...But as Bush launched his presidential bid in 1988, Barr joined the campaign team and, among oth­er things, helped fend off attacks on Dan Quayle’s character. His loyalty was quickly repaid. In late 1988, Barr became the first assistant attorney general to be installed in the wake of the election.

He also began flexing his ideology in pub­lic. During a congressional hearing at the time he boldly acknowledged having “doubts” about the constitutionality of the independent counsel statutes because of what he saw as their limiting effect on pres­idential power.

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.

If Barr had made no other contribution to the imperial pretensions of George Bush, these documents would nevertheless qualify him for hero status in the Republican pan­theon. The first “opinion,” written in June 1989, recognized the president’s right to dispatch FBI agents abroad to arrest for­eigners even in violation of international treaties. The second document, issued the following December as American forces geared up to invade Panama, gave a patina of legality to the president’s desire to use the military in similar takedown opera­tions. Together, the two memos enshrine what has come to be known as the presi­dent’s “snatch authority.”

In an inevitable seignorial flourish, the administration refused to release the com­plete contents of these documents, even to Congress. But over the years, enough of their flavor has seeped into the press to take one’s breath away. Writing in the June memo, Barr argued that both the president and, through him, the attorney general have an “inherent constitutional power” to au­thorize certain overseas operations, includ­ing abductions, to fend off “serious threats” to U.S. domestic “security” from “international terrorist groups and narcot­ics traffickers.” Such actions, he said, are mandated by the Constitution and domes­tic law and can be undertaken even in the face of objections from a foreign govern­ment or provisions of the UN Charter bar­ring the use of force against member nations.

Looming over all of this is an ideological battle over the “unitary executive,” the theory that all executive power in the United States government must be vested in the president, and over the legacy of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
[snip]

To understand why this case inspires such intense feelings, turn back the clock about three decades to the Supreme Court’s 1988 decision in Morrison v. Olson. Morrison involved a federal law, which expired in 1999, that provided for “independent counsels” — a form of special prosecutor that could only be fired by the president for cause.

The Supreme Court upheld the independent prosecutor statute by a lopsided 7 to 1 vote, with Justice Antonin Scalia providing the sole dissenting vote.

The thrust of Scalia’s opinion: The Constitution provides that “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.” For Scalia, “this does not mean some of the executive power, but all of the executive power.” And because the power to bring prosecutions is invested in the executive branch of government, there cannot be a prosecutor who is neither answerable to the president or answerable to some lower official who is answerable to the president.

This is the theory of the unitary executive. The executive branch has a single org chart. And the president must be above everyone else in that chart.
[snip]

If a majority of the Court embraced the full implications of Scalia’s dissent, the president could potentially gain the power to fire FCC Commissioners or destroy the independence of the Federal Reserve.

The relative obscurity of the unitary theory, combined with its profound and perverse power claims, has come back into focus during the Trump presidency. For example, just as Bush administration lawyers argued unsuccessfully in court in challenges to some of its key actions, Trump lawyers have argued on behalf of Trump’s immigration policies, claiming that the courts had no right to decide such matters because they are solely within the president’s unitary powers. It turns out that judges of all ideological stripes disagree, so such claims have generally been rejected to date. But with the recent appointment of Federalist Society-vetted judges to the federal courts and the Supreme Court, it is likely such claims will find greater favor in the future.

As usual, she was right. Almost immediately the polling on impeachment shifted. Within a week polls indicated that the majority of Americans favored opening the impeachment inquiry. And tide continues to turn. A recent Fox News poll, which incurred Trump’s wrath, showed that 55% of the voters believe that Trump should be impeached with 51% believing he should be impeached and removed from office.

But to some observers, the story of how a Kremlin-linked aluminum giant offered an economic lifeline to Appalachia is an object lesson of the exact opposite. Critics of the deal, both Democrat and Republican, say it gives Moscow political influence that could undermine national security. Pointing to Moscow’s use of economic leverage to sway European politics, they warn the deal is a stalking horse for a new kind of Russian meddling in America, one that exploits the U.S. free-market system instead of its elections. “That’s just what the Russians do,” says veteran diplomat Daniel Fried, who shaped U.S. policy on Eastern Europe at the State Department from the late 1980s until 2017. “They insert themselves into a foreign economy and then start to influence its politics from the inside.”

What worries national-security experts is not that Rusal, Braidy or Deripaska broke any laws in the deal. It’s that they didn’t. A TIME investigation found that Rusal used a broad array of political and economic tools to fight the sanctions, establishing a foothold in U.S. politics in the process. “You cannot go against them in a policy decision, even though it’s in our national interest, when they have infiltrated you economically,” says Heather Conley, who served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under President George W. Bush. “They use our laws, our rules, our banks, our lawyers, our lobbyists—it’s a strategy from within.”

To free itself from sanctions, Rusal fielded a team of high-paid lobbyists for an intense, months-long effort in Washington. One of the targets was Kentucky’s own Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, who helped thwart a bipartisan push to keep the sanctions in place. Since May, two of McConnell’s former staffers have lobbied Congress on behalf of Braidy, according to filings. Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, one of Rusal’s longtime major shareholders, Len Blavatnik, contributed more than $1 million through his companies to a GOP campaign fund tied to McConnell.

Deripaska denies he has interest in meddling in U.S. affairs. “If they didn’t touch me, I wouldn’t have to be so interested in U.S. politics,” Deripaska told TIME in February, after attending a panel with U.S. lawmakers in Munich. “But here I am,” he added with a smile.

"Not for nothing, but a good chunk of the cases I investigated in the FBI were 'perception management' (propaganda) cases. We actively try to STOP foreign countries from doing this to us, because we believe that part of an open society and marketplace of ideas is ensuring that people know the true source of information in order to assess credibility and critically evaluate the content (FARA originated in 1938 as a way to combat Nazi propaganda, be requiring state-sponsored content to be identified as such). Basically, you have the Trump admin attempting to conduct an illegal covert psyop on the American public, using officials from the State Department and his own attorney to do it. It's literally a version of what Russia did in 2016." she concludes.

The behavioral techniques that are being employed by governments and private corporations do not appeal to our reason; they do not seek to persuade us consciously with information and argument. Rather, these techniques change behavior by appealing to our nonrational motivations, our emotional triggers and unconscious biases. If psychologists could possess a systematic understanding of these nonrational motivations they would have the power to influence the smallest aspects of our lives and the largest aspects of our societies.”

The conference was a glimpse inside the hermetically sealed reality where Trump's most hardcore defenders live, a place where the president is besieged on all sides by an incredible conspiracy to delegitimize and remove him from office. This wide-ranging plot involves the intelligence community, the press, the largest social media companies on Earth, and possibly several foreign governments, depending on which version of the story you hear.