Tag: Bill Barr

Trump White House Changes Its Story on Michael Flynn

New York Times logoThree years ago, President Trump swiftly fired his first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, for lying to the F.B.I. Ahead of the November election, Mr. Trump and his allies are now telling a very different tale

WASHINGTON — After announcing that the Justice Department was dropping the criminal case against Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, Attorney General William P. Barr was presented with a crucial question: Was Mr. Flynn guilty of lying to the F.B.I. about the nature of phone calls he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States?

After all, Mr. Flynn had twice pleaded guilty to lying about them.

“Well, you know, people sometimes plead to things that turn out not to be crimes,” Mr. Barr said last week in an interview with CBS News. Then he went even further and described the infamous calls during the Trump presidential transition as “laudable.” Continue reading.

William Barr’s DOJ inadvertently named Saudi official suspected of helping the 9/11 hijackers after trying for 2 years to conceal his identity

AlterNet logoAfter an extraordinary, two-year battle to keep secret the name of a Saudi diplomat suspected of ties to the 9/11 plot, the Justice Department accidentally disclosed the man’s name in a court filing.

The revelation of the Saudi official’s identity, in a federal court filing last week, did little to illuminate links between the Al Qaeda hijackers and the Saudi government, which is being sued for complicity in the 2001 attacks by survivors and families of the victims.

In fact, the diplomat’s identity only deepens a mystery about why the Trump administration has fought so aggressively to keep the information under wraps. The disclosure, in a partially redacted statement from a senior FBI official, was first reported on Tuesday by Yahoo News. Continue reading.

U.S. judge puts Justice Department’s move to drop charges against Michael Flynn on hold

Washington Post logoA U.S. judge put on hold the Justice Department’s move to drop charges against Michael Flynn, saying he expects independent groups and legal experts to argue against the bid to exonerate President Trump’s former national security adviser of lying to the FBI.

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said in an order Tuesday that he expects individuals and organizations will seek to intervene in the politically charged case. Having others weigh in could preface more aggressive steps that the federal judge in Washington could take, including — as many outside observers have called for — holding a hearing to consider what to do.

Sullivan’s order came after the government took the highly irregular step Thursday of reversing its stance on upholding Flynn’s guilty plea. Continue reading.

Frank Figliuzzi: Trump’s ‘Obamagate’ comments and Barr’s Flynn meddling suggest troubling new pivot

Trump can’t pull off this ruse by himself, of course, but he has a partner. Barr is riding shotgun during this scorched-earth joyride against justice

In my 25 years as an FBI special agent and (now retired) head of the bureau’s counterintelligence, I learned the value of predictive analysis. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the FBI transitioned from an investigative agency adept at investigating what happened after the fact to an intelligence agency capable of forecasting and preventing harm from happening in the future.

Forecasting is a lot easier when there are clear clues. And when it comes to assessing the trap Attorney General William Barr and President Donald Trump appear to be setting for us, the warning signs are plentiful. We don’t need to read tea leaves for this. We only need to review tweets.

On Saturday, Trump retweeted a fantastical fiction of a theory from The Federalist asserting that former President Barack Obama’s White House intelligence discussions about, in part, the trustworthiness of incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn and members of the Trump transition team were proof that Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden were malevolently conspiring against the Trump administration. Continue reading.

Yale philosopher and author of ‘How Fascism Works’ explains why the pandemic offers Trump a dangerous opportunity to ‘rule by decree’

AlterNet logoA moment of reckoning is here. America must have committed great wrongs to be afflicted with the coronavirus pandemic and Donald Trump at the same time.

Authoritarians like Trump love disasters. Because they can only destroy and not create, authoritarians use such moments of misery and fear to expand their power.

Donald Trump is announcing that fact when he proclaims himself to be a “war president.” Such language is not just the superficial trappings of Trump wrapping himself in the flag and using empty words about “sacrifice” and “bravery” and “heroism.” It is something far worse and more sinister. As a “war president,” Trump is putting himself above the law and proclaiming the country is in a state of emergency. Continue reading.

Barr Openly Promotes Trump’s Dictatorial Ambitions

In a major step toward establishing a Trump dictatorship, the Justice Department moved Thursday to drop the criminal case against confessed felon Michael Flynn, the retired Army general and secret foreign agent who was Trump’s first national security adviser.

Instead of seeking equal justice under law, an extraordinary court filing demonstrated that Trump has one standard of justice for his enemies and an entirely different one for his allies. The court action shows how fully Trump has turned our Justice Department into his personal protection agency.

The 108-page court filing is rife with falsehoods and tortured interpretations of established facts, a mendacious necessity since Flynn twice confessed to multiple crimes under oath in open court. It argues that the lies Flynn told FBI agents were not “material” to the case against him. The trial court judge has already dismissed that as nonsense. Continue reading.

Storm builds around Barr over dropping of Flynn case

The Hill logoDemocrats and other critics are seizing on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) decision to drop the case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn, arguing it shows how heavily politicized it has become under Attorney General William Barr.

Anger over the extraordinary move by Justice to drop charges even after it secured a guilty plea has created a new political storm around Barr, who had previously angered Democrats for his handling of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

The latest surprise move approved by Barr makes him even more of a political lightning rod figure in Washington. Continue reading.

The Memo: Flynn case will become election issue

The Hill logoThe prosecution of Michael Flynn has been dropped, but the use of his case as a political weapon looks sure to intensify.

President Trump kept his rhetoric on the case red-hot in the immediate aftermath of Thursday’s decision from the Department of Justice (DOJ) to drop the case against the retired Army general, who had pleaded guilty on two occasions to lying to the FBI.

The president blasted the people behind Flynn’s prosecution as “human scum” to reporters — terminology that has grown familiar from Trump’s mouth but would once have been a shocking thing for a commander in chief to say in apparent reference to members of the FBI. Continue reading.

New report reveals Ukrainian charges against Paul Manafort were abruptly halted last year

AlterNet logoMuch has been written about Paul Manafort’s legal problems in the United States, where President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager was sentenced to seven and one-half years in federal prison after being convicted of crimes ranging from witness tampering to tax and bank fraud. But BuzzFeed reporters Tanya Kozyreva and Christopher Miller revealed on Friday that Manafort was also targeted by prosecutors in Ukraine.

“BuzzFeed News can now reveal that in May 2019, as Manafort settled into his U.S. prison cell, a special investigations unit inside the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office was preparing to wrap up a four-year-long investigation — drafting an indictment for him as well as for Greg Craig, a former Obama White House counsel and partner at the big-shot law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom,” report Kozyreva and Miller, both of whom are based in Kyiv, Ukraine.

The alleged crime in question, according to the BuzzFeed journalists, was embezzling government funds. BuzzFeed has obtained a copy of the Ukrainian indictment, which alleges, “The managing partner of Skadden Law Firm, Gregory B. Craig, and Paul Manafort intentionally participated in the misappropriation of the funds from the State Budget of Ukraine totaling $1,075,381.41 —  8,595,523.61 Ukrainian hryvnias and more than 600 times the tax-free minimum of citizens’ salaries — causing damage to the state.” Continue reading.

Here’s what Bill Barr doesn’t want you to remember about Michael Flynn

AlterNet logoOn October 7, 2016, the intelligence community issued a statement confirming that it was the Russian government that “directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.” Then, on January 6, 2017, they released an assessment of both Russian activities and intentions in their efforts to interfere the 2016 election. Here is their key finding:

We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.

Upon completion of that assessment, two issues remained: (1) the question of whether the Trump campaign had conspired with the Russian government and (2) how to respond to an adversary’s attempt to interfere in an election. The first question was eventually assigned to special counsel Robert Mueller and, on the second, President Obama ordered sanctions on individuals and entities involved in the interference efforts, shut down two Russian compounds in the U.S., and expelled more than 30 Russian intelligence operatives.