Bill Barr is wilding out. Trump’s former attorney general is on a one-man mission to explain to Fox News viewers that the story they’re being fed by MAGAworld about an overweening FBI using overdue library books to do witch hunts to poor Donald Trump in gross violation of his Fourth Amendment rights is utter bullshit.
Last week, he sat down with Sandra Smith and John Roberts to explain that it is in no wise very cool or very legal for the former president to expropriate Top Secret government documents and stash them in the pool shed.
“People say this was unprecedented, well it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club, okay?” he groused. “And how long is the government going to try to get that back? They jawboned for a year, they were deceived on the voluntary actions taken, they then went and got a subpoena, they were deceived on that. They feel, and the facts are starting to show, that they were being jerked around. And so how long, you know, how long do they wait?”
As to Trump’s claims of bulk declassification, either telepathically or by mystical incantation, Barr was similarly dismissive: “If in fact he sort of stood over scores of boxes, not really knowing what was in them, and said ‘I hereby declassify everything in here,’ that would be such an abuse, that shows such recklessness, that it’s almost worse than taking the documents.”
And after the special master order came down from Trump appointee Judge Aileen Cannon, Barr was back on the Fox airwaves to describe it as hot garbage that was virtually guaranteed to be overturned on appeal.
HOT GARBAGE! Trump Judge Aileen Cannon Does The Old Man A Solid With Special Master Order
And he’s still at it today, explaining to an incredulous Bill Hemmer that Trump’s personal effects weren’t wrongfully seized. They were taken pursuant to the warrant as evidence that Trump improperly stored classified documents commingled with his framed Time magazine covers and those skinny pants he’ll get back into one of these days. (Haha, never.)
“If you find very sensitive documents in Trump’s desk along with his passports, that ties Trump to those documents. The passports are personal stuff to Trump,” Barr explained, referring to the passports which Trump screamed were stolen, only to have it revealed that they’d been seized because they were being stored with highly classified stolen government docs. “But the fact that they’re found with the documents is evidentiary, and the government decides whether that’s relevant. Eventually he’ll get that stuff back.”
Barr went on to point out that the court tasked the special master with weeding out records possibly subject to executive privilege — a famously nebulous concept with no settled legal definition and one which Trump has interpreted so broadly as to shield himself from congressional oversight entirely. But Judge Cannon did this without defining executive privilege, and, more importantly, without reaching the threshold question of whether a former president can assert executive privilege to thwart a criminal inquiry over the objections of the incumbent — a premise for which there is exactly zero precedent, and a lot of countervailing data.
“The problem I have with the special master is what [Judge Cannon] has done on executive privilege documents,” Barr went on. “And she didn’t address the only question, which is: Can the former president have standing to say that the investigators don’t even get to look at the documents that he wrongfully had at Mar-a-Lago? And she dodges it.”
Bill Barr: Right About a Thing! You heard it here first, folks. Must credit Wonkette!
But Bill Barr gonna Bill Barr, and that shit couldn’t last. Pretty soon he was back to his regularly scheduled Republican villain act.
“Do you have a view on how it ends,” Dana Perino asked coolly, as Bill Hemmer flailed next to her like a ferret on meth, providing a perfect opportunity for Barr to say that, notwithstanding all of the evidence, former presidents should get a free pass for egregious violations of federal law.
As I’ve said all along, there are two questions. Will the government be able to make out a technical case — will they have evidence by which they could indict somebody, including him. That’s the first question, and I think they’re getting very close to that, frankly. But I think at the end of the day, there’s another question, that is do you indict a former president. What will that do to the country? What kind of precedent will that set? Will the people really understand that this is not, you know, failing to return a library book, that this was serious? And so you have to worry about those things, and I hope that those kinds of factors will incline the administration not to indict him. Because I don’t want to see him indicted as a former president.
There’s the Bill Barr we all know and loathe. The same guy who did everything he possibly could to send Hillary Clinton to email jail, and only tapped out on the investigation of the former first lady, senator, and secretary of State in January of 2020, a full seven years after she left office. This is the guy who was so hot to feed rightwing lies about the origin of the Russia investigation that he made John Durham an un-fireable special counsel, despite the fact that multiple inquiries had already established that the investigation of Trump’s potential collusion with Russian efforts to get him elected — Russia if you’re listening! — were appropriately predicated. This is the guy who loyally flogged lies about everything from hydroxychloroquine to election fraud in an effort to aggravate partisan divisions and keep Trump in office.
And now THIS FUCKING GUY wants the Justice Department not to indict Trump because it will piss off MAGAworld and set a bad precedent?
Haha, fuck you.
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