AG Barr: “It's not a lie" for Trump to instruct staffers to lie to investigators

[TitanTiger 20,499]

 

Quote

 

...“You . . . have a situation where a president essentially tries to change the lawyer’s account in order to prevent further criticism of himself,” Senator Dianne Feinstein told Barr during her allotted five minutes, pointing to the fact that the president told former White House counsel Don McGahn to lie to investigators about Trump instructing him to remove Mueller. Why, she wondered, is that not obstruction of justice? To which Barr responded, “Well, that’s not a crime.”

“So you can, in this situation, instruct someone to lie?” Feinstein asked.

“We felt that in that episode the government would not be able to establish obstruction,” Barr replied. “If you look at that episode . . . the instruction said ‘Go to [Rod] Rosenstein, raise the issue of conflict of interest and Mueller has to go because of this conflict of interest.’ So there’s not question that whatever instruction was given to McGahn had to to do with conflict of interest . . . To be obstruction of justice the lie has to be tied to impairing the evidence in a particular proceeding. McGahn had already given his evidence and I think it would be plausible that the purpose of McGahn memorializing what the president was asking was to make the record that the president never directed him to fire. And there is a distinction between saying to someone, ‘go fire him, go fire Mueller’ and saying ‘have him removed based on conflict.’”

At this point, Feinstein, speaking for all of us, asked, “And what would that conflict be?”

To which Barr responded, “The difference between them is that if you remove someone for conflict of interest, another person would be presumably . . . appointed,” failing to acknowledge that had McGahn complied with Trump’s request, the president would have likely continued to find “conflicts of interest” with every new special counsel.

Maybe Barr, the nation’s top law-enforcement official, just isn’t qualified to judge! “I’m not in the business of determining when lies are told to the American people,” he told Senator Richard Blumenthal at another point in the hearing. “I’m in the business of determining when a crime has been committed.” And if the lie is the crime? Look, we’re splitting hairs.

Elsewhere in the hearing, Barr:

• Claimed Trump’s attempt to get McGahn to remove Mueller wasn’t corrupt;

• Said Trump’s dislike of the investigation in general was a legitimate reason to try to fire Mueller;

• Said that “[Mueller’s] work concluded when he sent his report to the attorney general. At that point, it was my baby;”

• And admitted that neither he nor Rosenstein reviewed all of the evidence before making his conclusion not to charge Trump!

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/05/barr-not-a-crime-for-trump-to-demand-staffers-lie-to-investigators

 

I don't get how people in this administration will twist themselves into pretzels to deceive and folks on his side just shrug, or "but Obama..." the whole thing.

[AUDub 11,153]

A good piece from Benjamin Wittes, who took a careful "wait and see" approach on Barr. 

 

[homersapien 11,388]

And Rudolf Giuliani said it's fine for a presidential campaign to accept dirt on their opponent from a hostile foreign government like Russia.

I swear, sometimes I feel like I am living in a bad dream.

Trump corrupts everyone around him.

[homersapien 11,388]

Thank you Mr. Wittes.  This is exactly what I have been arguing regarding "collusion":

"Barr’s second sleight of hand—also visible in the quotations above—is rendering the absence of a criminal conspiracy charge as reflecting an active finding of “no collusion.” These two are very different matters. Conspiracy is a criminal charge. Collusion is a colloquial claim about history. Yet Barr, at his press conference, actually said that, “there was in fact no collusion.” He used the phrase “no collusion” over and over. He even described it as the investigation’s “bottom line.”

In other words, Barr is not merely translating the absence of sufficient evidence for charges into a crime’s not taking place, he is translating the crime’s not taking place into an absence of misconduct in a more colloquial sense. He is also using the president’s specific talking point in doing so. This pair of mischaracterizations has the effect of transforming Trump into an innocent man falsely accused."

 

The Trump administration colluded with the Russians to receive information illegally obtained and tried to cover it up by lying.

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Can you imagine the Republican outrage if Hillary had simply refused to show up after being subpoenaed in the Benghazi hearings?

And Bill Barr clearly committed perjury when he lied to congress about not receiving any feedback from Mueller on his summary.  He should be impeached.

We are watching our democratic system melting away.  Are the Republicans really prepared to have Democrats operate on these standards after they (inevitably) assume control of the executive branch?  I think not. 

Trump has totally corrupted the Republican party and is trying to destroy our system of oversight, which is a core aspect of checks and balances.