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Giuliani says Trump asked him to brief Justice Dept. and GOP senators on his Ukraine findings

Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, said Tuesday that the president has asked him to brief the Justice Department and Republican senators on his findings from a recent trip to Ukraine ahead of a likely Senate impeachment trial.

“He wants me to do it,” Giuliani said in a brief interview. “I’m working on pulling it together and hope to have it done by the end of the week.”

However, it is unclear whether GOP senators or Justice Department officials want information from Giuliani, whose meetings in Europe last week with Ukrainian sources drew condemnation from Democratic lawmakers and winces even from some Republicans.

Experts blast Bill Barr for ‘utterly shocking bad faith’ NBC interview attacking FBI: ‘Sean Hannity is the attorney general now‘

In a stunning move the Attorney General of the United States on Tuesday blasted the Federal Bureau of Investigation, widely separating himself from the findings of the Dept. of Justice Inspector General’s report. Barr also claimed the FBI should have ended the counterintelligence investigation into Donald Trump once he was elected president.

And Barr even said the FBI acted in “bad faith” in conducting the investigation into Trump and Russia.

Effectively, Barr is saying not only should the president never be prosecuted, but presidents should never be investigated. All these statements are contrary to what many if not most constitutional experts have said.

Barr criticizes FBI, says it’s possible agents acted in ‘bad faith’ in Trump probe

Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday offered stern criticism of the FBI over its investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016, disputing a Justice Department inspector general’s report one day earlier and saying it is possible the bureau acted in “bad faith.”

Barr in an interview with NBC News also elaborated on his disagreement with a key conclusion of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report that the investigation was justified, saying he doesn’t believe the evidence backed up the steps that were taken.

“Here, I felt this was very flimsy,” Barr said. “I think when you step back here and you say, ‘What was this all based on,’ it’s not sufficient.”

Five things to watch in Russia probe review

Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz’s long-awaited report examining the FBI’s actions in the early stages of the 2016 investigation into the Trump campaign and Russian election interference is slated to drop Monday.

President Trump and his allies have buzzed about the report for months and are hoping to be validated in their beliefs that the FBI acted improperly. But early indications suggest the report is unlikely to find that the bureau exhibited bias against the president that tainted their efforts.

Here are five things to watch for when the report is made public.

Trump, GOP shift focus from alleged surveillance abuse to Durham Russia probe

Republicans are preparing to shrug off a forthcoming report on alleged surveillance abuse during the 2016 campaign and turn their focus to an ongoing investigation of the Russia probe.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday is expected to release the long-awaited results of Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign was improperly spied on during the previous presidential election.

While Republicans have been careful to be respectful of Horowitz and hope he can answer their questions, they’re also warning that his authority is limited and he won’t be the final word.

Trump’s Plot To ‘Investigate The Investigators’ Is A Flop

For months, the names of Michael Horowitz and John Durham have figured in the pounding rhythms of right-wing media in which a heroically afflicted president faces down his perfidious enemies. A steady drumbeat of reports from Fox News, echoed by President Trump and Republican loyalists in Congress, proclaimed these two obscure Justice Department officials would get to the bottom of an alleged conspiracy against the Trump presidency.

They would, in Trump’s words, “investigate the investigators.” It was oh so promising.

“I will tell you this,” Trump blustered on October 25. “I think you’re going to see a lot of really bad things,” he said. “I leave it all up to the attorney general and I leave it all up to the people that are working with the attorney general who I don’t know. … I think you’ll see things that nobody would’ve believed.”

Supreme Court won’t let Justice Dept. immediately resume federal executions after hiatus

The Supreme Court on Friday refused to let the Justice Department immediately resume federal executions, denying the government’s request to bypass a lower-court ruling that the department likely exceeded its powers by adopting a new lethal injection protocol.

The order denying the stay will allow a federal appeals court to review the ruling blocking the executions.

No dissents were recorded, but three justices — Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh — included a statement saying they respected the decision while urging the appeals court to move quickly in deciding the case.

The Lack of Oversight in Trump’s Justice Department

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In the upcoming days, the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG), led by Michael Horowitz, will be releasing a report related to President Donald Trump’s frequent claims that the FBI spied on his 2016 campaign. And while early reports indicate the investigation will refute claims that the FBI did so, the report’s focus reflects a troubling trend of the OIG prioritizing investigations into conservative conspiracy theories rather than responding to substantive allegations of serious misconduct in the DOJ. To ensure the integrity of the DOJ, it is essential that this pattern is put to an end through robust, comprehensive oversight efforts.

Investigations by the DOJ’s OIG under Trump

Each federal agency has an oversight division, led by an inspector general, that is charged with investigating possible corruption within its respective agencies. Horowitz, the DOJ’s current inspector general, was confirmed to his position by President Barack Obama in 2012. In addition to his current position with the DOJ, Horowitz has served as the chair of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency since 2015. Prior to the Trump administration, he enjoyed a strong, bipartisan reputation in Washington.

At least during the Obama administration, Horowitz did not shy away from investigating allegations of misconduct attracting major public attention. In fact, he issued two reports—the first in 2012 and a follow-up in 2016—on Operation Fast and Furious, overseen by the DOJ. This topic was the ongoing focus of House Republicans, who also launched an investigation into it, with at least one prominent member of Congress claiming the DOJ’s actions could be compared to Watergate.

Barr’s handpicked prosecutor tells inspector general he can’t back right-wing theory that Russia case was U.S. intelligence setup

The prosecutor handpicked by Attorney General William P. Barr to scrutinize how U.S. agencies investigated President Trump’s 2016 campaign said he could not offer evidence to the Justice Department’s inspector general to support the suspicions of some conservatives that the case was a setup by American intelligence, people familiar with the matter said.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s office contacted U.S. Attorney John Durham, the prosecutor Barr personally tapped to lead a separate review of the 2016 probe into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, the people said. The inspector general also contacted several U.S. intelligence agencies.

Among Horowitz’s questions: whether a Maltese professor who interacted with a Trump campaign adviser was actually a U.S. intelligence asset deployed to ensnare the campaign, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the inspector general’s findings have not been made public.

Former CIA officer: Trump and his allies have a long history of bullying intelligence experts who probe Russian election interference

When Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council (NSC) senior director specializing in Russian and European affairs, testified before the House Intelligence Committee on November 21, she stressed that there was zero evidence to support the claim that Ukraine rather than Russia interfered in the United States’ 2016 presidential election. Nonetheless, the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory persists on the far right. And journalist Alex Finley, in a report for Just Security, discusses the extremes that President Donald Trump’s allies have been willing to go to in the hope of discrediting intelligence on Russian election interference in 2016.

The CrowdStrike conspiracy theory claims that in 2016, the cyber-security firm CrowdStrike conspired with Democrats and the Ukrainian government to frame the Russian government for interfering in the presidential election. According to the false claim that the Ukrainian government — not Russian President Vladimir Putin — was the real villain in 2016, Finley notes, “Trump never could have colluded with Russia, because Russia never did anything wrong.” And Finley notes that Attorney General William Barr has been investigating people in the U.S. intelligence community who have been part of the Russia investigation — and appointed federal prosecutor John Dunham to head that investigation.

Finley explains, “Last month, media outlets reported that Barr’s investigation had become a criminal one. Whether true or not, the claim — much like the public attacks from Trump, Republicans and the conservative media ecosystem — seemed like a clear signal to civil servants — whether in the FBI, the CIA or the NSA — to tread very carefully if they planned to take any actions that came anywhere near the Russia-Trump nexus again.”

View the complete November 26 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

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Investigations by the DOJ’s OIG under Trump

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