Comments

Arresting Barr — 29 Comments

1. I wonder if the House Sergeant at Arms would be liable personally for a false arrest suit ?

2. Raskin is the spawn of Marcus G. Raskin, who co-founded the red haze Institute for Policy Studies. Seldom acknowledged in our own time is that a fat slice of our intelligentsia were supporting the enemy during the Cold War, Marcus Raskin and his sidekick Richard Barnet among them. (The usual maneuver was to act as press agents for Latin American reds &c). The Institute had an annual budget of about $1 m in 1981. Given the changes in nominal personal income since then, a contextually similar sum today would be about $5 million. Not sure any of the Institute’s defenders in that era ever bothered to attempt to ascertain who provided the funds. (I don’t think George Soros was active at that time, and his first forays into political philanthropy weren’t particularly controversial). Rael Jean Isaac wrote a profile of the Institute at that time which suggested they might be receiving laundered money from the East Bloc (as were western Communist parties in that era). This was considered an outrageous argument in the red haze press (The Nation, &c), who would have been the first to point out that the CIA surreptitiously funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom for about 20 years.

3. I don’t have a comprehensive objection to using the Sergeant-at-Arms for such tasks. The trouble is the reason. Eric Holder was arbitrarily refusing to provide information about the conduct of his office. The objection here is that Barr excised about 30 pages of material from a report Democratic members of the committee refuse to read. It’s absurd.

4. I hope the left keeps up with their extreme behavior. The AG objected to being questioned in a congressional hearing by House staff attorneys, as is his right. The AG is limited by laws, passed by congress, in regards to what he can release. The House leftists are pushing to obtain unredacted copies of everything produced by the Mueller sham investigation. Sending the House sargent of arms to arrest Barr just to stoke the rage of their hard left base would be handing Trump a great campaign weapon.

5. IPS, for those who don’t know it: https://www.keywiki.org/Institute_for_Policy_Studies

   I had a college friend whose mother worked there. As a consequence I happened to visit at the time, which in turn just coincided with the Letelier/Moffitt assassinations. Crazytown.

6. Blue smoke and mirrors courtesy of Jamie and Jerrold.

   Expect a steady diet of stink bombs to distract from the investigation of the investigators.

   BTW – self-proclaimed “spy” Valerie Plame is running for Congress. No doubt she was “predicated” then and now.

7. Most people — who aren’t political junkies like us — have tuned all this out. The spectacle of Nadler telling us that “we’re in a constitutional crisis” simply produces a yawn. More people are seemingly interested in the Game of Thrones Starbucks gaffe.

   Con law was my favorite class in law school. I got an “A”.

8. If I recall correctly, the Democrat House bandied about this possibility 12 years ago, against AG Gonzales.

   It’s bluster and bravado, intended to keep their rabid base mollified and the campaign contributions rolling in. Nothing more.

9. As far as I know, Steven Powell’s 1988 book Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies is still THE book on the IPS. With a Foreword is by David Horowitz.

   https://www.amazon.com/Covert-Cadre-Inside-Institute-Studies/dp/0915463393/ref=sr_1_9?Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.x=0&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.y=0&qid=1557440003&refinements=p_28%3AInstitute+for+Policy+Studies&s=books&sr=1-9&unfiltered=1

10. Oh well, AWOL! *g*

11. When /If Barr or any other DoJ officer next attends before *any* House committee, they should bring and release ALL the Fast and Furious documents.
    That is another pus filled boil which shoul have been but was not lanced.

12. Shouldn’t you be trying to drive a wedge between Trump and otherwise normal Republicans like Barr? How is increasing sympathy for Trump and Trumpish attitudes helpful?

    Mike

13. Mbunge …”How is increasing sympathy for Trump and Trumpish attitudes helpful?”
    Hillary should have tried to drive a wedge between the Basket of Deplorables and Donald Trump, instead of permanently alienating them. We’relong past the point where we expect Dems to be rational.

    parker … “Sending the House sargent of arms to arrest Barr just to stoke the rage of their hard left base would be handing Trump a great campaign weapon.”
    As they say, “the ads write themselves.”
    However, I suspect the MSM would show pictures of the arrest and fail to elucidate why it was an asinine thing to do.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/05/in-your-face-nadler-bill-barr-laughs-at-dems-for-holding-him-in-contempt-video/

    Julie near Chicago …”As far as I know, Steven Powell’s 1988 book Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies is still THE book on the IPS. With a Foreword is by David Horowitz.”

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/05/just-a-glitch-twitter-accidentally-suspends-conservative-david-horowitzs-account-for-second-time-in-one-week/

    (I hope I got the correct Horowitz this time!)

14. “Also, it’s of interest that Raskin is a former constitutional law professor. Back in those ancient times when I was in law school, con law professors were usually distinguished by their devotion to and respect for the constitution. Now the designation is often more of the Orwellian variety…” – Neo

    When AesopSpouse took ConLaw in the 80s — at a very conservative school, no less — they read all the major decisions and discussed all the precedents, but they NEVER ACTUALLY READ THE CONSTITUTION.

15. Hah.
    Now I’ve read Neo’s link, and Steven Hayward already noted the same thing I did: “Joe Knippenberg reminds me that my AEI colleague Walter Berns always said that the problem with law professors is that they taught constitutional law, not the Constitution. Hence most constitutional law professors treat the Constitution as a plaything from which to extract whatever outcome they want.”

    More golden oldies:
    https://www.thenewneo.com/2013/01/01/louis-michael-seidman-the-con-law-professor-v-the-constitution/

    Occam’s Beard on January 1, 2013 at 3:40 pm at 3:40 pm said:
    I’m beginning to suspect that Constitutional law instructors are the legal profession’s answer to education majors.

    chuck on January 1, 2013 at 6:42 pm at 6:42 pm said:
    If medical ethicists see their job as justifying killing people, and I think they do, then I suppose it makes sense for con law professors to see their job as justifying discarding the constitution. All of which leads to the conclusion that academics should be ignored, they don’t have anyone’s interest in mind other than their own. It’s an old story, neither progressive nor original, but very human.

    Promethea on January 1, 2013 at 7:42 pm at 7:42 pm said:
    Seidman would probably have been happier in Czarist Russia. They had a legal system that resembles the one he is advocating.

    holmes on January 2, 2013 at 11:24 am at 11:24 am said:
    It’s all illegitimate because slavery! That’s basically the crux of the argument, and it’s not much of one. It’s why the Tea Party and Republicans have to be racists. “You’re wrong because racism!”

    I wonder if they find the constitutional fixes, like the 14th amendment, and then the statutory enforcement through the Civil Rights Act, also illegitimate because of the archaic methods by which they were passed.
    sarc, right?

    Paul in Boston on January 2, 2013 at 12:41 pm at 12:41 pm said:
    I still remember Archibald Cox’s question when he was fired by Nixon as the first Watergate special prosecuter, “Are we going to have a government of laws or a government of men?” The Democratic Party and the left in general appears to be voting for a government of men these days.
    Only if the govenment of men/womyn/whatevers is themselves.

    G on January 3, 2013 at 12:05 am at 12:05 am said:
    My conlaw professor had a story about a student complaining about a closed book exam. The student asked if they could at least bring in the constitution, to which he responded “You clearly haven’t been listening.” His lectures were a brilliant dissection of how the constitution, other laws, facts, and basic logic are ignored in most SCt decisions.

    is it 2016 yet on January 4, 2013 at 7:30 pm at 7:30 pm said:
    I like this nom; kind of prescient so early
    I have to wonder if Seidman realizes that the very document that he is putting down, protects him from being arrested by the government for these very comments. Obviously without it, what he is saying here would most likely be construed by the type of government he seeks as treason.

    Out of sequence, but Shakespeare should always have the final word:
    parker on January 1, 2013 at 10:36 pm at 10:36 pm said:
    I agree that it is a good thing to see the kabuki mask removed, but what percentage of our fellow citizens will realize the ramifications of this noxious professor’s ultimate goal? The movie Man for All Seasons has remained clear in my memory over the years. “This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, man’s laws, not God’s. And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”

    Where indeed will there be solid ground if the leftists succeed in the goal to usurp the Constitution!

    “And Caesar’s spirit, raging for revenge,
    With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
    Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
    Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
    That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
    With carrion men, groaning for burial.”

    I hope we don’t have to go down that road.
    * * *
    FWIW, some interesting information here:
    https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/cry-havoc-and-let-slip-the-dogs-of-war.html

    The military order Havoc! was a signal given to the English military forces in the Middle Ages to direct the soldiery (in Shakespeare’s parlance ‘the dogs of war’) to pillage and chaos.

    The ‘let slip’ is an allusion to the slip collars that were used to restrain dogs and were easily ‘let slip’ to allow the dogs to run and hunt.
    ….[origin and previous uses]
    The term is the predecessor of ‘play havoc’ (with). This is now more common than ‘cry havoc’ and has lost the force of the earlier phrase – just meaning ’cause disorder and confusion’.

    Even Marc Anthony has been wussified.

16. From the VDH post Neo quoted in 2013 – value on every page:

    https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/very-scary-times/2/
    “Note Seidman’s use of “evil,” which tips his hand that our great moralist is on an ethical crusade to change the lives of lesser folk, who had the misfortune of growing up in America — a place so much less prosperous, fair, and secure than, say, Russia, China, the Middle East, Africa, South America, Spain, Greece, Italy, or Japan and Germany (in the earlier 20th century history) . When I lived in Greece, traveled to Libya, and went into Mexico, I forgot to sigh, “My God, these utopias are possible for us too, if we just junked that evil Constitution.”…”

    https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/very-scary-times/3/
    “But if we wish to avoid the baleful influence of white guys, can Seidman point to indigenous Aztec texts for liberal guidance, or perhaps the contemporary constitution of liberated Zimbabwe, or the sagacity of the Chinese court system?…
    Note the fox-in-the-henhouse notion that a constitutional law professor essentially hates the Constitution he is supposed to teach, sort of like Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warning the Egyptians not to follow our own constitutional example, when South Africa has offered so much more to humanity than did Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, and others…”

    https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/very-scary-times/4/
    “The progressive mind, given that it is more enlightened and moral, alone can determine which parts of the “evil” Constitution should be summarily ignored (e.g., the Second Amendment) and which should not be…I am sure that history offers all sorts of examples where people without evil documents like our Constitution protected free speech and religious worship — out of “respect.” Ask Socrates, Jesus, six million Jews, 20 million Russians, or those with eyeglasses during the days of the Khmer Rouge. Apparently, what stops such carnage is not the rule of constitutional law, but good progressive minds who care for others and show respect. I’ll try that rhetoric on the next thief who for the fourth time will steal the copper wire conduit from my pump.”

17. http://volokh.com/2012/12/31/seidman-lets-give-up-on-parts-of-the-constitution/
    Seidman cites what he characterizes as a proud history of “constitutional disobedience” to suggest that ignoring the document would be all to the good, suggesting that the country would be better off if political disputes about everything from budgetary policy to military conflict were merely debated on the policy merits. Yet Seidman conspicuously ignores the various policy measures throughout our nation’s history that would have remained the law of the land were it not for the Constitution, including numerous restrictions on the freedom of speech and the detention policies struck down by the Court in Boumediene.

    Seidman suggests that liberal constitutional values such as the freedom of speech and religion, equal protection, and due process “are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution” and that “we should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.” But our political history shows quite clearly that the political process is more than willing to trample such principles, often with substantial popular support even with a constitutional obligation to respect. Yet the whole point of a constitution is to prevent such abuses and constrain popular majorities.

18. https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/12/a-liberal-comes-clean-we-hate-the-constitution.php
    At such times this impulse yields to the suspicion that many liberals don’t really like the Constitution at all, and would junk it if they could.

    Woodrow Wilson professed this openly. But the Founders built well, knowing that the Constitution—the documentary embodiment of the Rule of Law replacing the Rule of Man (or Rule of the King, as practical matters had it in the 1780s)—would work only if it became an object of reverence in place of a monarch among the people. As such, directly attacking the Constitution has always been a non-starter in American politics. Instead, liberals typically repair to the doctrine of the “living Constitution.”

    Thus it is helpful when a liberal’s impatience with constitutionalism yields to the impulse to rip the façade away and declare their contempt for the Constitution.
    …
    As I sometimes like to say, “Our Constitution may not be perfect, but it’s better than the government we’ve got.” Those “evil” and “archaic” provisions are why, despite 100 years of largely successful “Progressive” assault against our constitutional principles, the United States is still the freest nation in the world.

    Let’s hope the higher education bubble breaks first and hardest at our intellectually corrupt law schools.

19. The ellipses are generally quotes from Seidman’s post.

    http://coldfury.com/2012/12/31/the-truth-at-last-5/
    Just finally admit it and be honest for once, “liberals”: you have no regard whatsoever for the Constitution, and in truth harbor great antipathy to it, since it stands athwart your grandiose plans for power and control, yelling “Tyranny!” So to speak.
    Oh, look, one of them did
    …
    As someone who has taught Constitutional law for almost forty years, I would hope that the genius of the Founders in setting up a system based on timeless principles of freedom, self-determination, and limits to the depredations of all-powerful government would have been able to penetrate the fog of liberal-fascist disingenuousness and will to power by now, whether or not they themselves always lived up to those highest of ideals. Guess not.
    …
    I submit that our system IS broken, and badly so–and that it was broken by people who fully if by no means openly intended to do just that, so as to instigate a hue and cry for our reduction to absolute tyranny under a far too powerful central State. In a word, totalitarianism–which, despite any amount of soothing blandishments from liberal-fascists pooh-poohing the very idea, we are way too close to to be able to count ourselves as a truly free people under a government even remotely like the one set up by the Founders–who, whatever their skin pigmentation, property-holder status, or views on slavery, did amount to the next step forward in the pursuit of true enlightenment and progress.
    …
    And you should all be willing to have faith in your benevolent and wise government to protect those principles; we don’t need any messy old Constitution statutorily requiring such. Perish the thought. Hey, trust us; we know what’s best.
    …
    Look, ya dope: the Constitution IS our “social fabric.” In a nation of immigrants from every diverse background under the sun, founded not on geography or topography nor held together by traditional allegiance to some long-irrelevant hereditary monarchy, the Constitution and the ideals it codifies are the only real connection we have. The strength of that bond is now being severely strained precisely because Progressivists have sought to overthrow it, and have been alarmingly successful at it.

    Without our Constitutional bond, we are simply a loose aggregate of people who violently disagree on a lot of things; there’s no reason in the world why a traditional farming family in the rural South or Midwest that hews to the old values of self-reliance, religion, and independence should be interested in one word out of the mouth of some Northeastern neo-Marxist metrosexual college-boy dumbass with no experience in anything at all except spouting off and revealing his ignorance through his dipshit pontification. Indeed, they’ve all but stopped listening to them now; remove that last Constitutional bond, and you’ll see a much more active resistance to the forcible encroachment of values they not only don’t share but actively despise. Count on it, egghead; you can insist all you like that you know what’s best for those people, but they don’t believe you, and there’s no earthly reason why they should.

    And then all you’ll have left to instate your multiculti, politically-correct, Progressivist horseshit will be raw force. And after being properly radicalized, those hardy Midwesterners and Southerners will rediscover just how strong they really are, and how many devious ways there are to resist, thwart, and damage you. And you will lose in the end.

    All of which just demonstrates once again that liberal-fascists depend entirely on sophistry, circular argument, self-fulfilling prophecy, and outright deceit to realize their authoritarian dreams. But I don’t recall when I’ve ever seen so obvious and straightforward an example of it.

20. https://www.nysun.com/editorials/the-times-gives-up/88129/
    If this had been published on April Fool’s day, readers of the Times would have slapped their knees and guffawed. But what is one to make of the fact that the Times has issued this piece in apparent seriousness?
    …
    The internal logic, if that’s what it is, is just bizarre. Why does the fact that some of the House members were defeated for re-election make the House illegitimate? Wouldn’t that be the sign of the legitimacy of the process? If the House is illegitimate, why is he complaining about the grotesqueness of the Senate? If both are illegitimate, what does he want, George III?
    …
    There is no doubt that many of the Founders owned slaves and that a terrible compromise was forced at Philadelphia. It tarnished the founding for nearly a century. Nothing can ever remove the stain of it. The fact is, though, that slavery is no longer permitted by the Constitution, and in the end it was purged from the Constitution by means of an amendment process the same Constitution established. Professor Seidman would have us believe that the ratification of the 13th Amendment was done in an unconstitutional way. Does it then follow in his mind that slavery should be deemed legal?

    The hostility of the Times to the Constitution is not a recent development. When the 112th Congress opened its work by reading the Constitution from the floor, the Times issued an editorial calling it “a ghastly waste of time.” It wants the courts to use the Constitution to require the states to issues licenses for same-sex marriage, vouchsafe the power of the Congress to require Americans to purchase health insurance, to authorize the states and local administrations to ban the carrying of arms, but it also wants Americans to disobey the Constitution as they see fit.

    It will be illuminating to see how far the Times takes its latest lament, particularly because these days the Left generally seems to see the Constitution as a threat more to the liberal than the conservative cause. Here at the Sun we’ve tried for years to press the point that the Constitution is neither a Republican nor a Democratic document. Liberals have won some of their greatest battles by wielding the Constitution. So have conservatives. It’s not our place to advise the Times on how to run its newspaper. But we’d encourage the Times to cheer up. If it doesn’t like the Constitution it could lead an effort to amend it. Such would be a better course than giving up.

21. https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/160661/
    WELL, THERE’S AN ADMISSION IN HERE SOMEWHERE: Mike Seidman: Let’s Give Up On The Constitution. …
    I dunno. Does this mean we should ignore Roe? Or Miranda? And Baker v. Carr? And if the Constitution is this obsolete and “evil,” then maybe secession isn’t off the table after all? . . . .
    …
    ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Paul Berger writes: “The reason a politician or any public official shouldn’t just act in opposition to the Constitution whenever they feel like it? How about because they took an oath not to! If you don’t want to play by the long established rules – find a different game. But I’m just a regular guy in the real world and he’s a Georgetown professor writing in the NY Times, which I suppose speaks volumes about both of us.”

    It’s beyond even that. Their entire authority comes from the Constitution, and is the only reason we aren’t entitled simply to ignore them, or hang them from a tree for their insolence. Take away that source of authority because you don’t like the constraints it involves, and you’re a lot closer to the tree. Those who think themselves above the law are not in a position to hide behind it.

    MORE: On Facebook, Randy Barnett snarks: “I suppose this means the income tax could now be unconstitutional if we can just get 5 votes.”

    MORE STILL: Reader Bill Bacon writes: “If, after all, the Constitution isn’t to be followed then doesn’t that mean we default to the Articles of Confederation? Don’t know about you, but I personally like the idea of having to get unanimous consent of the states to raise taxes….” Heh.

22. Meanwhile, back at the ol’ Barr None, the wranglers are riding a buckin’ bronc and headed for a fall:

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/mueller-report-volume-ii-available-top-congressional-democrats/

    Top Dems Now Have Access to All But Two Full, Seven Partial Lines of Mueller’s Obstruction Report
    By JACK CROWE
    May 8, 2019 7:03 PM

    Top Dems Now Have Access to All But Two Full, Seven Partial Lines of Mueller’s Obstruction Report
    By JACK CROWE
    May 8, 2019 7:03 PM

    As Congressional Democrats prepare to hold attorney general William Barr in contempt over his supposed lack of transparency, it’s worth remembering that he has made available to top Democrats the entirety of volume II of the Mueller report, save for two full and seven partial lines, which were redacted to protect grand jury secrecy in keeping with federal law.
    …
    As of this writing, not one of the six Democrats granted access to what amounts to 99.9 percent of volume II of the Mueller report, which details the president’s behavior as it relates to obstruction of justice, have taken the opportunity to examine it.
    …
    [pictures of the redacted pages]
    …
    In response to Barr’s offer, Congressional Democrats have said that the full report should be made available to all lawmakers and have argued that outcome will become less likely if top congressmen view the less-redacted version.
    …
    But Democratic leaders are … asking, and subpoenaed for, a fully unredacted report and all of the millions of pages of underlying documentary evidence, which relate to 22 ongoing criminal investigations.
    Rather than examining the entirety of volume II of the Mueller report, save for the aforementioned lines, Democrats have advanced a vote to hold attorney general William Barr in contempt on the grounds that the two-time attorney general has cynically orchestrated a wholesale coverup.

    As assistant attorney general William Boyd argued in a letter sent to House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler on Monday, Democrats’ refusal to examine the most transparent version of the report that Barr can legally make available, “naturally raises questions about the sincerity of the committee’s interest in and purported need for the redacted material.”

    Are the Democrats using the word cynically just a bit…cynically?
    Or are they really that ignorant?

23. Can’t we arrest Mueller for contemp instead?

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/robert-muellers-preposterous-rationale-for-tainting-the-president-with-obstruction-allegations/
    Mueller’s Preposterous Rationale for Tainting the President with ‘Obstruction’ Allegations
    By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
    May 8, 2019 10:51 AM

    …
    Volume II of his report does exactly what he claimed to be avoiding.
    In gross violation of Justice Department policy and constitutional norms, a prosecutor neither charges nor recommends charges against a suspect, but proceeds to smear him by publishing 200 pages of obstruction allegations. Asked to explain why he did it, the prosecutor says he was just trying to protect the suspect from being smeared.

    This is the upshot of the Mueller report’s Volume II. It might be thought campy if the suspect weren’t the president of the United States and the stakes weren’t so high.

    The smear-but-don’t-charge outcome is the result of two wrongs: (1) Mueller’s dizzying application of Justice Department guidance, written by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), holding that a president may not be indicted while he is in office; and (2) the media-Democrat complex’s demand that only laws they like — those that serve their anti-Trump political purposes — be enforced.

    On the matter of the OLC guidance, the Mueller report exhibits the same sleight-of-hand that I detailed in Monday’s column regarding its account of the George Papadopoulos saga —
    …

    On the matter of the OLC guidance, if you can follow his reasoning, the special counsel twists himself into the position that it would have been unfairly prejudicial to Trump to recommend charges when the president would not have been able to defend himself in a judicial proceeding — but, somehow, it was perfectly fair to Trump for Mueller to publish his evidence in a document manifestly written for exploitation by congressional Democrats and the media.

    For what it’s worth, I have always thought the OLC guidance is wrong. I do not believe the Framers intended to insulate a sitting president from indictment.
    …
    More to the point, it makes no sense that a president should be spared indictment under seal. This is how the Justice Department routinely deals with cases in which (a) a crime must be charged to prevent the statute of limitations from lapsing, but (b) the indictment should not be publicized for some good policy reason (usually, because the accused is at large and, if put on notice, could flee and destroy evidence). The OLC guidance’s objective is simply to delay prosecution in deference to the chief executive’s weighty responsibilities; it is not supposed to put the president above the law by giving him a statute-of-limitations defense that would not be available to the rest of us.

    Consequently, if there is a truly serious offense and enough evidence to support prosecution, a president should be indicted under seal (i.e., under court-supervised secrecy). Then the indictment could be unsealed once a president is out of office, and the criminal case could proceed in the normal course.

    Whether I am right or wrong about this, it is indisputable that we are talking only about timing. The OLC guidance does not say a president may never be indicted; just that he can’t be indicted while serving.

    Indefensible Decision Not to Decide
    That means the OLC guidance should be irrelevant to the prosecutor investigating the case.
    …
    If there is sufficient evidence, then it is the prosecutor’s job to recommend indictment. The question of whether the OLC guidance should then be invoked to delay indictment should then be up to the attorney general. The guidance should not burden the prosecutor’s analysis of whether there is an indictable case.

    Yet Mueller chose not to see it that way. His thinking on the matter, it appears, was muddled, evolving over a few weeks’ time as he groped for a way to rationalize his failure to make a decision about whether obstruction should be charged.

    In recent Senate testimony, Attorney General Bill Barr related that he and his staff met with the Mueller team a couple of weeks before the report was completed. Mueller surprised them with the news that he would not be resolving the obstruction question. When asked to explain, Mueller said his rationale for this non-decision was not yet fully developed — such temporizing, of course, is often the sign of handwringing as one tries to rationalize a determination one knows is wrong. Nevertheless, Barr reports that Mueller was emphatic that the OLC guidance was not what drove his decision to abdicate.

    Yet when we finally saw the Mueller report, we found that the obstruction volume begins with a discussion of the OLC guidance. It is, by turns, vaporous and preposterous. It is no wonder Barr has said he does not know exactly what Mueller was thinking.

    Here’s my take.

    RTWT of course.

24. Let’s indict the Democrats for Contempt of America.

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/mueller-report-progressive-anger-bill-barr/

    Progressives Face a Bleak Post-Mueller Landscape
    By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
    May 9, 2019 6:30 AM

    …
    Almost immediately, they redirected their fury toward Barr’s summation of the Mueller report. Yet few rational people contested Barr’s synopses about collusion and obstruction.

    Both the Mueller report and Barr’s summation can be found on the Internet. Anyone can read them to see whether Barr misrepresented Mueller’s conclusions.

    Again, there have been few criticisms that Barr was wrong on his interpretation that there was no collusion and not enough evidence to indict on obstruction of justice.
    …
    But now Democrats are calling for Barr to resign or be impeached for not regurgitating the unproven allegations against Trump. In other words, Barr acted too much like a federal prosecutor rather than a tabloid reporter trafficking in allegations that did not amount to criminal conduct.

    The besmirching of Barr’s conduct is surreal. He certainly has not done anything even remotely approximating the conduct of former President Obama’s two attorneys general.
    …
    The Mueller report ignored the likely illegal origins of the Christopher Steele dossier, the insertion of an FBI informant into the Trump campaign, the unlawful leaking of documents, and the conflicted testimonies of former high-level intelligence officials.

    All of those things were potential felonies. All in some way yielded information that Mueller drew on in his investigation. Yet Mueller never recommended a single indictment of any of the Obama-era officials who likely broke laws.

    Mueller was instead fixated on possible collusion with Russia. But it is a crime to knowingly hire a foreign national to work on a presidential campaign — in other words, to “collude.” That is exactly what the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee did when they paid British subject Christopher Steele to smear Trump.
    …
    Since late 2015, Trump, as the supposed Russian puppet or the Machiavellian obstructer of justice, was nightly cable-TV news fare. Now such fantasies are shattered. But progressives are not willing to let the Mueller investigation rest in peace and move on with their lives.

    Perhaps they feel in the political sense that there is nothing to move on to. And they are probably right.

25. Were the Democrats meeting in Denver recently??

    https://www.nationalreview.com/news/denver-becomes-first-u-s-city-to-decriminalize-magic-mushrooms/

26. Andrew McCarthy understands what the word “cynically” means.

    https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/andrew-mccarthy-congress-contempt-barr-democrats-watergate

    But let’s pretend that the House was not too embarrassed by the patent partisanship of its contempt vote; let’s pretend lawmakers went to court.

    The first thing a judge would point out is that what Congress is demanding that Barr do is illegal – namely, disclose grand jury material to Congress. … Then there is the other embarrassing point a judge would make. Rule 6(e) is Congress’ own law. Meaning Congress has the power to amend it. Any judge would, therefore, have to ask House Democrats, “While you were doing all this ranting and raving and holding the attorney general in contempt, have any of you fine lawmakers proposed a two-line amendment to Rule 6(e) that would authorize disclosure to Congress in special counsel investigations?”

    Of course, the answer is no. That is because Nadler & Co. do not really want the grand jury material. They want to try to make Barr’s refusal to disclose it look like Watergate.

    Congress is not going to court. And it is not going to seek help from the executive branch. It will keep the contempt gambit in its own playpen and hope people won’t notice that it’s a cynical game.

27. What would a Con Law Professor make of this old argument?
    We know what Pelosi would say about citing the Constitution to challenge a contempt citation: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/05/democrats-cite-barr-for-contempt.php

    Unlike today’s vote, the House’s vote to find Holder in contempt was bipartisan, with 17 Democrats joining the Republicans in the vote to hold Holder in criminal contempt. (21 Democrats voted to hold him in civil contempt.) Because of Holder’s stonewalling, Congress never did get to the bottom of the Fast and Furious gun-running fiasco.

    In that long-ago era of 2012, Democrats had a very different view of the merits of holding an Attorney General in contempt. Nancy Pelosi termed the contempt motion “ridiculous,” and said “It’s not only to monopolize [Holder’s] time, it’s to undermine his name.” Adam Schiff: “We ought to be thinking about what this does to the future relationship between the two branches of government and how the subpoena power is used and how it is abused. But, unfortunately, here I think it has become now a completely political exercise.” Elijah Cummings: “You accused him of a cover-up for protecting documents that he was prohibited by law from producing. You claimed that he — and I quote — ‘obstructed’ — end of quote — the committee’s work by complying with federal statutes passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president of the United States.”

    Are they serious?

28. I hope they DO arrest Barr — because it’s so ridiculous. But the next time the Dems do some illegal stuff like Holder’s Fast and Furious, and the Reps are in the majority, arresting DOJ folks who are in contempt will be on the table.

    Like how it worked out with the “nuclear option” of ending the filibuster power of the Senate: short term OK for the Dems, long term no.

    With colleges being increasingly turned into anti-Trump, anti-Rep, anti-Christian indoctrination camps, the college grads / future leaders of America have a world view that is at risk. Reps need to stop that stuff, but they’re not prioritizing it as much as the Dems did.

29. I’d love to see the Sargeant-at-arms of the House try to arrest the Attorney General. I think the U.S. Marshals might have something to say about that.
    The Sargeant-at-arms might want to remember that Wyatt Earp was a U.S. Marshal.

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