Don’t let the door hit you
Barr is leaving. The cover story is that he wants to spendmoretimewiththefamily.
NPR has a rundown of his more unsavory actions.
In March 2020, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton called Barr’s handling of the Mueller report “distorted” and “misleading.” Walton, a George W. Bush appointee who was presiding over a lawsuit seeking redacted portions of the Mueller report, said Barr’s actions raised questions about the attorney general’s credibility.
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Democrats bristled over Barr’s statement that he believed the Trump campaign was “spied on” during the 2016 race, and his decision to appoint a veteran prosecutor, John Durham, to investigate the origins of the Russia probe.
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He didn’t show up for a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee during a nadir in tensions with Democrats. DOJ initially didn’t give Congress the whistleblower complaint that detailed many of Trump’s actions in the Ukraine affair.
And Barr overruled career prosecutors in Washington D.C. in the case of Trump’s adviser Roger Stone; Barr instructed them to ask for a lighter sentence.
He also intervened in the case against another former Trump insider, Michal Flynn. The former national security adviser pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.
The Justice Department, with Barr’s approval, moved to drop its prosecution of Flynn, although the presiding judge in the case balked.
And yet with all this, Barr managed to resent it when people thought he was Trump’s tool.
Barr grew frustrated by the president’s tweets and public statements about the department’s ongoing cases, people close to Barr say. The attorney general was sensitive about the perception that he wasn’t an independent officer but a political factotum of the president.
Then he went to work for the wrong guy, didn’t he.
Unfortunately at the end Barr, for all his previous faults, was successfully resisting Trump’s pressure to get him to illegitimately meddle in the election. He successor will likely be someone who has no such qualms.
January 20 can’t come soon enough. 37 days!
Barr’s leaving to spend more time with the family. The family’s views on this development are best summed up by the words Oh fuck/.
Deputy AG is succeeding him for these few weeks; name is Jeff Rosen. I know nothing about him but doubt he’s such a fool as to try to mess with the election now, after the Electoral College has duly voted for Biden-Harris.
Which doesn’t mean Trump won’t expect him to try. Trump does not understand anything. He thinks if he wants something, those who work for him (or even in the general vicinity of his outstanding personage) must get it for him. That’s what he learned in his life, and he wasn’t prepared for people to reject his claims to be the only one that mattered, to vote for their welfare over his ego.
I’m surprised you’d doubt there’d be such fools in the Trump administration.
But hopefully you’re right. Hopefully they’re at least smart enough to realize with 36.5 days left there’s no point in fighting such a losing cause.
Ophelia, re.
My concern wouldn’t be so much about them continuing to mess with the election as what they might be pushing under the radar while all the attention is on the ongoing circus. Aside from Trump, perhaps, they all know that chasing a reversal of the election is a lost cause that makes them look increasingly foolish, so I’d be deeply suspicious of their reasons for making certain that this one topic continues to get all the attention.