We have to keep our eyes on Barr
by digby
Judging from the reactions by most of the right wing, this piece by Michael Tomasky from this morning, before the Horowitz report dropped, looks pretty prescient:
Will reality stop the Trumpists? It never has. They’ll turn to three (at least!) tried and true methods of the demagogue.
One: They’ll dump on Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Well-known deep-stater, etc etc. Don’t buy it. Last week, the Center for American Progress put out an eye-opening report about Horowitz. Turns out that during the Obama administration, Horowitz issued two reports on Fast & Furious, the “scandal” that was supposed to lead to Obummer’s impeachment, while during the Trump years Horowitz has not launched a single investigation into any allegations of corruption within the Department of Justice.
More, from the report: “Horowitz’s lack of action in this regard is a significant anomaly among his peers. Public records suggest that he is the only inspector general at a major federal agency who has not investigated at least one potential instance of corruption or abuse of power by a Trump appointee. In fact, even a non-exhaustive review of inspector general reports from across the government quickly demonstrates that the majority of Cabinet-level agencies have launched multiple investigations. While some did not lead to findings of wrongdoing, others prompted the resignations of high-level Trump officials.”
You really have to go out of your way to find no corruption in this administration. But this is what Horowitz has done. If he’s a deep stater, he’s a pretty incompetent one.
Two: They’ll try to characterize the findings as bombshells anyway. I obviously don’t know as I write what the findings will be, but it sounds as if they’re likely to be violations of procedure of the type that probably happen a lot of the time, because we live in an imperfect world where investigations are conducted by imperfect people with imperfect information making the best judgments they can. People can make mistakes and still not be guilty of advancing a conspiracy against the president.
Three: They’ll just lie. They’ll dismiss the report as propaganda and keep on saying the same things they’ve been saying. Trump will certainly do that. And as long as he does it, his apologists will do it too.
So the questions now are what will Bill Barr do about all this, and what will the Democrats do about Barr.
While Horowitz and Durham’s less-than-bombshell reports suggest that there are still limits to how far the Justice Department will go to defend Trump, the more that we hear from the attorney general, the more he sounds like an out-and-out fascist.
There was the Notre Dame speech in October, where he denounced liberalism and secularism and warned that “militant secularists” were out to destroy America’s “moral order” with rhetoric that would have fit right in at Nuremberg.
The report was as Tomasky predicted. There were some low level mistakes and some problems with the FISA warrants for Carter Page which had no effect on the ultimate decision to proceed with the investigation.
Barr publicly disagreed with Horowitz’s findings. He got his henchman Durham to break the rules and come out and say that he too disagrees with the findings, despite the fact that he hasn’t completed his report! thus proving what we all suspected — that he’s in the tank with Barr and Trump. The DOJ is rotting from the inside out.
Trump went with the second choice — he proclaimed total victory making it sound as if the report was a devastating takedown of the Deep State. Of course.
But as Tomasky points out we have a very, very serious problem with Bob Barr. He is an authoritarian with Fox News brain rot and I honestly think he has the same megalomania as his boss.
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