Tag: William Barr

Road ahead: Barr testifying on DOJ budget, likely to get grilled about Mueller report

House to vote on net neutrality bill before Democratic retreat, Senate picks up pace on nominations after going nuclear

All eyes will be on the House and Senate Appropriations committees this week — but not necessarily because of President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget blueprint.

Attorney General William P. Barr is scheduled to testify Tuesday in the House and Wednesday in the Senate about the Justice Department’s budget, but the conversation is sure to turn to his handling of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report.

Barr has come under criticism over reports that Mueller’s findings showed more evidence against the president, particularly regarding possible obstruction of justice, than the attorney general suggested in his four-page letter summarizing the report’s key conclusions.

View the complete April 8 article by Lindsey McPherson and Niels Nlesniewski on The Roll Call website here.

New hints of the Mueller report: Did Trump simply get rolled by the Russians?

Despite the fact that William Barr had made public comments denigrating the Mueller investigation and clearly auditioned for the job with a spurious memo suggesting that it was almost impossible for a president to obstruct justice, he was confirmed as Donald Trump’s new attorney general with little difficulty. After what had happened with Jeff Sessions, it was understood that Trump would never again stand for an AG recusing himself from any investigation of the president. So everyone knew that Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election would be in the hands of someone who was unlikely to be an honest broker.

Nonetheless, most of us gave Barr the benefit of the doubt. I wrote about Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who had been a conservative supporter of Richard Nixon. He was coerced into taking the job by White House chief of staff Alexander Haig, who told him, “We need you, Leon” — assuming he would be loyal to the president. When Jaworski saw the evidence against Nixon, however, he was appalled and moved forward with the investigation. I thought maybe that could happen with Barr too.

I should have known better. Barr was a very political attorney general during George H.W. Bush’s administration, recommending pardons for all the guilty players in the Iran-Contra case, showing that he wasn’t going to be one of those weaklings who saw the Nixon pardon as setting a bad example for the country. I should have realized that this wasn’t a case of someone who’d spent too much time watching Sean Hannity and was slightly out of it. Barr’s been a rock-solid right-winger for decades.

View the complete April 5 article by Heather Digby Parton with Salon on the AlterNet website here.

‘Tide has turned’ against Bill Barr as GOP lawmakers increasingly back away from Trump’s hand-picked AG: NBC analyst

NBC News national affairs analyst John Heileman explained how Attorney General Bill Barr is losing the support of Senate Republicans on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” on Thursday.

Host Lawrence O’Donnell showed a tweet by Sen. Chuck Grassley:

ChuckGrassley

✔@ChuckGrassley

I support release of the Mueller report

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24.8K people are talking about this

“He could have easily not put that tweet out today,” O’Donnell noted. “He used to be the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee which would have had direct jurisdiction, he would have been receiving these letters from Barr, so he’s an important voice among Republicans on this kind of issue.”

View the complete April 5 article by Bob Brigham with Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Some on Mueller’s Team Say Report Was More Damaging Than Barr Revealed

WASHINGTON — Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.

At stake in the dispute — the first evidence of tension between Mr. Barr and the special counsel’s office — is who shapes the public’s initial understanding of one of the most consequential government investigations in American history. Some members of Mr. Mueller’s team are concerned that, because Mr. Barr created the first narrative of the special counsel’s findings, Americans’ views will have hardened before the investigation’s conclusions become public.

Mr. Barr has said he will move quickly to release the nearly 400-page report but needs time to scrub out confidential information. The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to government officials familiar with the investigation. Mr. Barr only briefly cited the special counsel’s work in his letter.

View the complete April 3 article by Nicholas Fandos, Michael S. Schmidt and Mark Mazzetti on The New York Times website here.

Questions mount over Mueller, Barr and obstruction

Questions are mounting over special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into whether President Trump obstructed justice as lawmakers on Capitol Hill await the release of his report.

While Barr’s four-page letter to Congress on Sunday silenced suspicions Mueller would charge Trump or members of his campaign with conspiring with the Russian government, its contents only amplified the mystery surrounding the obstruction inquiry.

It remains unclear why Mueller declined to make a decision one way or another on whether Trump impeded his investigation, and Democrats have grown increasingly skeptical of Attorney General William Barr’s judgment that the evidence was insufficient to accuse Trump of obstruction. They also argue he is not a neutral arbiter.

View the complete March 30 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

Barr expects to release nearly 400-page Mueller report by mid-April

Attorney General William Barr told lawmakers on Friday that he expects to have a public version of special counsel Robert Mueller‘s report ready for release by mid-April and that President Trump has deferred to him to decide what makes it into the redacted document.

“Our progress is such that I anticipate we will be in a position to release the report by mid-April, if not sooner,” Barr wrote to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

“Although the President would have the right to assert privilege over certain parts of the report, he has stated publicly that he intends to defer to me and, accordingly, there are no plans to submit the report to the White House for a privilege review,” Barr wrote.

View the complete March 29 article by Olivia Beavers and Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

Here are all the Russian interference efforts that didn’t make it into Barr’s letter

Secessionists, fundamentalists, the NRA, and the far-left all played their role, but they didn’t make it into Barr’s summary report.

Special counsel Robert Mueller may not have found the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, but plenty of Americans — wittingly or otherwise — have helped Moscow’s election meddling efforts in recent years. Secessionists, Jill Stein and her campaign, and members of groups organized around gun rights and far-right Christian movements have spent the past few years cultivating ties with those close to the Kremlin and using their platforms to promote Russia-friendly ideas.

None of these groups were mentioned by Attorney General William Barr, who issued a letter on Sunday confirming that Russia conducted coordinated campaigns to interfere in America’s elections.

According to Barr, Mueller’s report found that Russian operatives reached out to Trump’s campaign, but that no member of the campaign actively colluded with the Russian government. However, Barr wrote that Mueller also “determined that there were two main Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.” Both of these efforts — social media interference, and stealing and disseminating internal Democratic documents and emails — were widely known before the report’s conclusion.

View the complete March 27 article by Casey Michel on the ThinkProgress website here.

Barr: White House To ‘Review’ Mueller Report Before Release

After special counsel Robert Mueller finished his report last week, Democrats warned that Trump’s cronies would scheme to conceal the full results of the investigation from the American people.

They were right.

On Tuesday afternoon, Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, said he will allow Trump to review Mueller’s final report before Congress or the public can see it. The news was shared by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one of Trump’s staunchest supporters in Congress.

View the complete March 26 article by Dan Desai Martin on the National Memo website here.

With Bill Barr’s fake Mueller report, the GOP is pulling out the playbook of lies it used to sell us on invading Iraq

It’s starting to look like the fix is in. For two years, special counsel Robert Mueller investigated the Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election, and the possibility that Donald Trump’s campaign somehow colluded with this conspiracy. Now there’s a report, but whether we’ll actually get to see it is unclear, as the Republicans are rapidly working in formation to keep the actual contents of the report from public view.

The strategy they’re using will feel awfully familiar to those of us who lived through the George W. Bush administration’s conspiracy to bamboozle the American public into accepting a war with Iraq: Distort the existing evidence. Lie whenever necessary. Exaggerate any evidence, no matter how iffy, that supports the desired conclusion. Stifle any contradictory evidence as much as possible. And manipulate a gullible media into amplifying the spin instead of reporting the truth.

The Mueller report is weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq, all over again. Republicans are using the same playbook to protect Trump that they used to hype the Iraq war, and the strategy seems, yet again, to be working.

View the complete March 26 article by Amanda Marcotte from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Bill Barr’s Remarkable History Of Scandalous Cover-Up

Back in 1992, the last time Bill Barr was U.S. attorney general, iconic New York Times columnist William Safire referred to him as “Cover-up General Barr” because of his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s involvement in “Iraqgate” and “Iron-Contra.”

General Barr has struck again—this time, in similar fashion, burying Mueller’s report and cherry-picking fragments of sentences from it to justify Trump’s behavior. In his letter, he notes that Robert Mueller “leaves it to the attorney general to decide whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime.”

As attorney general, Barr—without showing us even a single complete sentence from the Mueller report—decided there are no crimes here. Just keep moving along.

View the complete March 25 article by Thom Hartmann on the National Memo website here.