Bill Barr’s snitty testimony

Bill Barr’s snitty testimony

by digby

Emptywheel has a nice succinct round-up of what we learned from Bill Barr today:

Bill Barr just finished testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

It was remarkable.

Among the opinions the Attorney General espoused are that:

You only need to call the FBI when being offered campaign assistance by a foreign intelligence service, not a foreigner

It’s okay to lie about the many dangles hostile foreign countries make to a political campaign, including if you accepted those dangles

Because Trump was being falsely accused (it’s not clear of what, because the report doesn’t address the most aggressive accusation, and many other accusations against Trump and his campaign are born out by the Mueller Report), it’s okay that he sought to undermine it through illegal means

It’s okay for the President to order the White House Counsel to lie, even about an ongoing investigation

It’s okay to fire the FBI Director for refusing to confirm or deny an ongoing investigation, which is DOJ policy not to do

It’s okay for the Attorney General to call lawfully predicated DOJ investigative techniques “spying” because Fox News does

Public statements — including threatening someone’s family — cannot be subornation of perjury

You can exhaust investigative options in a case having only obtained contemptuous responses covering just a third of the investigation from the key subject of it

The Attorney General also got himself in significant trouble with his answers to a question from Charlie Crist about whether he knew why Mueller’s team was concerned about press reports. His first answer was that he didn’t know about the team’s concerns because he only spoke with Mueller. But he later described, in the phone call he had with Mueller, that Mueller discussed his team’s concerns. Worse still, when called on the fact that the letter — as opposed to Barr’s potentially suspect representation of the call — didn’t mention the press response, he suggested Mueller’s letter was “snitty” and so probably written by a staffer, meaning he assumed that the letter itself was actually from a staffer.

But that’s not the most amazing thing.

The most amazing thing is that, when Corey Booker asked Barr if he thought it was right to share polling data with Russians — noting that had Trump done so with a Super PAC, rather than a hostile foreign country, it would be illegal — Barr appeared to have no clue that Paul Manafort had done so. He even asked whom Manafort shared the data with, apparently not knowing he shared it with a guy that Rick Gates said he believes is a Russian spy.

That’s remarkable, because he basically agreed with Ben Sasse that Deripaska — with whom Manafort was sharing this campaign data — was a “bottom-feeding scum-sucker.”

So the Attorney General absolved the President of obstruction without having the faintest clue what actions the investigation of which Trump successfully obstructed by floating a pardon to Manafort.

This is what stunned me:

In one of his more forceful defenses of Trump, Barr said Wednesday that the president had been “falsely accused” of coordinating with Russia and that it helped inform the decision to say that Trump could not be charged with obstructing justice.

Barr was responding to questions from Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) about why the absence of an underlying crime — in this case, that Trump conspired with Russia — mattered in the obstruction case. Leahy pointed out that obstruction could prevent investigators from identifying an underlying crime.

Barr said this situation was unique because the president has the “constitutional authority to supervise proceedings,” and if he feels a proceeding was “not well founded” or “groundless,” he could legally shut it down.

“The president does not have to sit there, constitutionally, and allow it to run its course,” Barr said. “That’s important because most of the obstruction claims that are being made here . . . do involve the exercise of the president’s constitutional authority, and we now know that he was being falsely accused.”

In other words, the president is above the law. There is no one else in this country who can proclaim that he is being falsely accused and then shut down an investigation. Only a president. Or, more precisely, a king.

And, by the way, he was not falsely accused. He was clearly happy to benefit from a Russian government sabotage of his opponent and it remains unknown whether or not he was under Russian influence when he did it. He sure as hell has acted like he was during the campaign and after.

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