William Barr Needs to Be Removed from Office

The Attorney General of the United States ("AG") is supposed to be the nation's top lawyer and is supposed to oversee the Department of Justice and by extension the FBI -  all for the goal of furthering the protection and interests of the American public. Unfortunately, the current AG, William Barr ( a bloated toad, in my view), has perverted his office and is now serving as the attorney of Donald Trump and conducting investigation that further Trump's interest even as he denigrates and attacks the FBI and spins untruths. It's the type of behavior one expects in authoritarian regimes such as Putin's Russia, not the behavior of an AG seeking to uphold his or her oath of office.  Columns in both the Washington Post and the New York Times make the case for Barr's removal and detail his departure from the duties he should be performing.  The Post column says this: 

[Trump’s] his most senior aides have done him no favors by acting as accelerators rather than brakes on his unconscionable conduct.

Three senior officials, in particular, could have tried to dissuade [Trump] the president from misusing his office for personal gain, but there is no evidence that they ever attempted to do so. History will record their names along with Trump’s in the annals of ignominy. [Trump's] The president’s principal accomplices in his brazen assault on the rule of law are Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William P. Barr.

The attorney general has already misled the country about the findings of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation by falsely claiming that the president had been absolved of collusion and obstruction of justice. Barr then refused to investigate complaints that a crime had been committed during Trump’s call with Zelensky. Now, he is flying around the world to pressure allies to cooperate with his politically motivated probe designed to show that the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia was actually a “witch hunt” by the so-called deep state — just as Trump claims. Barr’s highly improper requests have stirred a backlash in Italy, Australia and Britain — close allies that have no desire to be thrust into U.S. domestic politics.

The Times column examines the ways in which Barr is damaging the FBI and law enforcement in general and causing damage that will out last his tenure.  He needs to be removed from office.  Here are column highlights: 

Donald Trump famously said that he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not “lose any voters.” I don’t know about that. But I’m confident that he wouldn’t lose Bill Barr.

Execution privilege, Barr would probably call it. He’d release a statement or hold a news conference to say that Trump had a spastic trigger finger or was triggered by Adam Schiff or was set up by those dastardly Ukrainians, who are never up to any good. Such is the magnitude of Barr’s servility, the doggedness of his deference. He’s [Trump's] the president’s moral launderer. Trump does evil, and Barr washes him clean.

As attorney general, he’s supposed to be the nation’s lawyer. But he has bought into the autocratic delusion that Trump equals America, that national interest and presidential prerogative are inextricably intertwined. So he’s Trump’s advocate, come hell or high crimes, as surely as Pat Cipollone or Rudy Giuliani is.

On Monday, showing fresh contempt for the people who work under him in the Justice Department, Barr renounced a determination by the department’s inspector general that the F.B.I.’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia was legitimate and that anti-Trump bias was not its animating force. He did this instantly. And then, on Tuesday, did it again, with even less subtlety and more sanctimony. . . . He was dismissing the whole effort as rotten. It was an eerie echo of his efforts last spring, when he sought to neuter Robert Mueller’s findings about the Trump campaign’s openness to Russian help and the president’s attempts to obstruct justice. But what of the Constitution? What of common decency? Barr isn’t concerning himself with those. To appreciate his perspective, you must travel back two months, to the University of Notre Dame, where he delivered a speech that garnered some headlines but not nearly enough of them. You should note his remarks’ obsession with morality and you should try not to laugh, the same way you stifle chuckles when you’re reminded that Mike Pompeo is a putatively worshipful Christian and you try to square that with how he abetted the persecution of Marie Yovanovitch, leaves his State Department charges twisting in the wind and genuflects before a false prophet. In Trump he trusts.

You should dwell on the part of Barr’s jeremiad where he says that “men are subject to powerful passions and appetites and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbors and the community.” Ruthless? Roughshod? That’s Trump in an alliterative nutshell, but Barr seemed to be perversely oblivious to that.

All these supposedly godly men — Barr, Pompeo, Mike Pence, Ben Carson, Rick Perry and more — cluster around such a demonstrably godless one. They rationalize that Trump’s indulgence of certain religious factions absolves him of his sins. Barr is the principal agent of that absolution. [I]f Barr could dig out his conscience from under all those layers of ego, he’d see that the rapacious individual in direst need of restraint is the one he’s letting roam free.

The Foul Legacy of Paul Ryan

Other than Donald Trump, one of the biggest liars and frauds in Washington, D.C., is soon to be former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a man who never deserved to be treated as a serious conservative voice.  His relentless efforts to slash funding for the less fortunate in order to shower massive tax cuts on the obscenely wealthy while feigning to be a devout Catholic demonstrate  Ryan's rank hypocrisy.  Worse yet, since January 20, 2017, Ryan has put the interest of the nation and the rule of law beneath rank partisanship and protecting an occupant of the White House who is likely guilty of obstruction of justice, if not actual treason.  Ryan should never have been given respect much less treated as someone honest.  With Ryan leaving at the end of his current term, a column in the Washington Post  by a former Republican looks at Ryan's foul legacy.  Here are column excerpts:

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s last year in office is proving disastrous, a fitting end to the speakership of a man once considered a principled conservative reformer. His refusal to fulfill his constitutional role as leader of the House but rather play the role of presidential poodle and Republican attack dog for his increasingly unhinged caucus has had dire consequences for the GOP House majority, the intelligence oversight process and the broader conservative movement.

Among his most egregious failures has been his refusal to rein in House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who, in concert with the White House, created a phony “unmasking” scandal and released a misleading memo casting aspersions on the FBI and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in connection with the warrant to conduct surveillance on suspected spy Carter Page. As Nunes’s crowd, together with the president, now threatens to reveal a secret FBI and CIA source, in an unprecedented breach of the House’s intelligence oversight responsibilities, the extent of Ryan’s reckless disregard for his oath becomes clear.

There is no evidence the FBI behaved improperly. (“The FBI commonly uses sources and informants to gather evidence and its regulations allow for use of informants even before a formal investigation has been opened. In many law enforcement investigations, the use of sources and informants precedes more invasive techniques such as electronic surveillance.”) . . . . had the FBI failed to follow up on evidence that a presidential campaign was engaged in secret communications with a foreign government, it would have been excoriated for dereliction of duty. Moreover, none of this was revealed during the campaign — in stark contrast to the airing of the allegations against Hillary Clinton for misuse of email, an action that looks downright trivial in comparison with a far-flung Russian plot to boost Trump, a scheme that at critical points was eagerly greeted by top members of the Trump campaign. 

At any stage in this outrageous attack on American intelligence operations and the Justice Department, Ryan could have stepped in to replace members of the Intelligence Committee, to reprimand them and/or to rebuff the president’s attempt to interfere with and smear investigators seeking to uncover an attack on our democracy. 

Ryan’s legacy will be not only of someone who politically enabled an unfit president, but also of someone who presided over the erosion of trust required for a proper intelligence oversight process. Ryan has done his party no favors in permitting it to become irrational conspiratorialists and antagonists of our intelligence community. His passivity has only encouraged Trump to abuse his powers, which may, when the facts are laid bare, amount to obstruction of justice.

This week Ryan completely lost control of his own troops, watching the farm bill go down in humiliating fashion as he tried to stave off an immigration compromise that might actually pass. He is no longer doing the people’s business . . . . . Perhaps he should retire now. Any temporary replacement could hardly do a worse job for the remaining months of the GOP majority.

The Flaw in Trump's Russiagate Excuse That the FBI Set Him Up

Satan is sometimes referred to as the "Lord of Lies."  In 2018 America, the name also applies to the occupant of the White House who - like his evangelical supporters - must be assumed to be lying if his lips are moving.  Sadly, the same applies to most of the Republican leadership in Congress.  The latest lie being circulated is that somehow the FBI plotted to "entrap" Trump and his minions in a scandal of Russian collusion.  Never mind the issue that if one has no criminal or sinister intent, it is hard to be entrapped in the first place.  Plus, as a piece in New York Magazine lays out, the key to the supposed plot - an "October surprise" - never occurred.  If anything, James Comey's baseless letter in October about reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton, shows that Trump and devin Nune' latest manufactured conspiracy theory is absolutely ridiculous.  Not, of course, that Trump's mindless base of support will ever be swayed but the baselessness of the newest effort to undermine the FBI and the Russiagate investigation.  Here are article excerpts:

There has been no more barometrically reliable insight into the Trump administration’s defense strategy on Russia than Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel. Her weekly missives, essentially transcribed straight from the fevered mind of Devin Nunes, bring the readers up to date on every twist and turn in the developing conspiracy theories about the nefarious Deep State plot to frame the innocent president.
Strassel’s latest missive brings into view the latest working theory. It holds that James Comey planted a spy in the Trump campaign, in order to set in motion an investigation that would be used to smear Trump as a Russian tool, and thereby to hand the election to Hillary Clinton. This is the theory Trump is referring to when he rages about a plot that is “worse than Watergate.”
Put aside for a moment whether it is actually scandalous for the FBI to use an informant to uncover evidence of criminal conduct. The argument is that the clear purpose of this maneuver was to influence the 2016 election.Except there’s one tiny flaw in this theory: They never sprang the October surprise. The FBI kept a tight lid on the investigation — so tight, in fact, they floated a misleading story in the New York Times conveying the false impression that they saw no ties to Russia. Clinton did help finance Christopher Steele’s investigation, but also did not publish his reporting. And the Obama administration also kept a tight lid on the disturbing details that emerged. The farthest Obama went was to ask leaders of both parties to join in a bipartisan statement warning Russia not to interfere with the election — and when Mitch McConnell refused, they did nothing. When voting took place in November 2016, as far as the public was concerned, Clinton had been under FBI investigation and Trump had not.
This alleged secret plan to smear Trump only works if you actually let people know about it.
The details of the FBI investigation and Steele’s report did begin to leak out in January 2017. But there’s a reason the trick is called “October surprise” and not “January After the Election surprise.”