The Ongoing Adventures of Sleazy Republican Fixer Bill Barr
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You may not be surprised to learn that Bill Barr’s definition of “obstruction of justice” becomes rather more capacious when it comes to implementing Donald Trump’s white nationalist agenda:
It took Attorney General William Barr only one week from the release of the Mueller report to bring obstruction of justice charges against two governmental officials for interfering in a federal investigation. But the charges have nothing to do with the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the election or the possible obstruction of that investigation.
Although the obstruction charges DOJ filed are not related to the Mueller report, they underscore just how far the attorney general bent over backward to spin the report in the president’s favor and how partisan the Department of Justice has become. The disparities between the two cases highlight how the Department of Justice, under Barr’s leadership, has become nothing more than a political arm of the Trump administration, particularly in its handling of possible obstruction charges stemming from the Mueller report.
The indictment against Judge Shelley Richmond Joseph, a Massachusetts district court judge, and Officer Wesley MacGregor, a Massachusetts trial court officer, alleges that the officers interfered with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement proceeding by preventing ICE from arresting an individual who was arrested on state charges and attended an arraignment hearing in state court. During the state court proceeding, Joseph asked an ICE officer to wait outside the courtroom while the court conducted the arraignment hearing. Earlier in the day, the judge had requested more information about one of the state charges in the case (a fugitive charge) after the prosecutor said the state would not seek to detain the defendant on the other charge (a drug charge).
As always, the Republican legal elites follow the principle of “because we can.”
To be fair and balanced, however, it must be noted that two bold, adversarial journalists of the Real Left (i.e. the “left” that prefers Rand Paul to Barack Obama and Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton) are willing to vouch for this professional cover-up artist’s scrupulous integrity:
Glenn: "it was rational to assume that William Barr was accurately summarizing the findings" pic.twitter.com/P16NGFsUnx— eliot (@eliot_woodrich) April 27, 2019
The facts that 1)Mueller’s famously tight shop did in fact push back against the Barr memo and 2)we know for a fact that Barr’s memo was a tendentious cover-up job are surely central to Glenn’s point!