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Bill Barr opines

The New Neo Posted on by

Bill Barr gave a long interview to Jan Crawford, and you can find a transcript here and the recording here.

I haven’t read the entire thing nor have I listened to it, but Ace has taken the time and trouble to do so, and he’s excerpted some of the most interesting parts.

Even before this, I’ve liked just about everything I’d seen and heard from Barr so far. He’s exhibited a rare combination of traits: clarity and simplicity of expression, a straight-shooter who goes to the heart of the matter without being in the least offensive or careless. He’s precise without getting bogged down in arcane legalese. You can see all of this demonstrated in the interview, as well, and if you want the shorter version (it’s not short, though) go to Ace’s post.

My favorite quote is this one, although there are so many favorites it’s difficult to choose just one:

AN CRAWFORD: But when you came into this job, you were kind of, it’s like the US Attorney in Connecticut, I mean, you had a good reputation on the right and on the left. You were a man with a good reputation. You are not someone who is, you know, accused of protecting the president, enabling the president, lying to Congress. Did you expect that coming in? And what is your response to it? How do you? What’s your response to that?

WILLIAM BARR: Well in a way I did expect it.

JAN CRAWFORD: You did?

WILLIAM BARR: Yeah, because I realize we live in a crazy hyper-partisan period of time and I knew that it would only be a matter of time if I was behaving responsibly and calling them as I see them, that I would be attacked because nowadays people don’t care about the merits and the substance. They only care about who it helps, who benefits, whether my side benefits or the other side benefits, everything is gauged by politics. And as I say, that’s antithetical to the way the department runs and any attorney general in this period is going to end up losing a lot of political capital and I realize that and that is one of the reasons that I ultimately was persuaded that I should take it on because I think at my stage in life it really doesn’t make any difference.

Much more at the links.

Comments

Bill Barr opines — 40 Comments

  1. My skepticism remains high but this guy gives me hope that something may be done about this mess.

  2. AG Barr appears to desire to allow his chosen targets to continue their peaceful sleep all the while he rolls his artillery silently into place in the dead of night, ready to blast them to bits at a time of ripeness. Just as he anticipated criticism prior to taking the job, so he knows what awaits when he unrolls the litany of crimes and bad acts the Obama admin. has perpetrated on the nation. Preparation, crossing every t, dotting every i, isn’t optional to success. Step by simply competent professional step — everything the Obama works utterly lacked — that’s Barr’s way forward.

  4. somehow I suspect Herr Müllers nervous Elmer Fuddian reading was of a speech Eichmann I mean Veissmannn wrote für him

  5. We could use more interviewers like Jan Crawford. She was a favorite guest of mine years ago when I tuned in to C-Span. She usually appeared on the program around the time the Supreme Court was in session, and was always articulate, informed, and above all impartial.

  6. I’m quite impressed with Barr. His frank explanation that he’s at the end of his career so he can take these chances sounds sincere and makes sense. It gives me hope he’s not a wolf masquerading as a sheep dog. We’ve had too many of those.

  7. I immediately liked Barr. His calm demeanor coupled with his straightforward opinions appeal to me. No wiggle, wiggle, gobble gobble there. I think it was an inspired choice on Trump’s part, a good fit, and just the man we need.

  8. Me too Griffin. I will withhold judgement until I see the results. Barr may do something but there are several individuals such as McCabe that could and should be indicted along with Storzk (sorry for the spelling but I think you know whom I mean) and Page.

  9. The things that make Barr so effective is his demeanor combined with his long career. He’s so calm and professional all the while getting in his points and that his very hard to demonize, though lord know they are trying. He also isn’t easily caricatured like Sessions who was in retrospect a horrible choice (which I supported) to be AG in an administration that was going to be under constant attack.

  10. Compare Barr’s composure and demeanor to that of Mueller the other day. Barr knows the truth is on his side.

    And he’s funny. His comment last week when serendipitously encountering Ms Pelosi, “Did you bring the handcuffs?” Priceless!

  12. I am so, so impressed by Barr. Many times in our history, a man or woman has stepped up and made a huge difference in the life of our Republic. I see Trump and Barr as those type of men. Don’t forget that Trump sacked Sessions and appointed Barr.

  13. More and more impressed by Barr. Not getting my hopes too high. He will follow the law and be fair. He’ll have to have irrefutable evidence and a belief he can convict before he will indict. Many of the perps will plead that they could not ignore the possibility that Russia had influence with Trump. And the MSM/progs will back them to the hilt. Barr is fearless, but I don’t think he’s vindictive. Anyway, it warms my heart that the truth about the “silent coup” will finally be laid out for all to see.

  14. Barr is the person who actually has integrity, and staunchly believes in the rule of law. For once, a power player I feel I can trust to do the right thing. I hope he has an exemplary security detail.

  15. I’m sure Mr Barr’s a straight shooter.
    But that’s a mighty big freaking swamp…and those crocs know where to hide & how to bite. He better be packing a cannon…or it’s all kabuki.

  16. I’m sure Mr Barr’s a straight shooter.

    No clue who to trust anymore. For the time being, I’m hoping Barr is willing and able to weed out enough bad actors that our federal police forces and federal courts might be something other than lawfare outfits of The Regime.

    I think we would benefit from an administrative re-organization and recasting the modes of recruitment and promotion in federal law enforcement and intelligence collection. I think we’d also benefit from scarifying the federal criminal code and modifying its sentencing schedule. (See Jared Fogle & c. for an example of witlessness on both counts). Of course, Congress will do nothing. The Democratic members in particular expect that the bad actors will attack only Republicans, so it’s all good.

    And our real problem is the culture of the bar and of the professional class generally.

  17. The fact that Huber didn’t do a damn thing makes me think that Huber’s appointment by Sessions was intended as a phony signal that Sessions was “doing something”—it was a stalling tactic.

    Why did Huber agree to be involved in this little bit of Kabuki?

    I think it was either DiGenova or Giuliani who, last night, pointed out that a criminal probe takes precedence over an IG investigation, not the other way around; a phony precedence that Huber was reportedly using as an excuse not to do any investigating at all–according to complaints his losing of what appears to have been important evidence sent to him–lost three times no less–and his not interviewing any key witnesses at all.

    If I were Barr, at the least I’d call Huber in and tell him that his career at the DOJ was over, but I would also start to consider the possibility that Huber was also one of the rear guards for the coup attempt.

    As for Sessions, it seems pretty clear to me that, from the day of his appointment as AG–if not even earlier–some emissary of the Left sidled up to Sessions and said, “look what we have on you”–“compromat” indeed–and from that moment on Session’s chess piece was removed from the board.

  18. Why did Huber agree to be involved in this little bit of Kabuki?

    Because the kabuki was his, not Sessions’. Sessions had been a U.S. Attorney in the past, but I’m wagering he had about 50 people working under him in that capacity, all in the same building and with only one person intermediating between him and any other lawyer in the office. Thousands of employees, scores of locations all over the country, and crafty bureaucratic operators a great many of ’em. Suggest all outside of Sessions’ skill set and Huber BS’d him up the wazoo.

  19. As for Sessions, it seems pretty clear to me that, from the day of his appointment as AG–if not even earlier–some emissary of the Left sidled up to Sessions and said, “look what we have on you”–“compromat” indeed–and from that moment on Session’s chess piece was removed from the board.

    A more plausible explanation is that he was not suitable for the position. (1) He’d never held a position with that much responsibility before, and (2) in this particular circumstance, his direct reports and their direct reports were completely untrustworthy. The administration had trouble filling position because of Congress insistence that an insanely large population of appointees be subject to confirmation hearings.

  20. Richard Epstein argues that the rope that hung Mr. Sessions lay in the fact that, having worked on the Trump campaign, he did have to recuse himself from the investigation (conflict of interest). In other words, having worked on the campaign, he never should have accepted the office of A.G. in the first place. Richard, I think, considers this the huge black mark against Mr. Sessions.

    I am hardly an authority on anybody’s career record, but by all accounts Mr. Sessions had always been a straight shooter — and, not coincidentally to the ethics question, a law-and-order type. Recall his actual record on respecting rights of Negro persons, who he thought ought to be treated just like anybody else before the law.

    O/T, but Jeff Sessions was said to be a staunch free-trader wrt international trade: For instance, no tariffs. But as he watched, for a period of, I take it, at least a few years before the campaign, he came to believe that across-the-board free trade wasn’t the best policy all ways round. It occurs to me that for that very reason, plus his track record and general beliefs in terms of legal principals, Mr. Trump wanted him on the campaign and in the A.G.’s office.

    Possibly the conflict of interest never occurred to either the President or Mr. Sessions? Only the Great Frog knows for sure, although in my own hindsight, I’ve have thought that somebody among Mr. Trump’s legal advisors, official or not — and including Mr. Sessions himself — might have brought this up before the nomination. Possibly at the time of Mr. Trump’s selection, nobody saw this whole Russian-collusion thing as going anywhere? Still, to appoint him would be chancy — if not Russiagate, then there are always opportunities to try to nail a President legally.

  21. Cleaning up the DOJ was always going to be a years long task after the effort spent by the Obama administration to make it more political through selective hiring over eight years. Even if Trump is reelected it may not be done by the time he leaves.

  24. <blockquote.JAN CRAWFORD: You- I guess when you said that there were things done that were not the typical run of business, ad hoc, small group, it's not how these counterintelligence operations normally work. I think that maybe Comey and others might say well this was such an extraordinary thing we had to keep it so closely held. So we had to do it differently what's your response to that? Is that legit?
    WILLIAM BARR: Well it might be legit under certain circumstances but a lot of that has to do with how good the evidence was at that point. And you know Mueller has spent two and half years and the fact is there is no evidence of a conspiracy. So it was bogus, this whole idea that the Trump was in cahoots with the Russians is bogus.

    WILLIAM BARR: Well, I think Bob said that he was not going to engage in the analysis. He was, he was not going to make a determination one way or the other. And he also said that he could not say that the president was clearly did not violate the law, which of course is not the standard we use at the department. We have to determine whether there is clear violation of the law and so we applied the standards we would normally apply. We analyzed the law and the facts and a group of us spent a lot of time doing that and determined that both as a matter of law, many of the instances would not amount to obstruction.

    JAN CRAWFORD: As a matter of law?

    WILLIAM BARR: As a matter of law. In other words, we didn’t agree with the legal analysis- a lot of the legal analysis in the report. It did not reflect the views of the department. It was the views of a particular lawyer or lawyers and so we applied what we thought was the right law but then we didn’t rely on that. We also looked at all the facts, tried to determine whether the government could establish all the elements and as to each of those episodes we felt that the evidence was deficient.
    …
    BARR: … [L]et’s take the again the firing of Comey. One of the elements is that you have to show that the act objectively speaking will have the probable effect of obstructing a proceeding and we don’t believe that the firing of an agency head could be established as having the probable effect, objectively speaking, of sabotaging a proceeding. There was also we would have to prove corrupt intent, the report itself points out that one of the likely motivations here was the president’s frustration with Comey saying something publicly and saying a different thing privately and refusing to correct the record. So that would not have been a corrupt intent. So for each of these episodes we thought long and hard about it, we looked at the facts and we didn’t feel the government could establish obstruction in these cases.

    No collusion to begin with, and then no obstruction — as a matter of law and of facts.

    Finding clear evidence that a crime was NOT committed is a nice bonus in a Perry Mason novel, but it is not the standard of American jurisprudence, which is the accumulation of clear evidence that a crime WAS committed.

  25. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/5/31/18645173/mueller-report-barr-trump-obstruction

    It’s possible Mueller believes that’s a decision that should be made by Congress, not a Justice Department prosecutor. The House of Representatives is essentially the “prosecutor” in the impeachment process — they can vote to kick-start a trial in the Senate. He might have envisioned his job as limited to gathering evidence and presenting some analysis.

    But when Mueller’s report does reference impeachment, he seems concerned about interfering with that process. A “criminal accusation against a sitting President,” he writes, could “potentially preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct.” (A footnote there makes clear he means impeachment). So essentially, Mueller has ceded the role of deciding whether the president committed a crime to Congress.

    There may also have been features of the case itself that made Mueller prefer restraint. He didn’t establish an underlying conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to interfere with the election. And despite all his troubling obstruction evidence, he lacked an indisputable smoking gun example, like Trump outright telling witnesses to lie to investigators or destroying evidence.

  27. Other opionators opine:
    https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/robert-mueller-investigation-report-no-collusion/

    Did Mueller Sit on His No-Collusion Conclusion?
    By DEROY MURDOCK
    May 31, 2019 6:30 AM

    Under-covered passages of Mueller’s report strongly suggest that he engaged in malpractice rather than good medicine.

    “As soon as news broke that Trump had been elected President, Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen began trying to make inroads into the new Administration,” the report states on page 144. “They appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect.”

    “At approximately 3 a.m. on election night, Trump Campaign press secretary Hope Hicks received a telephone call,” Mueller’s report continues. Through this person’s thick foreign accent, Hicks deciphered the words “Putin call.” The next morning, Nov. 9, 2016, Hicks received the email she requested from the caller.

    Russian Embassy official Sergey Kuznetsov contacted Hicks via Gmail. Subject line: “Message from Putin.” In an English/Russian attachment, according to Mueller, “Putin offered his congratulations to Trump for his electoral victory, stating he ‘look[ed] forward to working with [Trump] on leading Russian-American relations out of crisis.’”

    Hicks and Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, according to his congressional testimony, then spent time authenticating this email by identifying, locating, and contacting Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. After Moscow’s man in Washington validated the email, Mueller’s report states, “Hicks conveyed Putin’s letter to transition officials. Five days later, on November 14, 2016, Trump and Putin spoke by phone in the presence of Transition Team members. …”

    These delays frustrated Putin. Mueller cites Petr Aven, chief of Alfa-Bank, Russia’s largest commercial lender: Mueller states that Aven had a “one-on-one meeting with Putin” in the fourth quarter of 2018. “Aven also testified that Putin spoke of the difficulty faced by the Russian government in getting in touch with the incoming Trump Administration,” Mueller writes. “According to Aven, Putin indicated that he did not know with whom formally to speak and generally did not know the people around the President-Elect.”

    If Trump and Putin had been in cahoots, they would have speed-dialed each other and toasted Trump’s triumph on Election Night. Instead, Putin’s greeting crawled toward the president-elect for five days.

    What did Mueller know? “Trump-Russia collusion” was a Red Square-sized lie.

    When did he know it? Kushner testified on July 24, 2017. Hicks spoke to the FBI on Dec. 8, 2017. Aven sang on Aug. 2, 2018.

    So, Mueller knew this at least 95 days before the November 6 midterm elections. Mueller could have removed the “Trump is a KGB agent” albatross that hobbled the president and his party. But he didn’t. In essence, Mueller hid this exculpatory evidence from the 328 million jurors in America’s court of public opinion before they rendered their verdict on Trump and the GOP last November.

  28. John Dowd opines:
    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/06/mueller-dings-dowd.php
    This is about Dowd’s phone call to Flynn’s attorneys, the transcript of which has a phrase that somehow didn’t make it into Mr. Mueller’s Opus.

    Once again #MuellerReport edited messages to make them appear more damaging, full transcript of this phone call reveals Dowd’s message was pretty typical for a lawyer and he clearly states he’s not interested in any confidential info. What else did they manipulate
    ..
    We got a statement from former Trump lawyer John Dowd, responding to the Special Counsel’s deceptive edits of his voicemail to Flynn’s lawyer

    “It is unfair and despicable. It was a friendly privileged call between counsel – with NO conflict. I think Flynn got screwed”

    Mueller’s statement in his presser that people who never have a trial never get to refute damaging evidence was certainly correct – and he intended that to be the effect of his report.

  29. Andrew McCarthy opines: his post discusses the options that Mueller may have considered before deciding to not decide; they are quite instructive.

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/robert-mueller-investigation-was-always-impeachment-probe/

    Playing Out the Alternative Scenarios
    This drastic divergence on what can constitute an obstruction offense had practical consequences here.

    For most of his investigation, Mueller was “supervised” by acting AG Rod Rosenstein, who did not comply with special-counsel regulations in appointing him, and who promised Democrats that he would be effectively independent. As long as the studiously passive Rosenstein was at the helm, the staff-driven Mueller was free to investigate under his loose, envelope-pushing obstruction theory. Once Barr became AG, however, it was clear that Mueller’s theory was not going to fly.

    So, let’s play out the alternative scenario.

    Let’s say that, having convinced himself he had a strong obstruction case, Mueller decided to recommend that the president be charged. That would have forced a confrontation over the issue that has been sidestepped: What are the correct standards for evaluating an obstruction allegation against a president? There would have been a brawl at Main Justice. The report would have been held up while the matter was debated.

    More to the point, Mueller and such top staffers as Andrew Weissmann and Michael Dreeben, who have operated at the top echelon of the Justice Department, would have known that the attorney general would win such a battle ten times out of ten. That goes double for an AG such as Barr, a highly regarded legal thinker who, besides now being AG twice, ran the OLC in the Bush 41 administration. He was not going to be intimidated or bulldozed by Mueller’s staff.

    Remember: Mueller’s staff is looking at this as if they were congressional impeachment counsel. Their objective is to get their evidence to Congress bearing something close to the stamp of an indictable felonies.

    Consequently, direct confrontation with the AG was the last thing they wanted. It would have guaranteed failure. The Mueller report’s discussion of obstruction standards would not have gotten out the Main Justice door as an authoritative statement of the law. There would have been a revised articulation of obstruction law as it applies to the president. There would have been vigorous debate over the eleven instances of obstruction Mueller wanted to allege. The report would have been scrutinized carefully by Justice Department lawyers, especially where it plays fast and loose with the facts (see, e.g., my Papadopouolos column) [and add the Flynn/Dowd conversation now – AF]. It might never have been released. If it had been released, it would have been discredited or dramatically revised.

    That would not have helped the impeachment cause.

    So . . . Plan B: What if we decline to make any recommendation on obstruction?

    Mueller’s staff calculated: If we don’t press the point of indicting the president, the AG and the Justice Department have no reason to dispute our findings, or even take on our analysis of obstruction law. They’ll be so relieved to avoid a fight over obstruction charges, they’ll be willing to let all that slide. And with Congress demanding the report, and the AG having promised maximum transparency in his confirmation hearings, we will achieve our objective: Congress will get our obstruction evidence, with an accompanying legal analysis that tends strongly in favor of finding felony obstruction. That will be the basis for any impeachment proceedings.

    This, then, became the plan: Mueller would decide not to decide.

    There was just one problem: Mueller would need a reason for not deciding. Barr was sure to ask. Mueller could not truthfully respond, “Well, we see ourselves as congressional impeachment counsel.” Barr has been quite clear (and quite right) that federal prosecutors exist to enforce the law, not to do Congress’s work — Congress has its own bloated staff for that.

    Mueller’s staff would need to come up with something that would pass the laugh test. After all, there was no collusion case, so rendering a prosecutorial judgment on the obstruction question was the only thing for which a special counsel had arguably been needed. Now, Mueller was about to tell the AG he would be abdicating on that. He’d be asked to explain himself, and if he didn’t have a compelling answer, he’d need to stall.

    It happened on March 5, during Barr’s first meeting with Mueller after being confirmed. Taken aback by Mueller’s announcement that he would not be deciding the obstruction question, Barr pressed him repeatedly: “Is it because of the OLC guidance?” Mueller insisted that it was not. When asked what, then, was the reason, Mueller meandered about how they were still formulating their rationale.

    Get it? Result-oriented: Decision first, then we’ll cobble together the reasoning.

    Why would Mueller do this? Again, play out the alternative scenario.

    If the special counsel had told Barr that the OLC guidance was his rationale for not deciding, Barr would likely have told him, “Don’t worry about the OLC guidance, that’s not your job. The OLC guidance only says we can’t return an indictment now. We still need to know whether there is a prosecutable case. Just make a recommendation on that, one way or the other.”

    If that had happened, Mueller would have been cornered. If he recommended in favor of indictment, he would have ended up in the confrontation with Barr over obstruction law that he was trying to avoid. If he recommended against an indictment, he would have undermined the impeachment effort.

    So he punted. And it worked.

    Mueller told Barr he was still formulating his rationale for not deciding the issue. Maybe the staff really was still trying to come up with a coherent explanation; or maybe in the back (or front) of their minds, they figured “we’re still formulating” was vague enough that they could ultimately rely on the OLC guidance, even if Mueller had said it was not his rationale.

    Whatever the calculation was, two and a half weeks later, when Mueller delivered his final report to Barr on March 22, Mueller and his staff expressly invoked the OLC guidance.

    Does that mean Mueller was being dishonest on March 5? Does it mean his thinking truly was still evolving?

    What difference does it make?

    What matters is that Mueller’s shrewd staffers accomplished exactly what they hoped to accomplish: Make sure the report was disclosed to Congress intact, with 200 pages of obstruction evidence, a legal analysis that tends toward a finding of obstruction, and an express assertion by the special counsel that if he had found Trump did not commit a crime, he would have said so.

  30. Barry – in re your JohnWHuber twitter link – mostly the usual left-and-right chit-chat, but these are some points I haven’t seen made elsewhere about Mueller leaving out 2 lines of a very short transcript, that just happened to lessen the negative view of Mr. Trump:

    Patrick@purplehead5
    “Nothing stopped Mueller from indicting Dowd for Obstruction, if he felt this snippet was criminal. Dowd was clearly talking to a lawyer and knew he was being recorded.”

    Shari K@ShariK4113
    “Does anyone still wonder why they don’t start impeachment hearings? It’s because things like this will come out. And if they don’t impeach then it just sits and guides the ignorant public opinion.”

    I also found this copy of the transcription with the parts Mueller included bolded, and the parts he left out highlighted.
    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D78CIjxWwAA5I0D.jpg

    For good measure, a couple of things that should have made it into PowerLine’s Pictures of the Week:

    Mueller vs Barr: presumption of innocence
    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D8AvxHcU0AEj4p-.jpg

    Mueller channels Ed Sullivan
    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D71pBc6VUAA9dUF.jpg

  31. I’m hopeful for Barr — but waiting for indictments.

    Disappointed in Huber, and Sessions. But Sessions’ recusal makes sense. Huber’s do-nothingism is part of the swamp problem.

    Horowitz had a report that documented “mistakes” but didn’t recommend criminal sanctions.

    Nunes sent to DOJ 7 referrals — I’m waiting for those to be turned into indictments.

    I think it would be better to get started rather than wait for all the t’s to be crossed, and i’s dotted — the bad guys need to know it’s serious.

  32. I notice in one interview the interviewer in essence said to AG Barr, “aren’t you afraid of all the criticism aimed at you,” and Barr replied that at his age and stage in life/his career he was not concerned, and that “everybody dies” (in the end).

    Thus, it looks like Barr has–with very clear eyes–taken up the challenge of doing his best to identify and to purge the malignancy that the Obama Administration has sewn and encouraged in our law enforcement, intelligence, and other government agencies.

    After all of the disappointing appointments that Trump has made–appointments, I would assume, that were recommended to him and urged by people surrounding him–who are supposed to have his and this country’s best interests at heart, but who, from the evidence of these appointments, seem to apparently have the Deep State’s interests closer to their hearts–Trump is very lucky that he has appointed someone as AG who has Barr’s fearless attitude.

    It looks like Barr is going to try to get the job done, come Hell or high water.

  33. “…shrewd…”

    It seems indeed to have been very cleverly done.

    But things cleverly done can also backfire.

    The ramifications may well be that Barr (and Rosenstein, if he has the nerve—it seems that quite a large part of the ball is in his court—and Horowitz, if he’ll step up) will have to start peeling back, and peeling back and peeling back the Mueller cover-up/attack/coup, dishonest layer after illegal layer after incriminating layer; starting from a place (ground zero?) where he probably would have preferred not to have had to begin.

    In other words, Is this “ground zero” Steele? Is it Hillary’s DNC? Is it Uranium One? Is it Fusion GPS? Perkins Coie? Is it Flynn? Papadopolous? Halper? Mifsud (regarding whom interesting “developments” have been emerging from Italy)? Strzok/Page? McCabe? The Ohrs?

    Obama? (Pace Maxine Water)

    While the flak, lies, slander, demonization and hysteria from the Democrats and the MSM will be scorching, non-stop and relentless.

    Obfuscate and attack. Obfuscate by attacking.

    And destroy at any price.

  34. Barry, you appear to be asking in part whether AG Barr will go into an investigation of SC Mueller and his team, among the other questions (all good ones, I think) you pose.

    As to Barr going after the SC & team, I can’t see any indication of that but a number of counter indications to it, both in Barr’s testimony to congress and in his interview with CBS. I won’t recite those pointing away from the SC, but leave it at the mere assertion, since Mueller’s are the secondary or tertiary misdeeds in this long national abuse of government powers.

    Turning then to the dual questions “where to begin?” and “where did the abuses begin?”, two things.

    The first, Barr has already indicated that he has been asking questions about the origin of the spying and says that the answers he has gotten aren’t consistent nor adequate, so I’d say he has already begun there.

    The second, my speculation merely. “Where did the abuse start?”

    In brief with Obama, naturally. But in particular, I think in the main Obama put the national security apparatus to work against his political enemies right along with his decision to turn US policy into a pro-Iranian interest parade with the JCPOA and its associated measures. There. Right there.

  35. Where is Manju to spin AG Barr’s words for us, and his evil twin to tell us none of this matters? Crickets.

    The wheels of justice grind slowly but grind fine, it is past time for them to roll. There is room for many beneath the stones.

  36. It seems to me that Mueller, for whatever reason, refused to deliver his report, take his ball and go home. Far from fading into the background, he decided that—since there was no way that Trump could be innocent (or allowed to be innocent)—he had to pour fuel on the impeachment conflagration.

    (This would appear to be akin to Hillary Clinton’s decision to refuse to accept the reality of Trump’s victory and instead declare—since there was no way she could have lost— that Trump’s victory was the result of criminal and traitorous machinations. In short, her decision to “let loose the dogs of war”.)

    Mueller has thus—officially—made himself an adversary of the administration (not that this is anything new for anyone who has been following events—but it is now official, incontrovertible, indisputable); and in doing so, he has decided to take legally questionable steps.

    He in one fell swoop revealed his investigation to be the a hyper-politicized, hyper-partisan hatchet job that many people already knew it was, but which more cautious, legally-based, and ideologically-constrained commentators (i.e,. desperately having to believe that Mueller was doing his best to uphold the law and the principles of the law) such as McCarthy and Dershowitz had to continue to believe was non-partisan.

    In short, made himself—and his no-longer “apolitical” Stalinist circus—a target.

    Barr may have originally wished to leave Mueller alone; but he may believe now that he has no choice but to pinpoint, prove and publicize the latter’s utter lack of integrity—and lawlessness—following Mueller’s debased betrayal of the mandate he was given, the DOJ, American jurisprudence and his own admission to Barr himself.

    Not that it is likely that he will change many minds….

    But the question is, can he leave Mueller’s arson attack go unchallenged.

  37. “…Crickets…”

    Actually, if you’re truly interested in wading through the muck and stink of mind-boggling perversity dressed up to look like “analysis”, take a look at Aesop’s link a bit further up (search for “movie”).

  38. Actually I’ve been following this daily via Dan Bongino’s podcast, for about 18 months now IIRC. He provides sources for almost all of his points made on the show, A. McCarthy, M. Hemmingway, J. Solomon, Byron York, are just a few examples, all of them are credited.

    Hurrah! Edit is back. Thanks Neo!

    Aesop and you all also do good work, much better than I can.

  39. Whether Barr can let Mueller’s misdeeds go isn’t a question I’m asking Barry, since I think his refusal to name those misdeeds when he has had every opportunity and hasn’t hinted at them, even, tells me he’s already decided.

    More serious still, I think, if (as I have surmised) the entire sorry episode of corruption at the highest levels of our government begins with the former President, then Barr and his associates will have their hands quite full with a heavy case to prove, no? Why would he further burden himself and his DoJ with a problem like Obama on his plate, and Trump breathing down his neck? No, it’s going to be hard enough to bring down the former director of the FBI, the DNI and CIA, along with White House staffers, D of State people, DoJ people, possible collaborators in congress (Christ, where does the list end?), and on and on.

    Nah, Mueller is small potatoes in this picture. He’ll have humiliation enough when all is said and done, besides.

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