The Threat of Bill Barr’s Lawlessness Is Much Worse Than You Think Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 40min

The Threat of Bill Barr’s Lawlessness Is Much Worse Than You Think
Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 40min
on January 29, 2019 in Washington, DC.

Today’s performance from Bill Barr is a harbinger of escalating assaults and perversions of the rule of law we will see unfold over the next 20 months and possibly – depending on the results of the 2020 election – for years to come. An article posted this evening in the Times gives us a first look at deeds that will make everything we’ve seen in the last 30 months seem mild or quaint by comparison.

The details are circuitous and murky. Let me try to summarize and highlight the key points.

In the late Obama administration Joe Biden was the point man on pushing anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine. Part of that focused on ousting what most Western countries believed was a corrupt chief prosecutor. Among the many companies the prosecutor was investigating was one that had a relationship with Biden’s son, Hunter. The conflict of interest argument is strained. But at least the appearance issue worried State Department officials at the time, according to the Times. The prosecutor eventually was booted and the new guy dropped that and many other probes.

Fast forward to today. Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal lawyer has been meeting with Ukrainian officials repeatedly and dangling the possibility of better relations with President Trump if they will reopen the investigation into the Hunter Biden-affiliated company. Let’s repeat that. The President’s personal lawyer is going abroad and using the lure of better treatment from President Trump to get them to reopen an investigation that could damage the man who is possibly Trump’s presidential competitor next year.

That’s not all.

Giuliani and Trump have asked Attorney General Bill Barr to get the material Ukrainian prosecutors have assembled and start his own investigation in the US.

Let’s review.

Possible sketchy dealings from several years ago, long since settled legally and in the past. Giuliani starts meeting with Ukrainian officials who are for reasons we all understand desperate for favorable treatment from President Trump. He tells them that the way to get better treatment is to start an investigation into the Joe Biden’s son. Giuliani routinely briefs President Trump on his activities. They both go to Bill Barr and start pushing Barr to piggy back on the Ukrainian investigation and start his own probe in the US.

Here are key paragraphs from the Times piece which give you some flavor.

The Trump team’s efforts to draw attention to the Bidens’ work in Ukraine, which is already yielding coverage in conservative media, has been led partly by Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as a lawyer for Mr. Trump in the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Giuliani’s involvement raises questions about whether Mr. Trump is endorsing an effort to push a foreign government to proceed with a case that could hurt a political opponent at home.

Mr. Giuliani has discussed the Burisma investigation, and its intersection with the Bidens, with the ousted Ukrainian prosecutor general and the current prosecutor. He met with the current prosecutor multiple times in New York this year. The current prosecutor general later told associates that, during one of the meetings, Mr. Giuliani called Mr. Trump excitedly to brief him on his findings, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Mr. Giuliani declined to comment on any such phone call with Mr. Trump, but acknowledged that he has discussed the matter with the president on multiple occasions. Mr. Trump, in turn, recently suggested he would like Attorney General William P. Barr to look into the material gathered by the Ukrainian prosecutors — echoing repeated calls from Mr. Giuliani for the Justice Department to investigate the Bidens’ Ukrainian work and other connections between Ukraine and the United States.

Mr. Giuliani said he got involved because he was seeking to counter the Mueller investigation with evidence that Democrats conspired with sympathetic Ukrainians to help initiate what became the special counsel’s inquiry.

I don’t think we need to assume that Hunter Biden is the cleanest guy in the world. I have no idea. We know that lots of Americans were making money in semi-lawless Ukraine over the last decade. The idea that Biden was doing anything to help his son seems extremely strained. But that’s not really the point. The President’s private lawyer, unbound by any government regulation or responsibilities, is practicing unauthorized foreign policy on the President’s behalf, the goal of which is to use the President’s power to get other countries to attack his political enemies at home. Both Trump and Giuliani are then asking Bill Barr to open companion investigations targeting Trump’s political enemies.

This is how corrupt, broken states operate, banana republics. Everything we’ve seen from Bill Barr tells us he will happily participate in this kind of corruption. Meanwhile, Giuliani spends lots of his time visiting foreign capitals in the last 18 months, nominally on private business. We have almost no visibility into what most of those visits are about. This is one example. What other stuff don’t we know about?

We hear a lot about the next time foreign corruption or interference gets tied up in US elections, guarding against Russian meddling, hacking of elections, whatever. Pretty clearly it’s already happening. Bill Barr’s handling of the Mueller Report is getting all the attention. We’re only learning some of the details now. But the Mueller is hardly the only thing Barr’s working on. He was unable or unwilling to answer today whether the President or other White House officials had asked him to open other investigations. Sounds like President Trump and Giuliani have already pressed him to get cracking on this. No surprise. He’s already begun his own personal investigations into the people who started the counter-intelligence investigation into Trump. All of this is thoroughly corrupt. Barr is happy to partake in all of it. He was a cover-up man in the old days. What’s clear now is that he’s been marinating in the Fox/GOP soup for the last two decades and is thoroughly part of the corruption Trump and his version of the GOP represents.

This will all be much, much worse than we expect.

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