Bill Barr's Corruption of the U.S. Justice Department

Trump and his consigliere.

Attorney General William Barr is a despicable individual serving an even more despicable individual, Donald Trump. Worse yet, he is utterly corrupting the U.S. Department of Justice and transforming it into a cog in Trump's crime syndicate like regime. Not only did Barr order the tear gas and rubber bullet attack on peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square, but he is throwing the Justice Department's reputation down the toilet as evidenced by his efforts to dismiss the case against confessed criminal and former Trump regime member Michael Flynn. Thankfully, the judge in the Flynn case refused to be bullied and appointed a retired judge with stellar credentials to investigate the Barr instigated effort to dismiss the case against Flynn, no doubt at Trump's request.  That investigator has slammed the Barr led effort and shows that Barr's idea of an independent Justice Department looks like something out of Hitler's Germany. Some will shrug and say so what, but should be re-elected, the misuse of the Justice Department could be used to attack and persecute those who oppose Trump and the corruption that he embodies.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the investigator's findings and the depths of Barr's corruption.  Here are excerpts:

The latest development in the saga of Michael Flynn — disgraced former national security adviser, admitted criminal, conspiracy theorist and all-around sleaze — gives us yet more evidence of how completely President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr have corrupted the Justice Department.

Back in May, long after Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents in their investigation into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election — which got him fired as national security adviser after 24 days on the job — Barr took the extraordinary step of seeking to drop the case against him before he could be sentenced. In response, the judge in the case asked a respected retired judge to make a recommendation about how this highly unusual situation should be handled.

That retired judge, John Gleeson, not only recommended that Flynn be sentenced as planned but issued a scathing report condemning the Justice Department’s actions in the case:

In his argument, Gleeson said the government’s “ostensible grounds” for seeking dismissal were “conclusively disproven” by its own earlier briefs; contradict the court’s prior orders and Justice Department positions taken in other cases; and “are riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact.”
 A former federal prosecutor and judge for 22 years in Brooklyn — best known for putting the late mob boss John Gotti behind bars and presiding over the trial of “Wolf of Wall Street” stockbroker Jordan Belfort — Gleeson wrote that judges are empowered to protect their court’s integrity “from prosecutors who undertake corrupt, politically motivated dismissals. That is what has happened here. The Government has engaged in highly irregular conduct to benefit a political ally of the President.”

Not only that, Gleeson stated that “Flynn has indeed committed perjury in these proceedings, for which he deserves punishment,” but recommended that instead of a separate prosecution, Flynn’s misdeeds should be taken into account when he is sentenced for the crime he pleaded guilty to.

Gleeson’s conclusions aren’t surprising in their particulars, because anyone familiar with this case knows them to be an accurate representation of the action Barr took. There is no doubt about what Flynn did, nor that it was against the law, nor that he would have known he was breaking the law when he did it.

Yet Barr carried out Trump’s obvious wishes by intervening to help Flynn (just as he had done with the case against Trump confidante Roger Stone). As the New York Times reported: “A range of former prosecutors struggled to point to any previous instance in which the Justice Department had abandoned its own case after obtaining a guilty plea.”

Barr did it because it was what Trump wanted, and because he evidently shares Trump’s belief that the government should essentially be run like a mob family, in which those who have the boss’s favor need not be held accountable for any crimes they commit. Asked how history would judge his actions, Barr laughed and said, “History is written by the winners.”

But he and Trump haven’t won yet, at least not in this case. An appeals court is about to hear Flynn’s request that the case against him be dropped so he can escape any sanction at all; they’ll have to decide whether the judge can go ahead and sentence him even after the Justice Department has withdrawn. The case could well go all the way to the Supreme Court.

But if nothing else, we can take solace that there are at least some moments when the system is capable of speaking an obvious truth. Not even the most partisan Republican actually believes that Flynn is some kind of martyr, or that impartial justice demands he be unburdened from accountability for his choices. He’s Trump’s guy, so Trump’s AG should let him go. It’s as simple as that.

Gleeson’s report makes that clear. Let me point to this passage:

The reasons offered by the Government are so irregular, and so obviously pretextual, that they are deficient. Moreover, the facts surrounding the filing of the Government’s motion constitute clear evidence of gross prosecutorial abuse. They reveal an unconvincing effort to disguise as legitimate a decision to dismiss that is based solely on the fact that Flynn is a political ally of President Trump.

We’re not used to reading that kind of blunt language in legal documents, but it’s completely appropriate here. We all know what’s happening: Barr is trying to spring Flynn on the president’s behalf. It’s repellent, it’s corrupt, and in a better world it would itself be grounds for Barr’s impeachment.

That won’t happen, and the Supreme Court may come to Flynn’s rescue in the end. But, at least for now, it’s good to hear the truth spoken.

Call Trump’s News Conferences What They Are: Propaganda

The current situation with COVID-19 is showing examples of amazing leadership among many stet governors and foreign leaders as well as lying and propaganda most obvious in the form of Donald Trump where even his group of experts are forced to correct Trump's lies. Shockingly, Trump's base continues to believe the lies and tout the liar-in-chief as "doing a good job" in the fight against the virus even as he has thrown states and hospital systems to fend for themselves. Being a leader means accepting responsibility and giving accurate information, not dishing a sleazy reality TV spiel. Of course, Trump wants to take no responsibility and his idea of leadership is boasting and saying whatever he believes his knuckle dragging base wants to hear.  Meanwhile, his sycophants prostitute themselves constantly to stay in the good graces of the "glorious leader."    A column in the New York Times looks at the disturbing situation.  Here are excerpts:

In a time of global emergency, we need calm, directness and, above all, hard facts. Only the opposite is on offer from the Trump White House. It is therefore time to call [Trump's] the president’s news conferences for what they are: propaganda.

We may as well be watching newsreels approved by the Soviet Politburo. We’re witnessing the falsification of history in real time. When Donald Trump, under the guise of social distancing, told the White House press corps on Thursday that he ought to get rid of 75 to 80 percent of them — reserving the privilege only for those he liked — it may have been chilling, but it wasn’t surprising. He wants to thin out their ranks until there’s only Pravda in the room.

Sometimes, I stare at Deborah Birx during these briefings and I wonder if she understands that this is the footage historians will be looking at 100 years from now — the president rambling on incoherently, vainly, angrily, deceitfully, while she watches, her face stiff with the strangled horror of a bride enduring an inappropriate toast.

If the public wants factual news briefings, they need to tune in to those who are giving them: Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, whose addresses appear with English subtitles on Deutsche Welle. They should start following the many civic-minded epidemiologists and virologists and contagion experts on Twitter, like Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch and Yale’s Nicholas Christakis, whose threads have been invaluable primers in a time of awful confusion.

These are people with a high tolerance for uncertainty. It’s [Trump's] the president’s incapacity to tolerate it — combined with his bottomless need to self-flatter and preserve his political power — that leads, so often, to his spectacular fits of deception and misdirection.

Only a liar — and a weak man with delusions of competence — would be so unnerved by the facts.

Compare this to Cuomo, who takes questions at his news conferences calmly and systematically — and, more to the point, has a substantive response when asked the same questions about anxiety. He hears it. He relates to it. He says it’s real.

On Friday, Cuomo said something else that was quite striking, as he was issuing his executive order for nonessential workers in New York to stay home, other than to run errands or exercise outside. “If someone wants to blame someone or complain about someone, blame me,” he said. “There is no one else who is responsible for this decision.”
Cuomo is nothing if not politically shrewd. He knows full well how this comment compares to Mr. Trump’s “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

But telling the media that they’re peddling fake news is straight from the playbook of the political gangsters of the last century. So many of Trump’s moves are.

How about Orwellian doublespeak? Ooooooh, check. Trump and his team are continually deploying words and phrases that disguise a reality that suggests the opposite. Vice President Mike Pence talks about a “strong and seamless” partnership with the states, when at the same time Mr. Trump is trolling the states, telling Cuomo to get his own respirators.

Pence speaks relentlessly of a “whole-of-government approach,” when in fact the government is hollowed out — defunded to fight pandemics, denuded of experts — and broken in shards, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sidelined in this fight, and the president’s task force now mutely competing with a shadow group run by the president’s son-in-law.

But most dangerous of all is Trump’s insistence that things are fine, or will be shortly, that they’ll be stronger and better and greater than ever. We don’t have any evidence that this is true, and the president finds any suggestion to the contrary quite rude. When a journalist pointed out to him on Thursday that the economy had all but ground to halt, Trump cut him off.

Here’s the truth: Things might be hard — unfathomably hard — for months, perhaps even north of a year. Anyone who’s reading or listening to other sources of news besides the president knows that. It takes sensitivity and strength and intelligence to speak truthfully to the public about imminent hardship, the prospect of enduring pain.

So I listen to Justin Trudeau, a sci-fi experience, a dispatch from an alternate universe that prioritizes the needs and anxieties of the middle class.

And I listen to Cuomo, who says the same thing. His news conference on Friday was about the practical things, knowing the entire state — country, globe — had just taken a precipitous slide down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with food, shelter and safety now topmost on many people’s minds. No one can evict you for 90 days. We’re getting hospital beds. We’re recruiting doctors and nurses in training to fight this fight, and we’re coaxing medical professionals out of retirement.

Honor and Morality vs. Trump

One way to think about what we are witnessing as the public impeachment hears unfold is to think of a mix between the movie "The Godfather" and sleazy real estate investors/developers who skirt the laws and often rely on bribes and treats to push their projects along.  Donald Trump - and sadly most of those who have signed on to his administration - embody this combination of criminality and moral haziness, if not out right moral bankruptcy.  As the hearings unfold in contrast to this corruption and lawlessness, one is witnessing individuals cut from the cloth of old school career diplomats who, unlike Trump, put honor, professionalism, and country ahead of squalid personal gain.  An op-ed in the Washington Post co-authored by a law school classmate, Evan Thomas, who has written numerous historical works looks at this stark contrast between Trump world and what ought to be the standard for government service.  If Trump avoids removal from office, it will be a sad day for America.  It will also be a sign that morality has been kicked into the gutter by someone little better than a mob boss and that immorality is now the hallmark of the Republican Party.  Here are column highlights: 

Geography, Napoleon is reputed to have remarked, is destiny, and this axiom came to our minds this week as we watched two very different but neighboring universes collide before the House Intelligence Committee. The ramrod-straight William B. Taylor Jr. and the bow-tied George Kent, two diplomats from the largely WASP ethos of the post-World War II foreign policy establishment, one headquartered at places such as the Council on Foreign Relations’ imposing Harold Pratt House at 68th Street and Park Avenue, found themselves bearing noble witness amid an impeachment imbroglio that may be best understood by an appreciation of the wilder mores of midtown Manhattan. 

Only a few blocks away from the portrait-lined walls and genteel cocktails of the Council lies the real center of gravity in the politics of 2019: the gilded Trump Tower, built on the fluid morals and cutthroat deal-making of New York real estate. The Tower sits cheek-by-jowl (the image is chosen purposely) with the Grand Havana Room, a cigar club frequented by Rudy Giuliani, atop a Fifth Avenue building owned by the family of Jared Kushner. Walk a bit farther south — you don’t even need a Town Car — and you reach Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., home of Fox News and the New York Post.

To Trump supporters, the testimony Wednesday was the “deep state” surfacing briefly from the depths of white papers, institutional knowledge and a facility with U.S. military and diplomatic history. (Kent’s evocation of von Steuben and Lafayette was straight out of a Ward Just novel.)

To Trump’s critics and defenders of constitutional norms, the Republican narrative that the president’s threats to deny security assistance to Ukraine was just the kind of thing tough guys do (and, after getting caught, he didn’t do it!), suggested that tabloid hyperbole, Fox News arcana and New York hardball had replaced the real world.

The story of upended conventions and of a president who careens between self-parody and serious lawlessness is by now familiar, as old as the Age of Trump itself. The distinction is that the impeachment hearings have given us perhaps the clearest example yet of the triumph of political demimonde wise guys such as Trump, Giuliani and the Rogers Stone and Ailes over the latter-day Robert Lovetts and Dean Achesons. And it’s not just Wise Men, of course: Jeane Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice hailed from the establishment world, as do Marie Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill. The moment of decision between the Wise Men and the wise guys on Wednesday was subtle but nevertheless clear. It came when Rep. Michael R. Turner, a Republican, noted that diplomats such as Taylor and Kent “deal in words of understanding. Words of beliefs and feelings, because in your profession, that’s what you work with to try to pull together policy.” Theirs, the lawmaker was implying, was almost a touchingly naive way of life in which one trusted what one was told, assumed the fundamental truthfulness of, say, a presidentially appointed ambassador, and believed that a president himself meant what he said.

No longer: The midtown game of wheeling and dealing, often done over a cigar at the Grand Havana or perhaps an overpriced steak at 21, has now gone global as the denizens of Trump’s neighborhood run shadow foreign policy ops seeking 2020 election help and good paydays.

Had any other president, Taylor was asked, linked official aid in the American interest to private or political benefit? With a stoicism and brevity that would’ve made George Marshall quietly proud, Taylor replied, “No.”

To be sure, the establishment has been far from perfect, its fall from preeminence more than partly self-inflicted. Elite education and conventional expertise don’t guarantee good results, and America has been shaped by the battle between the privileged and the populist since long before Andrew Jackson. Such establishment condescension also fueled the rise of Joe McCarthy and of McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who served as lawyer and mentor in the 1970s and ’80s to a young developer from Queens who was looking to make it big in Manhattan. And Donald Trump never forgot a thing Cohn taught him. In midtown Manhattan, Trump learned to dominate the news — in his rise, that meant the New York Post, with its screaming, one-sourced stories, an early harbinger of the presidential Twitter strategy. He learned the power of TV. And he learned that tough guys — or “killers,” in a favorite approbation of Trump’s — like Ailes, who presided over this stew of often-abusive power, money and misinformation, were the kinds of guys he could count on.

For one thing was certain: The Wise Men of 68th Street or the United Nations or any of the traditional institutions of expertise weren’t his guys. The question America now faces in impeachment and, should Trump prevail, in the 2020 election, is whose New York will serve us best in the long run — the wise guys’ or the Wise Men’s?

Be very, very afraid.

America's Beacon Has Gone Out

Despite the many ugly aspects of its history - the genocide of Native Americans and slavery and then Jim Crow being some of the ugliest - America has for generations held up in theory democracy and the rule of law and, if you will, the American dream where anyone had a chance to make a success of their lives.  Now, in less than three years, the Trump/Pence regime has extinguished that beacon of promise and, instead replaced it with authoritarianism, a betrayal of long time allies, pandering to outright racists who want to disenfranchise anyone they deem "other" - which likely includes gays - and rule by a malignant narcissist who has loyal to no one and who embodies what every decent parent - Christian or not - should never want the child to be.  No one should be surprised by the damage Trump and his simpering sycophant Mike Pence have wrought.  Trump long ran his real estate empire like a crime boss - a reason New Yorkers despise him so much - and now that cancer has spread to both America's domestic and foreign policy.  An op-ed in the New York Times looks at what has happened in Ukraine which is a microcosm of what is being wrought large by this toxic and dangerous regime.  Here are highlights:

In 2014, Ukraine’s wildly corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, fled to Russia after mass protests on the Maidan, Kiev’s central square. During what Ukrainians call the Revolution of Dignity, police snipers killed dozens of demonstrators. In the revolution’s aftermath, a number of young idealists decided to plunge into politics, hoping to reform their troubled country from the inside. One of them was Serhiy Leshchenko, at the time perhaps the country’s most famous investigative journalist.

The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama had encouraged Leshchenko and some of his friends to run for Parliament. He’d met Leshchenko in 2013, when the journalist took part in a three-week summer course run by Fukuyama at Stanford that aims to teach activists from around the world about building democratic institutions. “After the Maidan revolution, I thought that it was particularly important that all these people in civil society actually go into the government,” Fukuyama said.

Many of them did. That October, Leshchenko, a lanky, bearded hipster with a passion for rave culture, became part of a cadre of Western-oriented newcomers elected to Parliament, even as he continued to work as a journalist exposing corruption. This year, after Volodymyr Zelensky won the presidential election, Leshchenko advised him during the transition.

Then Rudy Giuliani began attacking Leshchenko as a conspirator against America.

In 2016, Leshchenko had helped expose the “black ledger,” an accounting book of hundreds of pages found in Yanukovych’s former party headquarters. Among its many entries, it showed $12.7 million in secret payments to Paul Manafort. At the time, Manafort was running Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but before that, he was one of Yanukovych’s most important advisers.

One of the reasons Manafort is in federal prison is that he failed to disclose or pay taxes on millions of dollars from Ukraine. But if you believe Giuliani, the black ledger was part of a plot to damage Trump.

Last month, in an epic, ranting interview on CNN, he accused Ukraine’s leading anti-corruption organization, the Anti-Corruption Action Center, or AntAC, of developing “all of the dirty information that ended up being a false document that was created in order to incriminate Manafort.”

In Giuliani’s fevered alternative reality, Ukraine’s most stalwart foes of corruption are actually corruption’s embodiment. Deeply compromised figures with vendettas against the activists — particularly the ex-prosecutors Viktor Shokin and Yuriy Lutsenko — are transformed into heroes.

This addled, through-the-looking glass fantasy came to drive American foreign policy in Ukraine. Trump withdrew the American ambassador to the country, Marie Yovanovitch, whom reformers saw as their champion. He withheld military aid that Ukraine desperately needed, while asking Zelensky to do him a “favor” and investigate deranged fictions about Ukrainian interference in American elections, as well as Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

Given how much Ukraine depends on American support, Giuliani’s smears made it politically impossible for Leshchenko, who left Parliament in August, to continue advising Zelensky. Now, with Ukraine at the center of a world-historical international scandal, he is stupefied to find himself defamed by powerful forces in the United States, once the world’s strongest backer of those fighting for democracy in his country.

If America can be said to have a foreign policy at this debased stage of the Trump administration, it mostly consists of sucking up to strongmen while betraying everyone who ever believed in America’s putative ideals. Trump has given Turkey his blessing to assault the Syrian Kurds, America’s crucial allies against ISIS. In June, he reportedly promised China that he wouldn’t speak out in favor of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, some of whom have been carrying American flags, as long as trade talks progressed.

Here in Ukraine, a country locked in a proxy war with Russia, coping with a deluge of disinformation and propaganda and struggling to transcend a history of corruption, reformers are trying to figure out what it means when the American president sides against them.

[Pro-Western reformers] had seen the United States as a “a perfect democracy functioning very well,” with an admirable system of checks and balances. “And now this image is crumbling and that’s very dangerous.”

[T]here was a time when America at least viewed the projection of democratic values as being in its self-interest. That gave liberals in countries like Ukraine leverage against recalcitrant officials.

“The majority of the reforms, especially on anti-corruption, were passed because there was a very strong demand from civil society, and there was the I.M.F. and the U.S. Embassy pushing it hard,” said Oleksandra Ustinova, a former board member of AntAC who was elected to Parliament this year.

Now that’s all changed. As The New York Times reported, after Trump recalled the U.S. ambassador, Lutsenko gloated to the head of AntAC that he had “eliminated your roof,” using Russian mafia slang for guardian.

“We’ve been exporting our corruption to them, rather than trying to export good governance,” said Fukuyama.

[T]wo Ukrainian-born clients of Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, had been arrested on charges of campaign finance crimes as they were preparing to leave the United States with one-way tickets.

According to an indictment, the two “sought to advance their personal financial interests and the political interests of at least one Ukrainian government official with whom they were working.” . . . . Sure enough, on Saturday NBC News reported that Lutsenko was the official in the indictment. Yovanovitch might have been referring to Lutsenko when she said, in her Friday congressional testimony, that “individuals who have been named in the press as contacts of Mr. Giuliani may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.”

Federal prosecutors are now investigating whether Giuliani himself broke the law.

Throughout our history, America has committed many sins against democracy around the world, but we used to be on the right side in Ukraine. Not anymore. As one former U.S. diplomat said to me recently, “The beacon has gone out.” We’re with the oligarchs now.

Witnessing what is happening makes one long even for the bad old days of George W. Bush.  Despite his many sins, Bush was not tantamount to a Mafia don running the nation and its foreign policy solely for his own personal financial and political gain.   And yes, I still want to know what Turkish President Erdogan offered Trump in exchange for betraying the Kurds.

Editorial: President Trump Needs to Resign

The Connecticut Post editorial board has come out and demanded that Donald Trump resign from office based on his efforts to secure interference by a foreign government in the 2020 presidential election with the withholding of military aid as the lever to push the president of Ukraine to aid Trump in his personal re-election effort.  Part of the editorial states "He has repeatedly proven himself unfit for office and appears to view the presidency as a position meant to benefit himself personally, not as one that must represent the interests of an entire nation."  Trump cares about only himself and has the morality of a Mafia crime boss.  The piece makes clear that Trump's own release of a redacted transcript proves his unforgivable transgression. Here are highlights from the editorial:

Even given the incredibly fast pace of news in the Trump era, the speed with which the Ukraine scandal has moved from vague complaint to impeachable offense has been stunning. Though we’re still at the beginning of the process, there is already a mountain of evidence implicating President Donald Trump with conduct far outside the accepted norms of a democratic leader.

The most damning evidence came from [Trump] the president himself. It centers around a phone call with the president of Ukraine in which Trump raises the issue of investigating the son of presidential hopeful Joe Biden, and the implication of Trump’s words is clear as day. He asks for an investigation that would benefit him politically and has nothing to do with legitimate U.S. interests, and he brings it up repeatedly, including immediately upon the Ukrainian president mentioning the need for U.S. security aid.

This is an impeachable offense. Republicans spent Wednesday arguing there was no explicit quid pro quo, but there is seemingly no line the president can cross that would inspire them to put the public good ahead of politics. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, joined by the entirety of Connecticut’s congressional delegation, has called for impeachment proceedings, and that process must now begin in earnest.

The proper next step for the president is clear. He should resign. He has repeatedly proven himself unfit for office and appears to view the presidency as a position meant to benefit himself personally, not as one that must represent the interests of an entire nation.
Because there’s almost no chance he is going to step down, Congress’ work becomes that much more vital.

The truth is that Trump has been breaking laws and norms with impunity from the beginning. For instance, the U.S. Constitution forbids federal officeholders from receiving any gifts or payments from foreign entities, but in the same phone call with the Ukrainian president we see evidence that Trump is in violation. “I stayed at the Trump Tower,” President Volodymyr Zelensky says of his last trip to the U.S. Since Trump never divested himself from his business and continues to profit from it, he’s in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, according to many legal scholars, and it’s just one of countless examples on that score.

It’s not clear how much worse the Ukraine scandal will get. The summary of the phone call was released by the White House without need for a subpoena, but it is apparently abridged and does not represent all the whistleblower complaint that set the issue in motion. It’s easy to imagine that what we don’t know could be much worse than what we do.

But what we know is enough, and because it’s from [Trump] the president himself, there’s no reason to question its veracity. There’s no going back from here. The long, bumpy ride of the Trump era may have turned a corner, but it’s nowhere near over.

William Barr - A Study in Corruption

Attorneys - including those in government positions - are supposed to adhere to ethical norms and recuse themselves from cases where they have a conflict of interest.  As Attorney General Attorney Barr has demonstrated over and over again, ethical conduct means nothing to him.  Instead of upholding the law, his sole focus is on serving as Donald Trump's consigliere and protecting crime boss like behavior from bearing legal consequences.  Efforts to obstruct justice and to protect Trump from by hiding evidence of Trump's impeachable acts on Barr's part is breath taking.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Barr's disturbing and likely unlawful behavior.  Here are excerpts:

[T]he whistle-blower’s stark, straightforward account of stupefying treachery deserves to be repeated as often as possible.

“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. government officials that the president of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistle-blower wrote. “This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the president’s main domestic political rivals. The president’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.”

Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well. The whistle-blower’s complaint was deemed credible and urgent by Michael Atkinson, Trump’s own intelligence community inspector general, but Bill Barr’s Justice Department suppressed it. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion saying that the complaint needn’t be turned over to Congress, as the whistle-blower statute instructs. When Atkinson made a criminal referral to the Justice Department, it reportedly didn’t even open an investigation. And all the time, Barr was named in the complaint that his office was covering up.

Under any conceivable ethical standard, Barr should have recused himself. But ethical standards, perhaps needless to say, mean nothing in this administration. In the Ukraine scandal, evidence of comprehensive corruption goes far beyond Trump. Former prosecutors have said that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, may have been part of a criminal conspiracy when he pressed Ukrainian officials to open an investigation into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

Vice President Mike Pence is also tied to the shakedown of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, having met with him this month to talk about “corruption” and American financial aid. When this administration complains about Ukrainian “corruption,” it almost inevitably means a failure to corruptly pursue investigations that would bolster conspiracy theories benefiting Trump.

The whistle-blower wrote that White House officials moved a word-for-word transcript of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky from the computer system where such transcripts were typically kept into a separate system for the most highly classified information. “According to White House officials I spoke with, this was ‘not the first time’ under this administration that a presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive — rather than national security sensitive — information,” the whistle-blower said.

[A]ny lawyers involved in hiding these transcripts might have done something illegal. “The rule is it is both unethical and a crime for a lawyer to participate in altering, destroying or concealing a document, and here the allegation is that the word-for-word transcript was moved from the place where people ordinarily would think to look for it, to a place where it would not likely be found,” said Gillers. “That’s concealing.”

Then there’s Barr’s personal involvement in the Ukraine plot. In the reconstruction of Trump’s call with Zelensky that was released by the White House, Trump repeatedly said that he wanted Ukraine’s government to work with Barr on investigating the Bidens.

[S]aid Representative Jamie Raskin, a former constitutional law professor who now sits on the House Judiciary Committee, “the effort to suppress the existence of the phone conversation itself is an obvious obstruction of justice.”

But Barr’s refusal to recuse creates a sort of legal cul-de-sac. It’s only the Justice Department, ultimately, that can prosecute potential federal crimes arising from this scandal. Barr’s ethical nihilism, his utter indifference to ordinary norms of professional behavior, means that he’s retaining the authority to stop investigations into crimes he may have participated in.

“The administration of justice is cornered because the ultimate executive authority for that government role includes the people whose behavior is suspect,” said Gillers.

That makes the impeachment proceedings in the House, where Barr will likely be called as a witness, the last defense against complete administration lawlessness. “Just as the president is not above the law, the attorney general is not above the law,” said Raskin. “The president’s betrayal of his oath of office and the Constitution is the primary offense here, and we need to stay focused on that, but the attorney general’s prostitution of the Department of Justice for the president’s political agenda has been necessary to the president’s schemes and he will face his own reckoning.”

I hope Raskin is right. But until that day comes, people who care about the rule of law in this country should be screaming for Barr’s recusal, even if he won’t listen. He is now wrapped up in one of the gravest scandals in American political history. Can America’s chief law enforcement officer really be allowed to decide whether to criminally investigate misdeeds he might have helped to commit or to conceal? The answer will tell us just how crooked the justice system under Trump has become.

Barr is despicable and embodies the worse characteristics of an unethical lawyer.