U.S. Senator Doug Jones Expresses Concerns About Attorney General William Barr’s Objectivity in Pending Investigations of the Trump Administration –

By Glynn Wilson –

It seems we may have reached the point of crossing the Rubicon with the presidency of Donald J. Trump. You may recall that the phrase refers to Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon river in 49 BC, the event that precipitated the Roman Civil War, which ultimately led to Caesar becoming dictator for life — and the rise of the imperial monarchy of Rome.

Apparently knowing something of this history, Trump’s new Attorney General William P. Barr has arrived upon the scene just in time to play Mark Antony, Ceasar’s Master of the Horse.

Barr proved himself to be a legal defender of the president in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, before declining to face the House Judiciary Committee controlled by Democrats on Thursday. Clearly there are growing doubts in Washington and around that country about Barr’s objectivity and commitment to being the top law enforcement officer in the land for the people, the job for which he swore an oath to the Constitution, not felty to Emperor Trump.

Widespread news coverage of Barr’s performance in handling the Mueller report and his sometimes confused testimony before the Senate show him under fire from “withering criticism,” and coming off with the nonchalance of grandpa sitting by the fire in his rocking chair, searching around for the poker to stoke the dying embers.

Either he was truly confused about events, the details of the report and the timeline of the case he is supposed to be handling, or he was playing dumb like a country lawyer, stalling and searching for a way to stand by the administration’s official line, which is and will remain:

“No collusion!”

“No obstruction!”

Between now and the 2020 election, mark my word this will be the most repeated phrase on television and the most shared key words on social media by far.

The real problem is that Mueller failed to nail down solid evidentiary grounds for an indictment of the president. He failed to recommend charges against any members of his family, and he failed to recommend grounds for impeachment for Congress to follow.

So Barr clearly feels justified in saying there was no obstruction in the absence of an underlying crime, a long-held position of some attorneys, a position he has written about himself in a 19-page unsolicited memo that some see as his application and tryout for the job as Trump’s attorney general. The reasons for why he would want this job at this time are still murky at best. This will take more of an investigation when I get to Washington for the summer political season.

While there is evidence in the report of criminality, it is not nailed down. At every turn the declination or charging decisions end with the conclusion that there was not “sufficient evidence” to recommend charging anyone else in the highest levels of the Trump administration for conspiracy to collude with Russia — or for attempting to cover up efforts to end the investigation.

Democrats are accusing Barr of deceiving Congress and acting as a personal attorney for Trump, rather than a steward of American justice, and of dismissing the concerns of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, expressed in a letter Barr withheld from Congress until it was leaked to the New York Times and other news outlets.

Barr dismissed the letter as “a bit snitty” in his testimony.

Senator Doug Jones

When asked in a media conference call on Thursday how he felt about Barr’s actions now, after voting to confirm him back in February, U.S. Senator Doug Jones, the Democrat from Birmingham, Alabama, said: “They certainly concern me.”

“I did the best I could with the information I had at the time,” he said. “But certainly these actions have concerned me.”

“On some of the specifics,” he said, “Attorney General Barr did what he told me he would do. That is he protected the Mueller investigation. And he made the report public to the extent that he could. I’ve been satisfied with what I’ve seen in the report with regard to the redactions.”

“What I’ve been disappointed in,” he said, “is I felt given his history, and with all that I’ve followed with the Department of Justice, he would be an independent voice. They needed that stability.

“I have been very disappointed with what I’ve seen with regard to his characterizations of the Mueller report, his testimony yesterday (Wednesday),” Senator Jones said. “To say it’s a great disappointment would be an understatement for me.”

“And I don’t think we’ve seen the last of it,” he added. “What concerns me the most, quite frankly, given the fact that he has become a partisan for the administration and the administration’s personal lawyer as opposed to the people’s lawyer, I’m concerned about the 12 investigations that are still pending out there, and his objectivity when it comes to making final decisions on where those might go.”

Video of Barr

Watch the video of Barr’s testimony, and fast forward to about 2 hours and 30 minutes in:

See that in Barr’s opening statement to the Senate, moments after Senator Lindsay Graham introduced Mueller’s letter into the record, Barr clearly states that he did not receive information for 6(e) grand jury redactions. This is the reason he said it took three to four weeks to release the report to the public and to Congress. He implied that Mueller did not follow his request to mark the report with the 6(e) grand jury redactions and he had to vet the report himself with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s help.

If you read Mueller’s letter to him complaining about his characterization of the report in Barr’s summary release of the key findings, Mueller contradicts that point of view. It’s not clear whether Barr is confused about the documents and the timeline being new to the cases, or whether he is playing dumb to create confusion and delay.

“I previously sent you a letter dated March 25, 2019, that enclosed the introduction and the executive summary of each volume of the Special Counsel’s report marked with redactions to remove any information that potentially could be protected by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e);” Mueller’s letter states. “That concerned declination decisions; or that related to a charged case. We also had marked an additional two sentences for review and have now confirmed that these sentences can be released publicly.”

As one of our astute readers pointed out on Facebook Thursday: “Am I missing something here? Is Mueller lying to Barr or is Barr lying to the Senate Committee? Watch for yourself and let me know what you think. Barr’s comments about this start at 2:31:00 on the YouTube link below. I’m sure you already have a copy of the Mueller letter to AG Barr.”

Objectivity

As for the objectivity of the Republicans in general and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsay Graham of South Carolina in particular, in trying to change the subject back to a closed investigation and well-worn story of Hillary Clinton’s emails, he quoted several internal emails from FBI officials who were involved in that investigation that led nowhere. Former FBI Director James Comey closed that investigation, before announcing he would reopen it, just days before the 2016 election.

Graham and other Republicans like to quote from the text messages uncovered in an Inspector General’s investigation between FBI agent Peter Strzok, who worked on the Clinton email investigation, and his girlfriend Lisa Page, an attorney working on the Mueller investigation, in which they disparaged Trump and expressed their disbelief that he was fit to be president or had any chance to win the election.

This doesn’t just show “bias” against Trump.

In a tirade staged for Trump in his remarks before the Judiciary Committee, Graham used the F-bomb, quoting text messages saying “Trump is a fucking idiot.”

Graham attacked the very objectivity of the FBI itself and the impartiality of the Department of Justice, just like Trump, for the language in the emails.

But readers should keep in mind this was at a time when EVERYBODY in the ENTIRE COUNTRY and half the world thought Trump was a fucking clown and an idiot, and almost no one gave him a chance to win, including Senator Graham himself. Where was, or where is, Graham’s objectivity now? Clearly in Trump and Putin’s pocket.

Watch this video to see all the names Graham called Trump, about the same time the FBI agents and lawyers were saying exactly the same things about him in text messages. Pretty much everybody I know was saying the same things on Facebook and Twitter.

Video: Lindsey Graham’s ever-changing tone toward Trump –

Can we just be big boys and girls for a minute and take a quick, undergraduate level look at the concept of objectivity? I have another book in the works on this American journalism invention, but here’s a pretty up-to-date primer on the subject from The American Press Institute.

Graham has no idea what objectivity means in science, in journalism or in life. He’s out there on the alt-facts, alt-right Trump train now, and he may never make it back to the real world or the political center. Only God may have any idea how much longer Graham’s political career will survive his change of heart and support of Trump.

As for Senator Doug Jones’ comments about Barr’s objectivity, they seem to have merit and lie within the accurate definition of the term.

The bottom line is, there is no such thing as a person without biases, except for someone operating in a state of extreme ignorance. If you don’t know enough about something to have formed a point of view, you can be said to be objective in that sense.

But there is a such thing as an objective scientist, trying to seek out the truth. There is a such thing as an objective journalist, also seeking the facts and the truth and not operating simply out of partisan political biases and loyalties. And yes, there are objective lawyers and judges who know how to put their own political views aside in the interest of finding justice.

The problem is, a large percentage of the public has given up on these American values, and allowed partisan politics to divide us to the breaking point.

Remember too, it was in Rome that they first devised the military and political strategy of “divide and conquer.” Are we crossing the Rubicon only to find ourselves outflanked by Putin’s army of spies and hackers, or the new world leaders in the growing behemoth of China, where they are surely laughing at Trump’s ignorance of history and naivety on foreign policy, waiting on their chance to pounce.