Month: May 2019

Time for Them All to Step Up 

by tristero

I think Digby’s right. We can’t be sure that Mueller fully understands what the Trump administration is capable of doing. He should have seen Barr’s tactics coming. And apparently, he didn’t. And it’s unclear that Mueller fully understands that he must step up and sound the alarm clearly as soon as possible — no “going to paper,” but a clear direct unequivocal discourse on how much Trump and his cronies are damaging this country.

Another point: It is unlikely that Mueller —who managed an wide-ranging investigation — is fully conversant with all the nuances and complexities of every aspect of what his team found. About all the cases in which Trump obstructed justice, for example.

That is why it is critical that all investigators at the Office of the Special Counsel be called to testify to Congress. For many reasons, it is also critical that they all be called immediately. There is no reason why Mueller couldn’t testify on, say, a Monday, and that each attorney involved testify in the days after for a week or more.

Let all the Special Counsel’s attorneys speak publicly.

Time to step up Bob

by digby

Dahlia Lithwick is right in this piece in Slate. She starts by going over all the ways in which Barr denigrated Mueller in his testimony yesterday:

It wasn’t just that Barr denigrated Mueller as a “political appointee” or dismissed his March 27 letter as “snitty,” and thus clearly the work of underlings. It wasn’t just that Barr implied that Mueller was either too timid or too incompetentto come to a conclusion on the question of whether Donald Trump had obstructed justice. And it wasn’t just that Barr suggested that since the entire Mueller probe had been proven to be “based on false accusations,” it was illegitimate, which certainly suggests that Mueller devoted two long years to a—you guessed it—witch hunt. Presumably, from now on, if the president decides any legal investigation is “based on false accusations,” he can just go ahead and impede it, a framing that makes a hash of everything Mueller sought to do. When pressed Wednesday on Mueller’s bona fides, Barr snapped that “Bob Mueller is the equivalent of a U.S. Attorney. … His work concluded when he sent his report to the attorney general. At that point, it was my baby.” This is not how you talk about a colleague you respect.

All true. And this piece was written before we saw the even more scathing insults hurled at Mueller by WH counsel Emmet Flood.

It’s clear that the White House and their supine minions in the DOJ have decided that Mueller must be destroyed. As I wrote earlier, I’m sure this is largely at the behest of Trump himself. It’s how he operates.

Lithwick argues that Mueller is going to have to climb down from his pedestal and engage in the fight:

Mueller, a lifelong Republican, has tried—probably harder than any public figure in the Trump ambit—to avoid doing anything that would draw him into the tractor beam of bullying, name-calling, and soapy melodrama that are the final resting place for anyone who involves himself with this president. Where lesser men have attempted to split the difference, compromise at the margins, and to persuade themselves that they were still doing noble work despite allowing Donald Trump to use and exploit them, Mueller simply never engaged, even when the president was attacking him by name. It was an elegant dance, along the invisible seam of public and private, institutionalism and self-protection. This studied restraint rested on Mueller’s unwavering assumption that if he trusted the fact-finding process of the investigation and the machinery of the Justice Department, he might come out the other side intact.

Well, any hope that Barr the institutionalist or Barr the defender of the Justice Department or Barr the believer in truth-seeking processes was going to help Robert Mueller thread this impossibly small needle was vaporized conclusively this week, and now, as my colleague Mark Joseph Stern argues, Robert Mueller is going to have to talk. Efforts to speak through his filings have proved futile in the hands of someone willing to twist and compromise Mueller’s own words until they mean the very opposite of what they originally established. And now that the rift between these two old friends and colleagues has been laid bare, the only person who can do anything about it is the person who has practically made a religion of keeping his head down.

Mueller has a narrowing path along which he might hope to salvage his own words and his own work from the attorney general, who seems to have taken custody of Mueller’s “baby” and then unabashedly attempted to tell us all that the baby was actually an accent lamp all along. Nobody has been more voluble than I have about Mueller’s right and inclination to quietly do the work, then step aside. But if he doesn’t step into the limelight to say out loud what he has written, and proved, and corroborated, and supported (with evidence Barr seems never to even have inspected), his entire effort will only serve as confirmation that those of us who still believe in systems and investigations and truth are all a bunch of chumps.

I don’t envy Robert Mueller. As the one and only character in this endless gothic saga who has managed to remain untarnished by the president’s highly contagious lack of principle, I take no pleasure in arguing that he will now have to engage. His silence and doggedness should have spoken louder than words. But in the hands of someone as bent on politicizing his efforts as William Barr, his silence and doggedness have now been weaponized against him. The special counsel cannot just live amid the heroic metaphors anymore.

I have no idea if he will do it. The report shows that they had uncovered tons of probable cause to believe Trump obstructed justice and made it very clear that he betrayed the country, if not criminally, by welcoming the Russian government sabotage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. So, it’s fair to say that he does not believe Trump did nothing wrong.

However, he is one of the few remaining “institutionalists” in the Republican party so it’s not impossible to believe that if he’s called to testify, he will keep to the old fashioned credo “never complain never explain,” just give a dry recitation of his report and then ride off into the sunset content to let history make its judgment on his legacy. He’s the only one Barr has said he will allow to testify … which makes nervous.

On the other hand, he has seen counterintelligence evidence. It’s possible that even if he doesn’t act out of his own ego that he will see this as a matter of patriotism.

There are very few heroes in our politics, particularly these days. So, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Mueller may end up being just like the rest. But if he isn’t, he’s going to have to step up in a big way, now.

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The “deterrent” was to take the children and not return them

by digby

This latest on the family separations at the border is just chilling:

On the same day the Trump administration said it would reunite thousands of migrant families it had separated at the border with the help of a “central database,” an official was admitting privately the government only had enough information to reconnect 60 parents with their kids, according to emails obtained by NBC News.

“[I]n short, no, we do not have any linkages from parents to [children], save for a handful,” a Health and Human Services official told a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement on June 23, 2018. “We have a list of parent alien numbers but no way to link them to children.”

In the absence of an effective database, the emails show, officials then began scrambling to fill out a simple spreadsheet with data in hopes of reuniting as many as families as they could.

The gaps in the system for tracking separations would result in a months-long effort to reunite nearly 3,000 families separated under the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. Officials had to review all the relevant records manually, a process that continues.

Nearly a year later, as many as 55 children separated last year under zero tolerance are still in Health and Human Services (HHS) custody at shelters around the country. The shortage of data has also complicated efforts to find many other children, potentially thousands, separated prior to zero tolerance. The administration’s lawyers have said in court filings that reunification could take years.

On June 20, 2018, President Donald Trump ended his separation policy by executive order amidst immense public pressure. Three days later, the Department of Homeland Security issued a fact sheet proclaiming the “United States government knows the location of all children in its custody and is working to reunite them with their families.”

The document said that DHS and HHS, the agency that cares for undocumented children when they are separated from their parents, “have a process established to ensure that family members know the location of their children,” with “a central database which HHS and DHS can access and update.”

But at the time, there was no database with information for both parents and children. Some of the necessary information was missing altogether. Behind the scenes, officials began exchanging emails, provided to NBC News by the House Judiciary Committee, that revealed how unprepared the agencies were to reunite families.

On the afternoon of June 23, Thomas Fitzgerald, a data analyst at HHS, e-mailed Matthew Albence, then the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s enforcement and removal operations and now the acting head of ICE. ICE was and remains the agency responsible for detaining, releasing or deporting separated parents.

Fitzgerald asked for “alien numbers” of separated parents to be filled into a spreadsheet of 2,219 children, along with whether or not the parent was already deported, among other information. Alien numbers are assigned to every migrant apprehended by Border Patrol and are how the government tracks them.

Albence replied several hours later. The first line of his email asks, “[A]re you saying you don’t have the alien number for any of the parents?”

“[T]he type and volume of what you are requesting,” Albence said, “is not something that we are going to be able to complete in a rapid fashion, and in fact, we may not have some of it.”

Fitzgerald wrote back to Albence, confirming HHS did not have a way to connect the thousands of children to their parents. He said he had information for a handful of parents, “about 60.”

The emails confirm a finding by the DHS Office of Inspector General last September. In a report on family separations, the IG said that conversations with ICE employees indicated there was “no evidence” of a centralized database “containing location information for separated parents and minors.”

A former administration official told NBC News that there was a central database, “but the database did not contain enough information to successfully reunite parents and kids. …The information sharing from DHS provided initially was not enough to be able to quickly reunite parents and kids.”

Former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and other government officials repeatedly claimed that the Trump administration was keeping track of separations. In a June 19, 2018, press conference at the White House, Nielsen insisted all separated children were being tracked.

“It is not that I don’t know where they are,” said Nielsen. “I’m saying that the vast majority of children are held by Health and Human Services.”

Albence did not respond to a request for comment. Fitzgerald referred questions to DHS. DHS said that DHS and HHS took the information about parents entered on spreadsheets and added it to a SharePoint site already populated by HHS with information about unaccompanied children.

HHS referred NBC News to a June 26, 2018 quote from Secretary Alex Azar: “There is no reason why any parent would not know where their child is located. I’ve sat on the ORR portal with just basic keystrokes, within seconds could find any child in our care for any parent.”

In a statement, HHS spokesperson Evelyn Stauffer said, “HHS knows where each and every unaccompanied child in HHS custody is at any given time, and that was true during the summer of 2018. What Secretary Azar said was true and is still true today.”

Three days after the emails between Fitzgerald and Albence, Judge Dana Sabraw of the Southern District of California ordered the Trump administration to reunite families within 30 days.

Once that deadline passed with hundreds of families still waiting in limbo, Sabraw expressed his frustration with the government agencies responsible for reunifying families.

“Each had its own boss,” Sabraw said in his San Diego courtroom. “And they didn’t communicate, so what was lost in the process was the family. The parents didn’t know where the children were, and the children didn’t know where the parents were. And the government didn’t know, either.”

Lee Gelernt, lead lawyer for the ACLU in the separations case, said Wednesday, “It is now clear beyond doubt that the government never had a proper tracking system but unfortunately they pretended in the beginning that they did. It is likely there’s still much more for the public to learn about how bad things really were.”

For sure.

Personally, I think they did this knowing full well that they would not be able to reunite kids and parents. The whole point of this disgusting practice was deterrence. They believed that if they separated kids and parents couldn’t find them, word would filter back to the asylum seekers in other countries that the US government was taking their kids and not giving them back.

I’m not being hyperbolic:

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday that separating migrant families at the border could deter illegal immigration and that he was considering several options to tighten border security.

In June, Trump abandoned his policy of separating immigrant children from their parents on the U.S.-Mexico border after images of youngsters in cages sparked outrage at home and abroad.

But some Trump administration officials have said the policy, under which some 2,600 children were separated from their parents, was needed to secure the border and deter illegal immigration.

Trump seemed to support that argument on Saturday.

“If they feel there will be separation, they don’t come,” he said of migrants during comments to reporters at the White House.

Taking the kids was the plan. Keeping them gave it teeth.

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If you want proof that Republicans can buck Trump if it’s really important to them …

by digby

… look no further than the way they nixed his choices for the Fed. Stephen Moore withdrew today. He boo-hooed about it to Fox News:

President Trump’s Federal Reserve board pick Stephen Moore is “bummed out” over withdrawing his bid Opens a New Window.
“It was very disappointing that this couldn’t go forward but you know the fact is that this kind of sleaze campaign over the last three or four weeks was just really too tough for me and my family and you know we just decided it was much better for Donald Trump to select someone who doesn’t have a 30-year paper trail,” he told FOX Business’ Neil Cavuto on Thursday.

“If people are looking at things that I was writing 25 years ago, and you know looking through my divorce records, and it just was it was too difficult for us, and I feel bad because I feel like I’ve let a lot of people down and the president, most of all,” he said.

“He was incredibly nice at times and when I told him about this and he understood. But you know I’m bummed out frankly that I’m not going to be over there the fact because I think I could have some ideas that the Fed really needs.”

Republicans are happy to act as if they have no power because the Trumpies out in Trumpland love the president so much that they can’t risk going against him. But obviously, when they and their rich donors really don’t like something, they have no problem opposing it.

Let’s not kid ourselves any further. Every time they go along with Trump’s agenda it’s because they want to.

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The Trumpies are so happy with Bill Barr

by digby

The Daily Beast reports on the White House ecstasy over Bill Barr’s hackishness:

Shortly after Attorney General William Barr’s Senate testimony ended on Wednesday, the Trump White House convened a conference call with surrogates and media allies. On it, Steven Groves, who serves as a deputy press secretary, assured listeners that the attorney general had not just done “a great job” but, according to a person on the call, “dismembered” Democratic lawmakers who sparred with him over whether the president had tried to obstruct justice.

What had seemed, to most outside observers, as a shaky moment for the administration—with the attorney general peppered as to why Special Counsel Robert Mueller had written him expressing frustration with Barr’s portrayal of Mueller’s findings—was internalized at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as a triumph.

“We have Barr’s back,” a senior White House official told The Daily Beast shortly after the Capitol Hill hearing wrapped following hours of testimony. And if there was any doubt that Trumpland was feeling emboldened by the proceedings it was dispelled just hours later, when Barr formally declined to attend a follow-up session with House Democrats on Thursday, citing, in part, his belief that he’d made himself readily available already to lawmakers.

White House officials maintained that the decision to ghost on the House Judiciary Committee was Barr’s alone. But among allies of the president, it was a glorious little F-U to the nattering critics in Congress.

“No, I don’t think [Barr] should appear before House Judiciary—they’re playing games with him,” John Dowd, Trump’s former lawyer in the Russia investigation who still keeps in touch with the president, told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “This is the attorney general of the United States. This is a high official of a coequal branch. You don’t treat him that way.”

Congressional Democrats, Dowd added, had been “juvenile” and asked “stupid questions.”

Lol. But the Executive branch telling congress to go fuck itself and the president namecalling like a four-year-old every single day for two years is extremely respectful.

Barr’s hearing on Wednesday and his refusal to testify on Thursday mark yet another escalation in the fight between congressional Democrats and the Trump administration over access to, and the interpretation of, the Mueller report. What had started out as a battle over the institutional powers of coequal branches has morphed into name-calling and overt political posturing, with the administration increasingly adopting the position that it simply won’t abide by Congress’ prerogatives.

Barr’s appearance came just hours after The Washington Post reported that Mueller wrote a letter to Barr in March, in which he said that the attorney general’s summary of his report “did not fully capture the context, nature and context” of it. In his opening remarks, Barr addressed his interactions with Mueller leading up to the release of the special counsel’s report. But while he faced some tough questions by Democrats on the committee, Republicans largely gave him cover from the vitriol of his critics.

“I think he was treated disrespectfully,” Senator Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said of the questioning of Senate Democrats. “I thought he did an extraordinary job, was very professional throughout the hearing. What I saw most, out of all of that, was when you lost on the outcome of the investigation and a decision on no underlying crime, no obstruction, then they’re just trying to use it as fodder for as long as they can, I don’t think it lasts very long.”
[…]
As Barr was stonewalling House Democrats, the Department of Justice was also blowing past its 10 a.m. deadline to submit the full, unredacted Mueller report to the judiciary committee, which had issued a subpoena for the report several weeks ago. Nadler said on Wednesday evening that the committee is seeking a contempt citation for the report.

The stonewalling from the administration has led to an uptick in meetings between various House committees about how to both compel Barr’s testimony and force President Trump to comply with congressional investigations. One senior Democratic aide said party leadership felt that one way to get Trump to capitulate was to continue using public testimonies by senior officials to “name and shame” the administration with the hope of bringing the focus back to Mueller’s findings.

But some Democrats are already thinking past Barr. On Wednesday, various lawmakers called on Mueller himself to testify, demanding that the Department of Justice officially set a day for such a hearing, which it has so far been reluctant to do.

Mueller’s testimony would be a fireworks display-type ending to a two-year-long investigation. But Democrats also believe that it could open new doors for investigating the president and his family.

For the White House and the Department of Justice, that would prove to be a nightmare, especially as Trump and his team gear up for the 2020 campaign. But it might not be one they can avoid. Several lawyers and former DOJ officials who spoke to The Daily Beast said there is no legal foundation or reason why the department would not allow Mueller to testify even if he is still technically a DOJ employee.

“I don’t see a legal basis on which they could prevent him from testifying,” said Elliot Williams, a the former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legislative Affairs at DOJ, adding that any slow-walking by DOJ is “political if nothing else.”

“I think it is improbable and politically suicidal for the administration to not have Mueller testify at this point given the enormous public interest in his testimony,” he added.

Of course the administration is going to do this. They have perfected the counter-narrative approach to politics. With their state media, it’s fairly easy to do it. For the rest of us it feels like gaslighting but it serves their partisan purposes.

That Senate Republicans have all lined up behind it remains shocking. I don’t know why, to be honest. They’ve shown over and over again that they have no honor. But still …

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The White House officially declares war on Robert Mueller

by digby

Flood is doing his job here. They are fighting impeachment now (even if the Dems are too timid to fficially call it that) and they need to do damage control on the executive privilege waivers. This will go to court. But by officially calling him a hack (as opposed to Fox News and Trump’s twitter feed) they are ensuring that Mueller himself is going to have to fight back. I feel confident that Trump insisted they go this way.

This is war.

The White House has accused special counsel Robert Mueller’s team of playing politics with the investigation and wildly straying from their mission in a letter sent to Attorney General William Barr last month and released Thursday afternoon.

In the five-page letter, a top White House lawyer, Emmet Flood, raised several concerns with the substance and format of Mueller’s report, which did not establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and the Russians but did unearth substantial evidence of obstruction by Trump, but without saying if the President should be prosecuted.

Flood slammed Mueller’s approach to the obstruction investigation. Even though current Justice Department guidelines say a sitting president cannot be charged, Flood wrote that Mueller needed to “either ask the grand jury to return an indictment or decline to charge the case.”

“The (special counsel) instead produced a prosecutorial curiosity — part ‘truth commission’ report and part law school exam paper,” Flood wrote.

“Far more detailed than the text of any known criminal indictment or declination memorandum, the report is laden with factual information that has never been subjected to adversarial testing or independent analysis,” he added.

Trump, however, has been touting the report and Barr’s analysis as proof he was exonerated. “No Collusion – No Obstruction!” he tweeted April 19 and has repeated several times.

The letter is dated April 19, one day after the Justice Department released the redacted report to the public.

In the report, Mueller directly explained how those internal Justice Department rules against indicting a president had a major impact on his internal deliberations. In effect, Mueller framed his entire obstruction investigation around the notion that he couldn’t bring any charges against Trump even if he found ironclad evidence against him, but wanted to preserve the evidence and included references to Congress’ unique constitutional role to hold a president accountable.

Mueller explained in his report that he saw the effort in part as preserving details because the President “does not have immunity after he leaves office” and that his team “conducted a thorough factual investigation in order to preserve the evidence when memories were fresh and documentary materials were available.”

Another part of the letter explains the White House argument that Mueller overstepped his role by providing a “road map” that Congress could use to initiate impeachment proceedings. Mueller never said this directly in his report, but some Democrats and commentators have said that the report could give Congress what it needs to take the next steps against Trump.

“Under a constitution of separated powers, (Justice Department officials) should not be in the business of creating ‘road maps’ for the purpose of transmitting them to (Congressional) committees,” Flood wrote.

The letter criticizes Mueller’s decision to document nearly 200 pages of extraordinary details from its obstruction investigation. Justice Department regulations require Mueller to submit a “confidential report” to the attorney general explaining decisions whether not to charge people under investigation. The regulations don’t impose limits on the length or detail of the report.

Essentially, the White House letter argues that Mueller’s team was playing politics when they specifically stated in the report that it “does not exonerate” Trump of obstruction of justice.

“The (special counsel’s) inverted-proof-standard and ‘exoneration’ statements can be understood only as political statements, issuing from persons (federal prosecutors) who in our system of government are rightly expected never to be political in the performance of their duties,” Flood said, echoing Trump’s longstanding position that Mueller’s team is biased.

With an eye toward upcoming battles with House Democrats, the letter also makes clear that the White House wants to preserve all executive privilege for all future proceedings. Just because the President did not assert privilege for the report doesn’t mean he will not do so in the future.

“The President therefore wants the following features of his decision to be known and understood,” Flood wrote. “His decision not to assert privilege is not a waiver of executive privilege for any other material or for any other purpose.”

As hundreds of others have already said, including myself, Trump just wants to run out the clock before the election and hopes the economy, Russia and general cheating will carry him over the line and get him back the House 18 months from now.

Fasten your seatbelts.

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Funniest headline of the day

by digby

Via Politico:

Three Senate Democrats voted for William Barr to be attorney general. Now at least two of them say they might have made a mistake.

After revelations that special counsel Robert Mueller took issue with Barr’s presentation of the Russia investigation findings, a pair of centrist Democrats said they are having second thoughts about having supported Barr’s confirmation earlier this year.

Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), who is the most vulnerable Democratic senator up for reelection next year, said he is “greatly, greatly disappointed in what I am seeing in the attorney general.” While Barr did follow through on releasing a redacted version of the Mueller report and didn’t quash the investigation, Jones now has much deeper concerns.

“I also thought he would bring this institutional stability to the Department of Justice — and not be the president’s personal lawyer. And he seems like he is moving and has moved toward a less independent role,” Jones said in an interview. “That bothers me for the 12 remaining investigations out there.”

Asked whether he regretted his vote, Jones replied: “I’m getting close to that. I haven’t said that yet. But it sure is so disappointing. I’m getting close. You might want to check tomorrow” after he reviews the hearing.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who also initially supported Barr, said if Mueller’s issues with Barr prove out, “Absolutely, I have buyer’s remorse. I would have made a big mistake.” Manchin said he will lean on Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to bring Mueller in for a hearing, though Graham has said he has no plans to do so.

“It’s troubling, absolutely. The difference between the interpretation between what Mueller really meant and what he intended. And he thought he didn’t present it properly. And Barr said he basically did represent properly,” Manchin said. “We’ve got to get that cleared up. And I would encourage my friend Lindsey Graham to bring Mueller in as quickly as possible.”

The third Democrat who supported Barr, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, has requested a meeting with Barr about the discrepancies between his view of the special counsel’s report and Mueller’s, an aide said.

Red state Democrats always think they will somehow benefit from votes like this and they never do. Jones and Sinema are up for election and Manchin is just … Manchin. But the only way they will keep their seats in 2020 is if there is if Democrats win a decisive victory. They certainly won’t win because they voted with the Republicans for William Barr. To wring their hands about it now is just silly.

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And the media gives Rudy a little kiss

by digby

The New York Times has a big story today ostensibly about Joe Biden’s son’s activities in Ukraine. It’s very hard to follow and it’s hard to understand why it merits a big story at this point.

Until you get many paragraphs down:

[T]he renewed scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s experience in Ukraine has also been fanned by allies of Mr. Trump. They have been eager to publicize and even encourage the investigation, as well as other Ukrainian inquiries that serve Mr. Trump’s political ends, underscoring the Trump campaign’s concern about the electoral threat from the former vice president’s presidential campaign.

The Trump team’s efforts to draw attention to the Bidens’ work in Ukraine, which is already yielding coverage in conservative media, has been led partly by Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as a lawyer for Mr. Trump in the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Giuliani’s involvement raises questions about whether Mr. Trump is endorsing an effort to push a foreign government to proceed with a case that could hurt a political opponent at home.

Mr. Giuliani has discussed the Burisma investigation, and its intersection with the Bidens, with the ousted Ukrainian prosecutor general and the current prosecutor. He met with the current prosecutor multiple times in New York this year. The current prosecutor general later told associates that, during one of the meetings, Mr. Giuliani called Mr. Trump excitedly to brief him on his findings, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Mr. Giuliani declined to comment on any such phone call with Mr. Trump, but acknowledged that he has discussed the matter with the president on multiple occasions. Mr. Trump, in turn, recently suggested he would like Attorney General William P. Barr to look into the material gathered by the Ukrainian prosecutors — echoing repeated calls from Mr. Giuliani for the Justice Department to investigate the Bidens’ Ukrainian work and other connections between Ukraine and the United States.

Mr. Giuliani said he got involved because he was seeking to counter the Mueller investigation with evidence that Democrats conspired with sympathetic Ukrainians to help initiate what became the special counsel’s inquiry.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, called for investigations into the Bidens’ connections with Ukraine.CreditJoshua Roberts/Reuters

Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, called for investigations into the Bidens’ connections with Ukraine.CreditJoshua Roberts/Reuters

“I can assure you this all started with an allegation about possible Ukrainian involvement in the investigation of Russian meddling, and not Biden,” Mr. Giuliani said. “The Biden piece is collateral to the bigger story, but must still be investigated, but without the prejudgments that infected the collusion story.”

This is the lede but they didn’t frame it that way.

This is an early warning that it’s highly likely the press is going to to be running right-wing propaganda again.

Update: Brian Beutler points out that this is actually a harbinger of something even worse:

Donald Trump is still the president today, and absent any meaningful effort to penalize him for what he’s already done, he won’t walk away from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation chastened. He will instead, as I wrote after watching House Democrats’ horrifying response to the Mueller report, fill the void of accountability with autocratic ambition—including by seeking revenge against the people who began the investigation in the first place, and encouraging foreign autocrats to sabotage his Democratic presidential challengers.

Both of those dangers have already begun to materialize—but there are others as well.

Buried several paragraphs into this New York Times story about the work Joe Biden’s son Hunter did for a Ukrainian energy company while his father was Vice President, we learn that Trump’s own criminal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has engaged that country’s prosecutors to investigate the Bidens, and Trump himself has asked his loyalist attorney general, William Barr, “to look into the material gathered by the Ukrainian prosecutors—echoing repeated calls from Mr. Giuliani for the Justice Department to investigate the Bidens’ Ukrainian work.”

Through this reporting we can infer why (or one of the reasons why) a cat got Barr’s tongue at his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday when Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) asked him if “anyone at the White House had asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone.”

.@SenKamalaHarris: Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested you open an investigation into anyone?

BARR: ….. ah …..

HARRIS: Seems like something you should be able to answer

BARR: I don’t know ……. pic.twitter.com/8FIqrGzSrm

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 1, 2019

Barr isn’t just Trump’s cover up artist. In his last stint as attorney general he completed the Iran-Contra coverup, and, in the waning days of the George H.W. Bush administration, he pressured federal prosecutors in Little Rock, AR, to build a case against associates of Bill and Hillary Clinton, in the hope of ensnaring them in a scandal that might save his boss’s presidency.

In the intervening decades, Barr has only grown more conspiratorial and contemptuous of the rule of law. Two years ago he emailed New York Times reporter Peter Baker, “I have long believed that the predicate for investigating the [Uranium One] deal, as well as the [Clinton] foundation, is far stronger than any basis for investigating so-called ‘collusion,’” exposing the psyche of a man steeped in the authoritarian language of right-wing propaganda. If Trump wants the Justice Department to investigate the Bidens on the basis of whatever Giuliani cooked up with Ukrainian prosecutors, Barr is precisely the kind of attorney general who will make it happen. If that turns into a dead end, he will find something else. Other Trump loyalists—including Peter Schweizer, who cooked up the Uranium One conspiracy theory ahead of the last election—would like DOJ to investigate whether the Chinese government has leverage over the Bidens. Any port in the storm.

Peter Schweizer, whose earlier book spurred an FBI probe of the Clinton Foundation, alleges that China targeted family of Joe Biden with business deals https://t.co/98oQEpy5y8 via @WSJ

— Robert Barnes (@Barnes_Law) April 25, 2019

All of these developments form the backdrop of a scheme to knock out the Democratic candidate Trump is known to fear the most. Trump associates have been unusually frank, without seeming coy, about their concern that Biden could defeat Trump in the general election, and they would apparently like to neutralize the threat by embroiling Biden in a politically motivated criminal investigation.

This isn’t a clever strategy, but it is blunt and chilling, and, if successful, can and will be repeated to hobble whichever Democrat Trump fears second most, and ultimately on whichever Democrat wins the party’s 2020 presidential nomination.

It so nice of the New York Times to help out.

Again.

Remember:

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Above the law
by Tom Sullivan

American democracy? Welcome to Fifth Avenue. (The mouth is almost right.)

Stunning among other stunning statements Attorney General William Barr made Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee was his blithe declaration that the president is above the law.

Responding to questioning by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Barr claimed repeatedly Donald Trump had been “falsely accused” of coordinating with Russia. Deploying the “no underlying crime” red herring, Barr asserted that the president as head of government and the Department of Justice was entitled to close down an investigation into himself if he felt it was off the rails:

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.”

Wild from Barr: If the president feels a proceeding is unfounded, "the president does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course. The president could terminate the proceeding and it would not be a corrupt intent because he was being falsely accused." pic.twitter.com/SMpiIXia92— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) May 1, 2019

The supposed chief law enforcement officer of the United States of America declared President Donald J. Trump his own grandpa prosecutor, judge, and jury. Bill Barr declared Trump king.

As Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) tweeted repeatedly during the proceeding, Barr never specified what details in the Mueller report he repeatedly mischaracterized were false. Democrats never pressed him to name them.

What the Mueller Impeachment Referral found — after failing to get Trump to sit for an interview — was there was not enough evidence to bring formal conspiracy charges provable in court. Details such as what became of the Trump campaign internal polling data Paul Manafort gave to a suspected Russian intelligence asset and what Roger Stone’s campaign role was in coordinating with Wikileaks on releasing stolen emails remain muddy. As is whether Trump’s conduct in dangling pardons before his associates obstructed Mueller’s finding out. But there was plenty enough misconduct, Mueller suggested, to launch an impeachment investigation.

The report states, “[W]e were not persuaded by the argument that the President has blanket constitutional immunity to engage in acts that would corruptly obstruct justice through the exercise of otherwise-valid Article TI powers. 1091” (Pg. 178, Pt. II) Footnote 1091 refers to impeachment as a remedy.

The always-caustic Rick Wilson predicted Barr’s move before he made it, warning Tuesday evening that with his knowledge of Washington’s “folkways and expected behaviors” he has twice lulled Democrats into thinking he is a rational, pre-Trump Republican. They clearly haven’t caught on that he is not. Perhaps Wednesday disabused them. Wilson cautions, “Impeachment for [Trump] is reality TV catnip … Once it fails, he’s free to rape and pillage the remains of Washington.” Wilson declares, “The GOP is Trump now, and Trump is the GOP.”

Former F.B.I. director James Comey explained in the New York Times Wednesday how that occurred:

Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring. For example, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, resigned over principle, a concept so alien to Mr. Trump that it took days for the president to realize what had happened, before he could start lying about the man.

But more often, proximity to an amoral leader reveals something depressing. I think that’s at least part of what we’ve seen with Bill Barr and Rod Rosenstein. Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like Mr. Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.

Giving silent assent as Trump lies about what “everyone thinks” and offering up the fawning praise he demands, Comey writes, slowly “pulls all of those present into a silent circle of assent” until they are lost. Comey may be sanctimonious, but it doesn’t mean he is wrong.

Republicans, the party of wealth and the “petite bourgeoisie” have found their mad king in Donald Trump. I have long written that the royalist strain among us, present since before the Revolution, has never slept far below the surface. That sleeping desire for absolutism has awakened.

Comey is not alone in seeing how it has overtaken us bite by bite:

He slipped several times, but the biggest slip seemed to be planned. Barr argued that Trump (or any president) could shut down an investigation into his own crimes, by simply declaring himself “falsely accused.”

Barr is a monarchist. Trump is the GOP’s king.

Hole card seen.— Shockratees 🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈🐄 (@ThatShockratees) May 2, 2019

Fascism, Stalinism, monarchy, despotism – all names for what fills the void when democracy is dismantled. It’s what self-dubbed “libertarians” meant to do all along.— Shockratees 🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈🐄 (@ThatShockratees) May 2, 2019

Getting government-by-the-people out of the way, piece by small piece, until the vacuum opens and government-by-ONE-person rushes in to fill it.

It’s been the GOP right-wing’s project for decades. And it was inevitable that foreign enemies of democracy co-opted it as their own.— Shockratees 🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈🐄 (@ThatShockratees) May 2, 2019

This is a perilous moment. Best to make yourselves heard and felt.

If the shoe was on the other foot, would Republicans be so blase?

by digby

Barr pretty much gave a green light to any foreign country that wants sabotage American elections. He’s protecting Trump but the way the Republicans are acting, it’s quite obvious that they believe this is a big advantage for them generally.

And they are actually right to say that. Democrats would turn on their own if they did this. Republicans will not. Clearly. This is a Republican-only strategy.

However, it’s still fun to see what they say when someone asks them what they would do if a Democrat were in the same position:

On @AJUpFront, I asked Trump campaign adviser Marc Porter if he was ok with the Democratic 2020 presidential candidate calling on China to hack Trump’s emails, or for the candidate’s kids to meet in secret with representatives of the Iranian government:pic.twitter.com/g9zpDjg0Zb

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) May 1, 2019

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