William Barr Breaks with Trump's Election Lies

In general I have little positive to say about U.S. Attorney General William Barr who has done severe damage to the Department of Justice and the rule of law.  Indeed, Barr can't leave that office soon enough in my view.  That said, now even Barr can no longer pretend the 2020 presidential election was stolen from the narcissistic liar currently occupying the White Hose.  As Barr noted yesterday, there is simply no evidence of any type of fraud or irregularities that support Trump's - and Republicans still debasing and prostituting themselves to him - claims that Joe Biden did not win the election fairly and by a huge margin in terms of the popular vote.  Would that the rest of the  Republican elected officials, especially those in Congress, would have the spine and balls to callout Trump's lies.  A piece at CNN looks at Barr's rejection of Trumps lies/fantasy which not surprisingly has drawn attacks from Trump and the pathetic political whores like Rudy Giuliani.  Here are highlights: 

Attorney General William Barr just dealt the most credible blow to Donald Trump's lies about a stolen election, precisely because he previously often came across more as the President's personal lawyer than a neutral arbiter of justice.

Trump has suffered repeated and embarrassing defeats in court. Republican governors and secretaries of state have certified results that show he lost on November 3. And he has so far failed to stage an Electoral College coup. 

But Barr's admission Tuesday that his Justice Department has looked for significant voter fraud but has found none that would change the result is sure to be treated as a betrayal by a President who demands sworn fealty from subordinates. 

Barr's comments to the Associated Press on the election -- which stated what every objective observer knows to be true -- were such a big deal because they reflect the extent to which Trump and his aides have shattered Washington's democratic guardrails.

By contradicting Trump's fever dream over vote fraud, Barr, in the end, balked at being the President's modern version of his firebrand New York attorney Roy Cohn. 

His decision represented a final failure of Trump's often successful attempt to weaponize the Justice Department as a personal and potent political weapon. Try as he might, Trump has never found a fixer equal to his former New York retainer Cohn, the notorious mafia lawyer and McCarthy-era aide for whom loyalty to his clients meant a willingness to break any rule. 

Barr's political heresy came on a day when it also became clear that the President's exit from the White House will be accompanied by the same clouds of scandal, constitutional chicanery and politicized legal gambits that shaped the most disruptive presidency of modern times. 

The risks inherent in Trump's continued denial of reality and claims that the election was corrupt -- which are eagerly embraced by his followers -- are becoming increasingly clear in the strain imposed on GOP election officials. 

Gabriel Sterling, the voting systems implementation manager at the Georgia secretary of state's office, issued an emotional appeal on Tuesday for the President to denounce threats faced by election officials. 

"It's all gone too far," said Sterling, a Republican.  "Someone's going to get hurt, someone's going to get shot, someone's going to get killed, and it's not right."

But at a White House Christmas Party on Tuesday night, that featured little social distancing on a day more than 2,400 Americans died of Covid-19, Trump again claimed falsely that he had won the election and mused about "another four years" in office, either now, or after the 2024 election.

Sadly, America will not be fully free of the cancer that Trump represents as long as Trump is breathing.