Soul Eating

Barr’s Baby:  Attorney General Barr testified in front of the Lindsey Graham chaired Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday and things went about as expected.  Graham and most of the Republicans except for Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse stuck with Barr’s summary conclusions, ignoring the really disturbing actions detailed in the Mueller Report.  They attacked all of those “despicable investigators” who they characterized as biased Democrats who launched the investigation into Trump in order to upend the results of the 2016 election and they attacked Hillary Clinton, who many of them cited as the real criminal.  For good measure they called for more investigation into her email server because that’s what they do.  Sasse, who apparently didn’t get the Trump “throw dirt at Hillary and diss Mueller” memo, threw in a pointed barb at Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska, the Putin buddy whose bad activities are detailed in the Mueller report, calling him a bloodsucker and a “bad dude.” The sanctions against Deripaska were recently lifted by the Trump administration.  For his part, Barr was arrogant, he lied, deflected and said that the Mueller report was his baby so it was okay for him to slice and dice it and represent its conclusions in any manner that he saw fit, his way of justifying his misleading four page summary report, his representation to the public that there was no collusion even though Mueller opined only on criminal conspiracy and his decision that Trump didn’t obstruct even though he did, ten times.  He dismissed Mueller’s letter, the one that criticized the way he was handling the report’s release, saying it was just a “snitty” letter, one probably written by a member of Mueller’s staff although he admitted that the two had subsequent communication including at least one phone call about how Barr had described the report and its conclusions. He refused to share any notes taken during that call because he’s the Attorney General and we’re not.  Barr mischaracterized the contents of Mueller’s “snitty” letter saying that Mueller was really only upset with the way the press was interpreting his conclusions, not with the actual summary, a boldfaced lie proven false by the now public letter.  In response to a question from California Senator Kamala Harris, who once again proved that her years as a prosecutor hadn’t gone to waste, Barr admitted that he hadn’t bothered to read any of the exhibits attached to the Mueller report and judging by his vague and frequently erroneous answers to some of the other questions it doesn’t appear that he did more than speed read the body of the report either. When Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, another former prosecutor, asked him if he had spoken to the White House about any of the twelve cases referred by Mueller to federal prosecutors as a result of the Russia probe, Barr, who first claimed that Mueller found no one had committed any crimes before admitting that Trump was “Individual One” in the Michael Cohen case, was intentionally elusive, saying he did not discuss anything of substance about the cases with the White House but refused to deny that he had discussed the cases, saying instead  “I don’t recall,” adding “if I looked over a list of cases and thought about it I might be able to answer.” Blumenthal then asked him to recuse himself from involvement in any of those cases.  Barr responded with a terse “No.”  Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, also a former prosecutor, took a different tack, after getting Barr to grudgingly admit that the report uncovered multiple efforts by the Russians to infiltrate the US election infrastructure, she asked him to support the Secure Election Act, bipartisan legislation that she and Republican Senator Lankford are sponsoring, a bill that the White House has been thwarting largely because Trump refuses to support anything that acknowledges that the Russians interfered in his 2016 victory, Barr disingenuously pretended that he hadn’t heard of the legislation and said that he’d have to look into it.  Hawaii’s Senator Mazie Hirono, not one to mince words dispensed with any niceties and just told Barr that “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 then called him a liar and told him to resign.  Apparently, former FBI Director Comey is on team Hirono, while the hearing was ongoing, the NY Times published his newest Op-Ed.  In it he says that amoral leaders like Trump “have a way of revealing the character of those around them," that "accomplished people” like Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, “lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from … because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.”  Going forward, although Barr said that he had no problem with Mueller testifying in front of Congress, Lindsey Graham, who also confessed that he’s only read part of the Mueller Report, said that he doesn’t see the point, he’s done and has no plans to invite him.  After the Senate hearing the Justice Department announced that the now “soulless” Barr would not be testifying today in front of the House Judiciary Committee purportedly because of Chairman Nadler’s plan to have staff attorney participation but really because he’s not all that interested in another day on the hot seat.  All that lying and dissembling is just so exhausting.   The Justice Department also said that it has no plans to provide Nadler with a fully unredacted copy of the Mueller report.  It’s not clear what happens next, Nadler is threatening to hold Barr in contempt of Congress if the department doesn’t turn over the unredacted report and all of the underlying evidence “in the next day or two” and also said he could issue a subpoena to compel Barr’s attendance at a future hearing.  Unlike Graham, Nadler also plans to hear from Mueller and to the extent he can get him, and in all likelihood he will, despite White House and Barr pushback, former White House Counsel Don McGahn.

Other News:  Trump continues to tweet attack former VP Joe Biden, furious that he’s gotten the Fireman union endorsement and also because he is concerned that Biden could win some of the key states that he’ll need to win again in 2020 like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin but also because Biden appears to have gotten into his head, a space he shares with Hillary Clinton who last night told Rachel Maddow that she isn’t all that happy that she lives “rent free” in Trump’s head and would love to get out.  Clinton also wondered out loud how Trump and the Republicans would react to Democrats calling for China to hack the IRS to get Trump’s taxes, she was joking but who knows, maybe someone in China was listening?  On a more serious note, NBC News reports that in June of 2018, on the same day the Trump administration said it would reunite thousands of migrant families it had separated with the help of a "central database," an official was admitting privately in emails that the government didn’t have such a database and only had enough information to reconnect 60 parents with their kids.  Sadly, fifty-five kids still remain in government shelters and many others remain “missing.”