Bill Barr, secret policeman for the deep state

[Kid Berwyn]

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Bill Barr: The “Cover-Up General”

"At the center of the criticism is the chief artic­ulator of Bush's imperial presidency," we reported in 1992, "the man who wrote the legal rationale for the Gulf War, the Panama invasion, and the officially sanctioned kidnapping of foreign nationals abroad"

by FRANK SNEPP
The Village Voice, APRIL 18, 2019

Snip...

For the next two years, as chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Coun­sel, Barr played a key role in shaping Rich­ard Thornburgh’s stormy tenure as attorney general. In a job that was essentially politi­cal, he helped maintain the administra­tion’s ideological purity by screening out judicial candidates who weren’t conserva­tive enough. He also drafted two key docu­ments rationalizing the U.S. invasion of Panama and the seizure of General Manuel Noriega.

Snip...

In mid 1990, as Thornburgh’s own prob­lems with Congress deepened, Barr was tapped to run interference, and was named deputy attorney general. The appointment came just in time for him to draft another landmark tract for the administration, the legal pretext for the undeclared war against Iraq. It would have made any Nixonite proud. Explaining it later to Congress, Barr said he believed there was a “gray zone” between a declared offensive war and an emergency defensive action where “there is latitude for the president, if he believes that the vital interests of the United States are threatened by foreign military attack, there is room for him to respond.”

Barr did not make clear how the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait equaled an attack on vital American interests, but to his credit, at the moment of decision itself, he did counsel the president to soften the impact of his unilateral rush to war by seeking a declaration of congressional support. That piece of advice, much akin to Johnson’s leveraging of the Tonkin Gulf resolution, helped to keep the naysayers at bay.

Barr’s service to the administration, how­ever, wasn’t limited simply to such flashes of political savvy. In 1991 he became active in stone-walling the Iraqgate and the BCCI investigations and further gratified conser­vatives by keeping up the tattoo on their favorite hot-button issues. Embracing im­migration policy as his own, he helped craft an exception rule that automatically barred HIV-positive sufferers from entering the country. Civil libertarians charged illegal discrimination and even racism, since many of those excluded were black Hai­tians. Barr assured Congress that the policy was meant only to keep out people who might be thrown back on public welfare.

Flogging another conservative hobby­horse, Barr fought hard as deputy AG to keep federal courts from expanding their right to review state criminal convictions on writs of habeas corpus. As a devout Catholic, he also pandered to the antiabor­tion crowd, even “torquing” the law in Au­gust 1991 to advance their crusade. The challenge came when a federal judge in Wichita issued an order barring anti-abor­tion demonstrators from blocking access to a clinic. The Justice Department inter­vened to try to force a lifting of the ban. Later asked about this by Congress, Barr gave an exquisitely technical rationale, as­serting that though the demonstrators were “lawbreakers . . . treading on other people’s rights,” they “should be dealt with” in state court, not federal court — thus the federal judge’s order was unenforceable.

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https://www.villagevoice.com/2019/04/18/attorney-general-william-barr-is-the-best-reason-to-vote-for-clinton/

Barr is the rock which covers all manner of the vilest treasons.

[hedda_foil]

1. Thanks for posting this, Kid Berwyn! It's essential reading!

[Kid Berwyn]

2. MSM might ask Barr: Why did your dad hire Jeffrey Epstein?

Vital history that is little known:

The Ties That Bind Jeffrey Epstein, William Barr & Donald Trump

Todd Neikirk
Hill Reporter, May 19, 2019

During Attorney General, William Barr’s confirmation hearing, he was mostly peppered with questions about how he would handle the Mueller Report. Senator Ben Sasse’s (R-NE) questioning, however, diverged from the pack. Sasse asked Barr about the lenient sentence given out to billionaire pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. The future Attorney General told Sasse that he would look into the matter.

This, however, was not the first connection between Barr and his family and the disgraced pedophile. In 1973, Barr’s father Donald, the headmaster at Manhattan’s Dalton School, hired Epstein as a calculus and physics teacher.

While hiring Epstein, a noted mathematics genius, was not strange on its face, the hire was unusual for a number of reasons. Epstein had not earned a college degree as he dropped out of New York’s prestigious Cooper Union. The other odd circumstance was that the new teacher was only 20 years of age.

Apparently, the hire was a successful one. The New Yorker wrote in a 2003 profile on Epstein, “he was something of a Robin Williams–in–Dead Poets Society type of figure, wowing his high-school classes with passionate mathematical riffs.” Epstein’s mathematical skills caught the eye of Bear Stearns’ chairman, Alan “Ace” Greenberg, whose son attended the Dalton School. Greenberg hired Epstein as an options trader and the former teacher was able to amass a fortune.

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https://hillreporter.com/the-ties-that-bind-jeffrey-epstein-william-barr-donald-trump-34107

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Barr Sr must’ve seen a potential, uh, asset. Otherwise, there’s no logical rationale for the hire.

ETA: I have yet to hear a major media outlet — print or broadcast — bring Barr Sr hiring Epstein to the nation’s attention.

[Kid Berwyn]

3. How Bill Barr Is Helping Trump Escape the Russia Scandal

The White House would rather have a fight over contempt than betrayal.

by David Corn
Mother Jones, May 12019

On Wednesday, the Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee voted to proceed with a contempt resolution against Attorney General Bill Barr. The man installed as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer by President Donald Trump—who had been looking for his own Roy Cohn—had refused to hand over an unredacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report and had ducked a committee hearing the previous week because Democrats had insisted on allowing the committee’s counsel to question Barr. The contempt vote, committee Democrats say, was a demonstration of Democratic unity (among a caucus divided on the question of impeaching Trump) and a signal to the party’s base and others that the Dems, as they face an obdurate Trump administration bent on stymying congressional investigations, are willing to punch back. But they may be punching in the wrong direction and, consequently, helping Trump escape the Russia scandal.

Barr is a convenient target for the Democrats. He misled the public about Mueller’s report—twice: with the four-page letter he wrote purportedly summarizing the report’s conclusions, and the press conference he held before the report was released. Barr downplayed the evidence related to the question of whether Trump had committed obstruction of justice and said Mueller had handed him the decision on whether Trump had committed this crime. (Mueller’s report said that was a matter for Congress to handle.) Barr said Trump had cooperated fully. (Trump had refused to be interviewed.) He echoed Trump’s mantra of “no collusion.” (Mueller had investigated whether there had been any criminal conspiracy related to the Russian attack on the 2016 election and found nothing to prosecute—and rendered no judgment on “collusion.”) And Barr, unsurprisingly, had not mentioned that Mueller’s report cited numerous lies from Trump and his crew about their interactions with Russia and Moscow’s assault on the United States.

An attorney general spinning for a president who might have criminally obstructed justice is important. But, arguably, it is not as important as what has prompted all this hubbub: the Trump-Russia scandal itself.

The Mueller report reaffirms the core elements of what is probably the most consequential political scandal in American history. Russia, it notes, waged a “sweeping and systematic” attack on a US presidential election. And, Mueller notes, Trump and his campaign, while publicly denying this attack was underway, sought to benefit from it. As the report states, during the campaign, Trump called “this whole thing with Russia” a “total deflection” and said that the notion Moscow was intervening in the election was “farfetched” and “ridiculous”—which is precisely what Russia was claiming at the time. Trump’s embrace and promotion of Moscow disinformation was not a crime—but Mueller included it in his narrative.

Mueller’s report lays out the curious series of interactions between Trump associates and Russia throughout the 2016 contest—showing that the campaign even attempted to establish a back-channel connection to Putin’s office after public reports that Moscow was behind the hack-and-dump attacks mounted against Democrats and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Additionally, the report details how Trump lied to the public about his secret efforts during the campaign to develop a Trump tower project in Moscow. (After 10 months of negotiations, the project fizzled out once Trump essentially secured the Republican presidential nomination in June 2016.) The report points out that Trump continued to lie about this deal after he won the election. It cites a remark he made at a press conference days before moving into the White House: “I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away…We could make deals in Russia very easily if we wanted to, I just don’t want to because I think that would be a conflict.”

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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/05/how-bill-barr-is-helping-trump-escape-the-russia-scandal/

[Kid Berwyn]

4. Corporate McPravda immediately focused on one storyline.

EPSTEIN DEATH: DEEP DIGGING NOT WELCOME IN CORPORATE MEDIA

by Russ Baker
WhoWhatWhy.org , Aug. 26, 2019

Excerpt...

Although establishment media usually ignore or ridicule non-traditional media when the latter ask questions that don’t conform to a pro-system bias, they have a tougher time when it is one of their own breaking ranks.

That’s what the Washington Post did. It began with a tweet from reporter Carol Leonnig:

People close to Epstein fear he was murdered…as Epstein told authorities someone tried to kill him in a previous incident weeks earlier. He was described as being in good spirits in recent days… https://t.co/J9QNSo1N2v

— Carol Leonnig (@CarolLeonnig) August 10, 2019

In a follow-up tweet the same day, Leonnig reminded readers:

Remember previous incident July 23: it was never cleared up whether Epstein had been attacked, as he said, or if he was covering up his own suicide attempt https://t.co/G7smVLAZqc

— Carol Leonnig (@CarolLeonnig) August 10, 2019

In a rare display, we saw other major news organizations take the Post to task. For instance, Rolling Stone. This progressive journal quoted Tim Gleason — a professor of journalism and director of the Payne Awards for Ethics in Journalism at the University of Oregon — who said “I don’t know why she would have tweeted this — what was she thinking? It’s hard not to read that and think she is suggesting something else happened.”

Something else. As if “something else” was clearly out of the question.

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https://whowhatwhy.org/2019/08/26/epstein-death-deep-digging-not-welcome-in-corporate-media/