Larry Ellison, the co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp., is a fierce competitor, to put it mildly. This is a man who helped build a $177-billion company, and who likes to unwind by funding ludicrous hydrofoiling racing catamarans.

Increasingly, Ellison’s company is competing with the cloud computing wing of Amazon.com Inc., and he does it with zeal. Oracle funded an anti-Amazon group called the “Free and Fair Markets Initiative” to attack the rival. Oracle also worked desperately to derail Amazon’s bid for JEDI, a lucrative Defense Department cloud contract, going so far as to sue the federal government, alleging it illegally favored Amazon.

Now, Ellison is making friends with his enemy’s enemy, who happens to be the president of the United States. On Wednesday, Ellison will host a fundraiser for President Trump at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. Top contributors are expected to shell out $250,000 for a photo, a golf outing and a round-table discussion...

Is Ellison’s interest in Trump inspired by their shared contempt for Bezos? Who knows? On the one hand, it’s not out of character for Ellison to raise money for Republicans. He backed Marco Rubio in 2016.

Then again, backing Trump is uniquely controversial. Recode called Ellison “one of Silicon Valley’s most eccentric and independent-minded leaders,” observing that those traits might make him immune to “blowback” from Oracle workers. Silicon Valley workers in general have become more activist; in November 2018 Google employees walked out over the company’s sexual harassment policies...

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-15/larry-ellison-trump

As The New York Times reports, this outside team of attorneys has spent the last two weeks “grilling line prosecutors” about cases. But not just any cases: those cases special to Trump. That includes looking at every step of the investigation, prosecution, and sentencing. And that review is looking not just at how these cases were handled, but also at who was involved at every step. Because finding scapegoats is definitely part of the agenda.

Seen in this light, the resignation of the four prosecutors on the Roger Stone case wasn’t a snap response to a single instance of Barr overruling their decisions. It was the endgame following weeks in which the entire U.S. attorney’s office in Washington was subject to badgering from a team of hand-selected political hit men, brought in to second-guess every action and undermine each decision. As the Times article puts it, these actions mean subjecting the office to “a secondary layer of monitoring and control over what career prosecutors have been doing.”

Over the last week, Trump has tweeted attacks on the prosecuting attorneys who set the sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone. He’s challenged the impartiality of the judge in charge of the case. He has even gone after the jury foreman with charges of bias.

But Trump’s tweets were not happening in a vacuum. In fact, they weren’t even coming first. Barr had placed his review team over the Washington office before Trump began his series of 280-character tirades against everyone involved in the Stone trial. Barr’s blathering on about how he was tired of Trump telling him what to do wasn’t just deceptive—it was a reversal of the truth. Barr was already tearing into those cases. Undoubtedly, Trump was aware of what Barr was doing to rip up the paperwork on Flynn and Stone when he issued his tweets...

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/2/14/1919210/-Barr-created-an-outside-team-that-has-been-secretly-tearing-apart-Stone-and-Flynn-cases-for-weeks