Home / General / Should Bill Barr still be given the benefit of the doubt? Views differ

Should Bill Barr still be given the benefit of the doubt? Views differ

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Ross Douthat suggests that Bill Barr asking foreign governments with help into his ratfucking “investigation” into the Deep State’s Well Known 2016 War on Trump Russia investigation should be treated differently than the Ukraine phone call:

[Strokes chin] Yes, we should consider the possibility that Barr investigating a nutty, baseless conspiracy theory at the behest of the president who personal attorney he believes himself to be will actually be fair and impartial…sorry, I can’t keep up this bit:

This is exactly Trump’s “Deep State” theory, albeit employing more multisyllabic terms: An evil cabal of bureaucrats has decided to overturn the will of the people by trying to overturn the 2016 election.

Another sign is that Trump’s loyalists have expressed almost uncontainable excitement about Barr’s work. In April, Trump excitedly told Sean Hannity that Barr was investigating “big” and “incredible” evidence that Ukraine had secretly colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign to plant evidence against Trump.

The right-wing legal community has been vibrating with excitement at what Barr is producing. Conservative columnist and movement apparatchik Hugh Hewitt gleefully predicts Barr will give “shock therapy” to Democrats. “A Justice Department inspector-general report into surveillance of American citizens based on the Steele dossier is coming,” he notes. “If indictments are warranted, U.S. Attorney John Durham will be bringing them. And a deep dive into Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma and its well-connected board member named Biden, is imminent.” Former George W. Bush attorney general Michael Mukasey, after, of course, insisting in the Wall Street Journal editorial page on Trump’s innocence, pivots to Barr’s counter-investigation. Mukasey lets on that one of Barr’s investigators will soon “determine whether highly specific criminal laws were violated, and if so by whom” — i.e., the perpetrators are not Trump or his loyalists but the people who investigated him. The fact that Republicans have such specific and wildly positive expectations for Barr’s probe is a foreboding sign.

Barr’s counter-investigation is not the same thing as Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine to smear Biden. It is not improper on its face; in theory, Barr might be double-checking everything in a completely aboveboard fashion. But there is little reason to believe Barr is acting fairly at all and a great deal of reason to suspect he is carrying out his duties as hatchet man for his authoritarian boss.

Giving the career-long Republican hatchet man who got his job by writing an unsolicited memo declaring the Mueller investigation a sham the benefit of the doubt before his confirmation was absurd. At this late date, it’s somewhere well beyond delusional.

Anyway, I look forward to Douthat’s next column arguing that ACTUALLY Barr was just eliciting the help of foreign governments to help enforce the Voting Rights Act.

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