Trump Criminal Administration U.S. At Mercy: Max Boot - Corrupt GOP A RICO

Opinions

This nation is at the mercy of a criminal administration

Criminal liar Attorney General William P. "Moral Turpitude"  Barr testifies criminally untruthfully under oath during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Wednesday now not yet disbarred awaits contempt of congress vote and judicial prosecution. (Andrew Harnik/AP).

By Max Boot

Columnist

3 May 2019

Imagine that you live in a town that has been taken over by gangsters. The mayor is a crook and so are the district attorney and police chief. You can’t fight city hall. But at least you know you can turn for help to the state or federal government. Now imagine that it’s not a city or state that has been taken over by criminals — it’s the federal government. Where do you turn for help? That is not a theoretical concern. After the release of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report, it’s our grim reality.

Even before Mueller’s probe ended, federal prosecutors in New York had implicated President Trump in ordering his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to violate federal campaign finance laws. Mueller then documented at least six ironclad incidents of obstruction of justice by Trump along with numerous instances of misconduct that, while not criminal, are definitely impeachable. The New York Review of Books reported that two prosecutors working for Mueller said that if Trump weren’t president, he would have been indicted.

Now the administration is obstructing attempts to bring the president to justice for obstruction of justice. William P. Barr isn’t the attorney general; he is, as David Rothkopf said, the obstructor general. We now know that Mueller wrote (in Barr’s description) a “snitty” letter objecting that Barr’s deceptive summary of his work, designed to falsely exonerate Trump, “threatens to undermine … public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

Yet when Barr testified to Congress after receiving the Mueller letter but before releasing the Mueller report, he claimed not to know whether Mueller disagreed with his conclusions. “He lied to Congress,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) charged. But even if it could be proved that Barr committed perjury (no sure thing), who would prosecute him? Is he (or his deputy) going to appoint a special counsel to investigate himself? Unlikely. And if he did appoint a special counsel, would he heed the counsel’s conclusions? Also unlikely.

Barr’s jaw-dropping performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday dispelled any lingering confidence in the impartial administration of justice — the bedrock of our republic. He actually testified that if the president feels an investigation is unfounded, he “does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course. The president could terminate the proceeding and it would not be a corrupt intent because he was being falsely accused.” Given that no president has ever felt justly accused of any misconduct, this means that the president is above the law. Barr is endorsing the Nixon doctrine: “Well, when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” . . . . 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/03/this-nation-is-mercy-criminal-administration/?

Copyright 2019 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to The Washington Post content)

"Barr Cannot Whitewash Mueller Report" Under Special Counsel Regulations

Opinion

Why Barr Can’t Whitewash the Mueller Report

We have a system in place for our government to uncover evidence against a sitting president. And it’s working.

By Neal K. Katyal

Mr. Katyal drafted the special counsel regulations under which Robert Mueller was appointed.

• May 1, 2019

Attorney General William Barr testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.CreditErin Schaff/The New York Times

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Attorney General William Barr testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.CreditCreditErin Schaff/The New York Times

Many who watched Attorney General William Barr’s testimony on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which followed the revelation that the special counsel Robert Mueller had expressed misgivings about Mr. Barr’s characterization of his report, are despairing about the rule of law. I am not among them. I think the system is working, and inching, however slowly, toward justice.

When it comes to investigating a president, the special counsel regulations I had the privilege of drafting in 1998-99 say that such inquiries have one ultimate destination: Congress. That is where this process is going, and has to go. We are in the fifth inning, and we should celebrate a system in which our own government can uncover so much evidence against a sitting president.

Some commentators have attacked the special counsel regulations as giving the attorney general the power to close a case against the president, as Mr. Barr did with the obstruction of justice investigation into Donald Trump. But the critics’ complaint here is not with the regulations but with the Constitution itself. Article II gives the executive branch control over prosecutions, so there isn’t an easy way to remove the attorney general from the process.

Instead, the idea behind the regulations was to say, “We recognize the constitutional reality that the attorney general controls the prosecution power, so what else can we do?” My colleagues and I (a group that included many career officials at the Justice Department as well as bipartisan leaders in the House and Senate) settled on two things. First, provide a mechanism to enable an independent investigation, and thereby generate public confidence in the outcome of that investigation. Second, design that mechanism so that if the attorney general interferes with the special counsel’s inquiry, that interference would be reported to Congress and ultimately become public.

The underappreciated story right now is that we’ve not only learned that it was Mr. Barr — and pointedly not Mr. Mueller — who decided to clear President Trump of the obstruction charges, but also discovered the reasoning behind Mr. Barr’s decision. The American public and Congress now have the facts and evidence before them. The sunlight the regulations sought is shining.

Mr. Barr tried to spin these facts. He hid Mr. Mueller’s complaints, which were delivered to him in writing more than a month ago, even when Congress asked in a previous hearing about complaints by members of the special counsel's team. And the four-page letter that Mr. Barr issued in March and supposedly described the Mueller report omitted the two key factors driving the special counsel’s decision (which were hard to miss, as they were on the first two pages of the report’s volume about obstruction): First, that he could not indict a sitting president, so it would be unfair to accuse Mr. Trump of crimes even if he were guilty as sin; and second, Mr. Mueller could and would clear a sitting president, but he did not believe the facts cleared the president.

These two items came out because the special counsel regulations allowed for public release of this information (and not, as Mr. Barr testified on Wednesday, because he “overrode” the regulations to give the information to the public). The attorney general was misleading through and through, not just about the investigation, but about the special counsel regulations themselves. . . .

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/opinion/barr-mueller-report.html?

Copyright 2019 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to

The New York Times content)

Mueller Reveals Barr Liar GOP Hack Fit To Impeach Disbar For Moral Turpitude

National Security

Mueller complained that Barr’s letter did not capture ‘context’ of Trump probe

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III submitted his investigation to the Justice Department in March. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

By Devlin Barrett and

Matt Zapotosky

30 April 2019

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wrote a letter in late March complaining to Attorney General William P. Barr that a four-page memo to Congress describing the principal conclusions of the investigation into President Trump “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s work, according to a copy of the letter reviewed Tuesday by The Washington Post.

The letter and a subsequent phone call between the two men reveal the degree to which the longtime colleagues and friends disagreed as they handled the legally and politically fraught task of investigating the president. Democrats in Congress are likely to scrutinize Mueller’s complaints to Barr as they contemplate the prospect of opening impeachment proceedings and mull how hard to press for Mueller himself to testify publicly.

At the time Mueller’s letter was sent to Barr on March 27, Barr had days prior announced that Mueller did not find a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian officials seeking to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In his memo to Congress, Barr also said that Mueller had not reached a conclusion about whether Trump had tried to obstruct justice, but that Barr reviewed the evidence and found it insufficient to support such a charge.

Days after Barr’s announcement, Mueller wrote the previously undisclosed private letter to the Justice Department, laying out his concerns in stark terms that shocked senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the discussions.

[Justice Dept., House Democrats at impasse over Barr hearing]

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

What's in the Mueller report?

A redacted version of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's report was released to the public on April 18. Here's what's in it. (Brian Monroe, Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)

The letter made a key request: that Barr release the 448-page report’s introductions and executive summaries, and it made initial suggested redactions for doing so, according to Justice Department officials. . . .

"Mueller Complained That Barr Letter Did Not Capture 'Context' Of Trump Probe" by Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky, The Washington Post, 30 April 2019
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/mueller-complained-that-barrs-letter-did-not-capture-context-of-trump-probe/2019/04/30/d3c8fdb6-6b7b-11e9-a66d-a82d3f3d96d5_story.html?


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Mueller Objected to Barr’s Description of Russia Investigation’s Findings

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Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, leaving Easter services in April. He ended his investigation and delivered his 448-page report to the attorney general in March.CreditCreditAndrew Harnik/Associated Press

By Mark Mazzetti and Michael S. Schmidt

• 30 April 2019

WASHINGTON — Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, wrote a letter in late March to Attorney General William P. Barr objecting to his early description of the Russia investigation’s conclusions that appeared to clear President Trump on possible obstruction of justice, according to the Justice Department.

The letter adds to the growing evidence of a rift between them and is another sign of the anger among the special counsel’s investigatorsabout Mr. Barr’s characterization of their findings, which allowed Mr. Trump to wrongly claim he had been vindicated.

It was unclear what specific objections Mr. Mueller raised in his letter. Mr. Barr defended his descriptions of the investigation’s conclusions in conversations with Mr. Mueller over the days after he sent the letter, according to two people with knowledge of their discussions.

Mr. Barr, who was scheduled to testify on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the investigation, has said publicly that he disagrees with some of the legal reasoning in the Mueller report. Senior Democratic lawmakers have invited Mr. Mueller to testify in the coming weeks but have been unable to secure a date for his testimony. . . .

"Mueller Objected To Barr's Description Of Russia Investigation's Findings" by Mark Mazzetti and Michael S. Schmidt, The New York Times, 30 April  2019  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/us/politics/mueller-barr.html                                                                                                                                                                                          Copyright 2019 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to The Washington Post and The New York Times content)