"To the Republican Party that holds tightly to my father’s legacy — if you are going to stand silent as America is dismantled and dismembered, as democracy is thrown onto the ash heap of yesterday, shame on you. But don’t use my father’s name on the way down.”
Patti Davis, the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan

William Barr Is Cowering at the Prospect of a Proper Cross-Examination
This weekend brought a subtle, but important, bit of good news for those interested in effective congressional investigations of the Trump administration.

Attorney General William Barr is threatening to refuse the request of the House Judiciary Committee that he testify later this week. Reportedly, Barr is balking because the committee will deviate from the pattern of recent congressional hearings in which members do all the questioning and every member gets a paltry three to five minutes to ask questions of the witness, with no opportunity for follow-up. Instead, House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler is delegating some of the questioning to committee lawyers who will have 30 minutes to pursue lines of questioning to their logical conclusions. There may also be a private session about any classified materials in the Mueller report.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019...-committee.html

This other liar is already shitting himself.

BrooklynDad_Defiant!@mmpadellan
In case you were wondering about the mental state of Orange Twitler after we found out that Barr Lied about the Mueller Letter, he has retweeted over 59 random tweets from Dan Bongino, desperately seeking support from firefighters.

In other words, it's a Wednesday.🙄

5:33 AM - 1 May 2019

Babbel Pulls Ad From Tucker Carlson’s Fox News Show Because It’s ‘So Repugnant’
The online language learning platform is the latest in a long line of businesses to cut ties with the primetime host.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tucker-ca...4b0e4d7572ba188


Babbel USA@BabbelUSA
If you saw our ad on Tucker Carlson’s show, you’re right to be upset. We are too.
While we did place our ad with Fox, we did not know it would air on a show so repugnant and at odds with our mission and values.
We are blacklisting the show going forward. We are deeply sorry.
10:40 AM - 30 Apr 2019

Senator Dick Durbin@SenatorDurbin
I'm gravely concerned that the 14 criminal referrals from Special Counsel Mueller related to the investigation are under the supervision & control of AG Barr.
He's virtually disqualified himself to be the kind of person we can expect to stand back & make sure justice is served.

7:14 AM - 1 May 2019

Seth Abramson@SethAbramson
I cannot express to you what a giant pile of nonsense this Barr testimony is to any licensed attorney who is not compromised by blind loyalty to Donald Trump
8:00 AM - 1 May 2019

Es gibt zumindest einen demokratischen Bewerber, der die richtigen Probleme adressiert - zum Beispiel, was geschieht mit den Jobs, die durch die Automatisierung wegfallen. Und das ist Andrew Yang. Vielleicht ist es aufschlussreich, dass Yang weder Weißer noch Schwarzer ist, also weder sich im Schuldkult ergeht noch Klientelpolitik betreibt. Ich vermute allerdings, dass er in dieser demokratischen Partei chancenlos ist.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=...&type=3&theater

:-)

So, thanks to Ilhan Omar we learnt that Jesus was not a Jew, but a Palestinian. And since all righteous people since Adam and Eve are Muslims he was a Palestinian Muslim. What a distinguished luminary in the field of history and religion.

Diesmal muss es bei den Dems schon eine Frau werden. Wenn nicht ein Schwarzer. Idealerweise natürlich eine schwarze Frau.

James Comey Explains Why William Barr and Others Let Trump ‘Eat Their Souls’
“Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from.”

Regardless of whether Attorney General William Barr was ever a “respectable” political figure, plenty of powerful people seem to have held him in such regard.

If Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) was one of those people, she’s not anymore. On Wednesday, she lamented the degree to which the attorney general has allowed himself to be co-opted by President Trump. “The American people know that you are no different from Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway or any of the other people who sacrificed their once decent reputation for the grifter and liar who sits in the Oval Office,” she told Barr during his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Hirono spent most of her allotted time reviewing the extent of Barr’s “deep involvement” in covering for the president, from misrepresenting Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings to lying to Congress about Mueller’s objections to the “principal conclusions” of the investigation Barr released last month. Hirono’s monologue lasted more than five minutes. There was a lot of ground to cover. She attempted to close with a few questions for Barr, but committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) interrupted her, accusing her of slandering Barr. “I do not think that I’m slandering anyone,” Hirono replied. “Mr. Chairman, I am done. Thank you very much.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/po...r-souls-829902/

Attorney General Barr refuses to testify to House panel after contentious Senate hearing
Atty. Gen. William Barr pulled out of a scheduled House appearance hours after Democrats attacked his credibility during a contentious Senate hearing Wednesday and accused him of deliberately mischaracterizing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s final report to protect President Trump.

The Justice Department said Barr would not show up for a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday because the Democratic-led panel had overruled Barr’s objections and would allow staff lawyers to question him. A department spokeswoman called those conditions “unprecedented and unnecessary.”
https://www.denverpost.com/2019/05/02/wi...stify-thursday/

Nach seiner blamablen Vorstellung gestern hat der fuer den Moment genug.

The GOP’s Just a Racket Now, and Trump Is Its Godfather, Barr Its Wartime Consigliere
We see now with a new and oddly liberating clarity that these next 18 months may well be the most consequential and frightening time in living history.

It’s May Day, and this was a Mayday all right. May 1, 2019 will go down as one of the dark days in the history of this republic.

You think that’s overstated? Then tell me another time when an attorney general went before a committee of the United States Senate and lied like that to protect a lying president. The day after being caught in another whopping lie as we learned about the existence of Robert Mueller’s letter taking issue with the way Bill Barr had characterized the Mueller Report, which Barr had lied about to Congress previously.

And—tell me another time when the members of one political party participated in the protection racket quite like that. Why did Lindsey Graham think it was cute or cheeky to utter the word “fucking” at the beginning of this hearing? Fine, he had the excuse that he was quoting something. But that isn’t why he did it. He did it to de-dignify these proceedings. To signal to viewers that they didn’t need to take this hearing seriously. And, he did it for an audience of one. You think Orange Julius didn’t chuckle when he heard Graham go down in the gutter? ...

... But then, in late 2015, when it became apparent the party was actually probably going to nominate Trump, came the racket phase. And Barr and Graham have adapted to it with, we must confess, a kind of evolutionary impressiveness, like bedbugs that have developed an ability to repel pesticides. And not just them, of course—every single one of them.

And all of it along the way—every racist dog whistle, every Rush Limbaugh rant, every false, out-of-thin-air accusation against Bill and Hillary Clinton, every lie about easily liberating the people of Iraq, every accusation that the rest of us hated freedom, every “joke” about Obama serving fried chicken, every disgusting attack on immigrants and gay people and you name it—has brought us to this point. Brought us to today, when a sitting attorney general said in effect to the American people whose interests he is supposed to be defending, “No, I truly do not give a fuck. I’m up here for the president, and that’s that.” And naturally, we learned three hours after he left the Senate chamber that he will not deign to appear at the House, where the questioning would likely be tougher.

Trump is a uniquely diseased man, it’s true. But what kind of political party nominates, celebrates, venerates, and takes political bullets for a uniquely diseased man?

So after today, if we didn’t before, we see now with a new and oddly liberating clarity where this is headed. It’s 18 months until Election Day. They may well be the most consequential and frightening stretch in the history of the country, or at least since Reconstruction.

This racket known as a political party will try to pervert the law in ways we’ve never seen. Reverse the meaning of every word we know. Trump is screaming that he’s the victim of a “coup.” What he is doing, of course, is perpetrating a coup, against the Constitution, with the eager help of Barr and Graham and all the rest of them. Trump is an idiot, but on some intuitive level, he’s a smart man, smart enough to know that to get away with staging a coup, the very first thing you have to do is to accuse your opponents of trying to stage one.

Barr and Graham and Mitch McConnell and everyone else around knows that they’ve thrown in, and having thrown in, they can’t throw out. Survival will require every kind of lie you can imagine, especially and exactly the lie of accusing their foes of that which they are doing themselves. And before this is over, they’re all going to be in on it.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-gops-j...ime-consigliere

Zitat von Corto im Beitrag #6335

---

Diesmal muss es bei den Dems schon eine Frau werden. Wenn nicht ein Schwarzer. Idealerweise natürlich eine schwarze Frau.

---

We Should Not Have Been Surprised About Bill Barr
William Safire had his number 27 years ago.

William Barr has turned out to be a surprise to many observers, who seem taken aback that the attorney general has been so disingenuous, misleading, and apparently willing to act as President Trump’s personal attorney.

The release of the redacted Mueller report exposed Barr as an egregiously unreliable narrator; but it was still startling to learn that Robert Mueller himself had complained about Barr’s attempts to spin his findings. ...

Neal Katyal, the former acting solicitor general, called much of Barr’s testimony, “totally misleading.”
“If my law student summarized or described things this way,” said Katyal, “they’d get an F.”

Barr’s performance, said Katyal was “conduct totally unbecoming for the Attorney General of the United States.”

Pretty surprising stuff, no? Well, not really. Nearly three decades ago, William Safire had Barr’s number. The former Nixon speechwriter turned author and columnist wrote devastating critiques of Barr’s first turn as attorney general, labelling him repeatedly as “General Coverup.”
https://thebulwark.com/we-should-not-hav...bout-bill-barr/

Zitat von Willie im Beitrag #6338

---

The GOP’s Just a Racket Now, and Trump Is Its Godfather, Barr Its Wartime Consigliere
We see now with a new and oddly liberating clarity that these next 18 months may well be the most consequential and frightening time in living history.

It’s May Day, and this was a Mayday all right. May 1, 2019 will go down as one of the dark days in the history of this republic.

You think that’s overstated? Then tell me another time when an attorney general went before a committee of the United States Senate and lied like that to protect a lying president. The day after being caught in another whopping lie as we learned about the existence of Robert Mueller’s letter taking issue with the way Bill Barr had characterized the Mueller Report, which Barr had lied about to Congress previously.

And—tell me another time when the members of one political party participated in the protection racket quite like that. Why did Lindsey Graham think it was cute or cheeky to utter the word “fucking” at the beginning of this hearing? Fine, he had the excuse that he was quoting something. But that isn’t why he did it. He did it to de-dignify these proceedings. To signal to viewers that they didn’t need to take this hearing seriously. And, he did it for an audience of one. You think Orange Julius didn’t chuckle when he heard Graham go down in the gutter? ...

... But then, in late 2015, when it became apparent the party was actually probably going to nominate Trump, came the racket phase. And Barr and Graham have adapted to it with, we must confess, a kind of evolutionary impressiveness, like bedbugs that have developed an ability to repel pesticides. And not just them, of course—every single one of them.

And all of it along the way—every racist dog whistle, every Rush Limbaugh rant, every false, out-of-thin-air accusation against Bill and Hillary Clinton, every lie about easily liberating the people of Iraq, every accusation that the rest of us hated freedom, every “joke” about Obama serving fried chicken, every disgusting attack on immigrants and gay people and you name it—has brought us to this point. Brought us to today, when a sitting attorney general said in effect to the American people whose interests he is supposed to be defending, “No, I truly do not give a fuck. I’m up here for the president, and that’s that.” And naturally, we learned three hours after he left the Senate chamber that he will not deign to appear at the House, where the questioning would likely be tougher.

Trump is a uniquely diseased man, it’s true. But what kind of political party nominates, celebrates, venerates, and takes political bullets for a uniquely diseased man?

So after today, if we didn’t before, we see now with a new and oddly liberating clarity where this is headed. It’s 18 months until Election Day. They may well be the most consequential and frightening stretch in the history of the country, or at least since Reconstruction.

This racket known as a political party will try to pervert the law in ways we’ve never seen. Reverse the meaning of every word we know. Trump is screaming that he’s the victim of a “coup.” What he is doing, of course, is perpetrating a coup, against the Constitution, with the eager help of Barr and Graham and all the rest of them. Trump is an idiot, but on some intuitive level, he’s a smart man, smart enough to know that to get away with staging a coup, the very first thing you have to do is to accuse your opponents of trying to stage one.

Barr and Graham and Mitch McConnell and everyone else around knows that they’ve thrown in, and having thrown in, they can’t throw out. Survival will require every kind of lie you can imagine, especially and exactly the lie of accusing their foes of that which they are doing themselves. And before this is over, they’re all going to be in on it.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-gops-j...ime-consigliere

---

Barr Didn’t Even Try to Pretend He’s an Honest Broker for the Justice Department
This is what happens when the nation’s top prosecutor is the president’s defense lawyer

There’s no great mystery about what Attorney General William Barr did Wednesday during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He knows that Senate Democrats don’t have the votes or the power to do anything substantial to impair his tragic choice to protect President Trump from the substantiated allegations against him. And so the nation’s chief law enforcement official and top prosecutor, at taxpayer expense, spent hours spinning like a defense attorney with his client’s liberty on the line. If every prosecutor was so keen to forgive and forget compelling evidence of criminal conduct the nation’s prisons would be empty.

It was as disgraceful a performance by an attorney general as I have seen in 22 years as a legal analyst and commentator. And I say that having extensively covered the hapless appearances of Alberto Gonzales. He was the attorney general at the heart of the Bush administration’s U.S. Attorney scandal a decade ago. At least he had the excuse of being as dumb as a rock. Barr is no dummy. He knows precisely what he’s doing. His audience is an audience of one. It always has been. And he made it clear Wednesday, as if it had not been before, that he is no honest broker for the Justice Department. He’s just another hack.

Over and over again, Barr refused to show a shred of independence from Trump or even pretend he needed to. The attorney general refused even to acknowledge what we all know to be true and what littered the Mueller report: that the president lied and deceived, repeatedly, for a long period, to protect himself and his political interests. When pressed for candor or to simply be intelligible by Democratic senators, Barr filibustered or used that hoary old lawyer’s trick of pretending not to understand the question or the definitions of the words used in it. ...

Lapdog Lindsey instead made it clear through the course of the day, as did virtually every other Republican member, that the Judiciary Committee doesn’t want to look further into the evidence Mueller compiled of Trump’s misconduct. They don’t want to hear from former White House Counsel Don McGahn, whom Trump asked to lie, or from anyone else who chronicled the ways in which the president tried to cover up his Russia ties. Instead, the same folks who gave us Kenneth Starr and endless Benghazi hearings now say they will spend their time trying to dig up more dirt about Hillary Clinton and trying to bash the FBI. Great news for the Russians. ...

“We’re out of it,” Barr said at one point. “We have to stop using the criminal justice process as a political weapon.” He said this with a straight, stern face, lined by decades of Washington gravitas, as though he actually meant it. We know he didn’t. The last word of a day of remarkable tension goes to Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI), who spoke for millions of sentient Americans. “You are no different than Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway or any of the other people who sacrificed decent reputations for the grifter and liar who sits in the Oval Office,” she told Barr.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/po...-lawyer-829904/

William Barr absolved Trump of Obstruction without having the faintest Clue what He obstructed.

...The most amazing thing is that, when Cory Booker asked Barr if he thought it was right to share polling data with Russians — noting that had Trump done so with a Super PAC, rather than a hostile foreign country, it would be illegal — Barr appeared to have no clue that Paul Manafort had done so. He even asked whom Manafort shared the data with, apparently not knowing he shared it with a guy that Rick Gates said he believes is a Russian spy.

That’s remarkable, because he basically agreed with Ben Sasse that Deripaska — with whom Manafort was sharing this campaign data — was a “bottom-feeding scum-sucker.”

So the Attorney General absolved the President of obstruction without having the faintest clue what actions the investigation of which Trump successfully obstructed by floating a pardon to Manafort.

There may be an explanation for this fairly shocking admission on Barr’s part. He also admitted that he and Rod Rosenstein started making the decision on obstruction before they read the report. Indeed, several times during the hearing, it seemed he still has not read the report, as he was unfamiliar with allegations in it.

In short, the Attorney General said it was okay for Trump to obstruct this investigation because (he claims) Trump was falsely accused, without being aware that the report showed that several of the key allegations against Trump — including that his campaign manager coordinated with Russians, including one Barr agrees is a bottom-feeding scum-sucker” with ties to Russian intelligence — were actually true.
http://www.emptywheel.net/2019/05/01/bil...-he-obstructed/

Exclusive: Foreign government leases at Trump World Tower stir more emoluments concerns
The U.S. State Department allowed at least seven foreign governments to rent luxury condominiums in New York’s Trump World Tower in 2017 without approval from Congress, according to documents and people familiar with the leases, a potential violation of the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-t...s-idUSKCN1S80PP

How Putin's oligarchs funneled millions into GOP campaigns
As Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team probes deeper into potential collusion between Trump officials and representatives of the Russian government, investigators are taking a closer look at political contributions made by U.S. citizens with close ties to Russia.

Buried in the campaign finance reports available to the public are some troubling connections between a group of wealthy donors with ties to Russia and their political contributions to President Donald Trump and a number of top Republican leaders. And thanks to changes in campaign finance laws, the political contributions are legal. We have allowed our campaign finance laws to become a strategic threat to our country.
https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/comme...s-gop-campaigns

“Get Out While You Can”
Once notorious for her racist and bigoted tweets, Katie McHugh saw the dark insides of the white nationalist movement.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/katie-mchugh

Ein exzellenter aber sehr langer Artikel, mit guten Einsichten ueber die "Who is who" auf der rechstextremistischen Szene. Und wie weit diese sich inzwischen in der Politik -selbst in DC- etabliert hat.

Josh Marshall@joshtpm
Pelosi is right. Trump's and Barr's blanket refusal to honor subpoenas is itself obstruction of justice.
8:11 AM - 2 May 2019

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5klZufWAAAlXV8.jpg

In William Barr, Donald Trump Has Finally Found His Roy Cohn
With the release of the redacted but still damning Mueller report, Attorney General William Barr will go down in history for his attempts to shield a corrupt president.

Early last year, The New York Times published a meticulously reported piece about Donald Trump’s frenzied attempt to fire FBI Director James Comey, which succeeded, and to stop Attorney General Jeff Sessions from recusing himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which did not. In the flood of damning revelations, one fact stood out to me at the time: a frustrated Trump bleating, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Cohn, of course, was the conscience-free hitman who began his career aiding Senator Joe McCarthy’s destructive crusade against so-called Communists in government, who wound up, appropriately, as Trump’s mentor and fixer.

I thought perhaps Trump had found him, in Rudy Giuliani, but I was wrong.

One year later, Trump finally has his Roy Cohn, in his new attorney general William Barr. If you were paying attention, you knew the fix was in when Trump picked Barr: The former attorney general had already shared with the White House a memo arguing that a president cannot obstruct justice, since his powers to hire, fire, and redeploy staff are infinite. In an earlier stint as AG, under George H.W. Bush, Barr pronounced himself “subordinate” to the president in a 1992 interview. In his confirmation hearings, he refused to recuse himself from the Mueller probe, given his earlier advice to Trump that he couldn’t obstruct justice, and he didn’t promise to release the full Mueller report to the public when he received it. ...

Now that we have the redacted but still damning Mueller report, we know that Barr was lying. On the issue of obstruction, Mueller has essentially delivered materials that ought to move the House of Representatives to an impeachment investigation.

But before releasing the report, Barr delivered a disgraceful performance Thursday morning that essentially acted out his dishonest four-page letter and expanded on its ludicrous judgments. Though Mueller wouldn’t exonerate Trump on the obstruction charges, Barr did—with a bizarrely sympathetic nod to the “context” of Trump’s potentially obstruction. ...
https://www.thenation.com/article/muelle...r-trump-russia/

CSPAN@cspan
SpeakerPelosi: "What is deadly serious about it is the Attorney General of the Unites States of America was not telling the truth to the Congress of the United States. That's a crime."
8:08 AM - 2 May 2019

Robert Reich writes:

1. Lie: Barr claimed he didn’t know that Mueller and his team disagreed with his conclusions.
Truth: Mueller sent Barr a letter stating he disagreed with his conclusions.

2. Lie: Barr claimed the decision as to whether Trump obstructed justice was left to him.
Truth: Mueller left the decision to Congress.

3. Lie: Barr falsely claimed the opinion by the Office of Legal Counsel (that a sitting President can’t be charged) was not a factor in Mueller’s assessment of whether Trump committed any crimes.
Truth: Mueller said it was a key factor.

4. Lie: Barr claimed the White House “fully cooperated” with the investigation.
Truth: Trump refused to grant an interview and the Trump team lied to investigators and deleted communications.

5. Lie: Barr falsely claimed the Mueller report found no collusion, which is not a legal term.
Truth: The report was chock-full of non-criminal collusion.

Barr ist ein Luegner. Genau wie sein Chef und der Rest der ehemaligen GOP.
Die Trumski Crime family transformiert Schritt fuer Schritt die gesamte Exceutive zu Gesetzesbrechern. Das nimmt kein gutes Ende.