on whether Trump had ever asked him to investigate someone.
But in future, probably the most telling portion of Barr's Senate appearance came when Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) nailed him on whether Trump had ever asked him to investigate someone. Barr stammered and squirmed, and evaded a direct answer, because of course Trump has done that. He demanded the FBI investigate Hillary Clinton dozens of times, and The New York Times reports that Trump has encouraged Barr to open an investigation into possible Democratic connections with Ukrainian oligarchs — including Joe Biden's son Hunter.​

The objective, obviously, is to smear Trump's political opponents with ginned-up lawsuits. As Brian Beutler writes, "If that turns into a dead end, he will find something else." All this is extraordinarily dangerous — it's practically Authoritarianism 101. And if Democrats want it to stop, they need to fight back hard.

We know Bill Barr won't.



https://theweek.com/articles/839008/attorney-general-barr-always-been-coverup-specialist


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[QueEx]

Attorney General Barr has always been a cover-up specialist

More than 1,100 former prosecutors and other DOJ officials call on Attorney General Bill Barr to resign

More than 2,000 former prosecutors and other DOJ officials call on Attorney General Bill Barr to resign

More than 2,000 former Justice Department officials who served in Republican as well as Democratic administrations have signed a statement posted Sunday calling on Attorney General Bill Barr to resign.

www.cnn.com

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[MASTERBAKER]

The de democratization of USA..