Something you may have noticed during the 10 months that he’s been Attorney General is that William Barr appears to view his role not so much as the chief lawyer for the federal government, but as Donald Trump’s personal attorney and manservant. After scoring the job by sending an unsolicited 19-page letter to the Justice Department decrying the special counsel’s inquiry into potential obstructions of justice as “fatally misconceived” and insisting that “Mueller should not be permitted to demand that the president submit to interrogation about alleged obstruction,” Barr wildly misrepresented the report‘s findings to the American public and told Congress that it was “not a crime” for the president to demand that a staffer lie to investigators. While Barr has lately been focused on providing cover for Trump on Ukraine and claiming that the impeachment inquiry is being led by people who are “engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government,” he hasn’t let it distract him from continuing to undermine the Russia investigation and insisting that his “client” Donald Trump is the victim of an unjust system, like an African-American living in the Jim Crow–era South. No, really.
Speaking to NBC News’s Pete Williams, Barr said Tuesday that, despite the findings from his own agency’s inspector general, he maintains that the F.B.I. launched its initial investigation in 2016 in “bad faith.” And that’s upsetting to Barr, not just because he’s a giant hack, but because he doesn’t want it—it being an investigation that D.O.J. Inspector General Michael Horowitz, i.e. Barr’s employee, said the F.B.I. had a valid reason to initiate—to happen to any other innocent American.
“From a civil liberties standpoint, the greatest danger to our free system is that the incumbent government use the apparatus of the state…both to spy on political opponents but also to use them in a way that could affect the outcome of an election,” Barr said. He added that this was the first time in United States history that “counterintelligence techniques” were used against a presidential campaign, which may have had something to do with the fact that a foreign government was seeking to use said presidential campaign to overthrow democracy. Little things like that.
Aside from the fact that Barr is creating an alternative narrative that his own agency says doesn‘t exist, it’s a little rich for him to be decrying the violation of Trump’s civil liberties when this administration has driven a Mack truck over people’s civil liberties, gotten them caught in the bumper, and dragged them 100 miles down I-95. Last week Barr demonstrated his commitment to First Amendment rights when he claimed that people who fail to show proper “respect” to the police “might find themselves without the police protection they need.”
Anyway, perhaps the A.G. will expound further on this topic at the D.O.J.’s holiday party, which is being thrown at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, with a $30,000+ tab for which Barr is reportedly footing himself.
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