Barr’s global gallivanting is much more bizarre than we knew
by digby
I have to believe Barr is doing this in furtherance of his life-long project to ensure that the president of the United States is immune from the rule of law. But since it’s obvious that his brain has been thoroughly rotted by Fox News, he clearly doesn’t believe that the Intelligence agencies of Barack Obama’s administration had the right to look into the infiltration of the election in 2016:
[O]vershadowed by the publicity around the impeachment, is the ever-broadening investigation by William Barr, the attorney general, which the White House sees as a game-changer. An investigation which is seeking nothing less than to overturn the conclusion of the US intelligence services and special counsel Robert Mueller that Russia interfered in the last US presidential election.
This has now been designated a criminal investigation with power of subpoena and the possibility of prison sentences for those who have been allegedly involved in criminal actions, although exactly what these criminal actions entail remains unclear.
It may also seem odd that Trump, having repeatedly claimed that the Mueller report was a “complete and total exoneration” of him over Russiagate, is now going to such lengths to try and discredit it.
Ukraine is a common factor in both the impeachment hearings and the Barr investigation. The House is looking at claims that Trump withheld military aid to Kiev to force the Zelensky government to reopen investigations into unproven allegations, with Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani playing a leading part in this campaign.
The attorney general is focusing on the theory, aired on far-right conspiracy sites, and raised by Trump and Giuliani, that Ukraine framed Vladimir Putin over the US election in a complex triple-cross operation by impersonating Russian hackers.
Trump and Barr have also been asking other foreign governments for help in investigating the FBI, CIA and Mueller investigators. The US president has called on the Australian prime minister Scott Morrison for assistance, while the attorney general has been on similar missions to the UK and Italy.
And the information being requested has left allies astonished. One British official with knowledge of Barr’s wish list presented to London commented that “it is like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services”.
The article is worth reading if you’re confused about the various conspiracy theories.
The Attorney General is going around the world asking foreign allies to discredit the Mueller Report and advance the cockamamie theory that Ukraine framed Russia for the hacking and interference in 2016 on behalf of Hillary Clinton. I still can’t quite wrap my mind around this.
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