Coop Scoop: Barr Finally In The Crosshairs
And a few thoughts about Facebook
May 6, 2021
Issue #73
By Marc Cooper
That big, bloated bag of mendacious wind, former Attorney General William “Bill” Barr, is finally getting his comeuppance. And it’s about time.
In a FOIA hearing on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson called Barr onto the carpet, branding his hurried summation of the Mueller Report “disingenuous” and gave the current DOJ till May 17 to turn over a memo that was apparently used to dismiss the report before anyone else saw it.
That memo, probably prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel, laid out the groundwork for Barr’s response and his DOJ’s decision not to prosecute and by all indications it was an intentional ploy at coverup.
Well, more than a ploy, it was a wildly successful coverup. Just two days after Mueller turned in his report, Barr rushed to the cameras to say that he has read it and that it had absolved Trump of Russian collusion as well as obstruction of justice.
Three more weeks passed until a semi redacted version of the report came out and, wouldn’t you know it, it didn’t quite track with Barr’s whitewashing. Can you imagine that? Trick is, you had to read through a thousand dense pages to see it all.
But Barr’s deception had gained traction. It set a national narrative that the Mueller Report had flopped and that Democrats alleging dirty pool had overplayed their hand.
The Barr ruse was so effective, that many even on the Left apparently did not bother to read the real report and have gone around for the last couple of years saying the Russian connection was a hoax (see Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi).
I think David Corn’s book, Russian Roulette, is a much more honest account of the Trump-Putin dating game.
No question in my mind that some Democrats, indeed many Democrats, latched onto Russiagate as a great excuse for Hillary Clinton’s defeat and they most certainly did exaggerate things when they claimed Putin was really running the U.S. government etc. etc.
That does not cancel out the underlying truth that Trump and the Russians did everything they could to cooperate (collude has no legal meaning) right down to Paul Manafort providing detailed poll information to a Russian asset. Trump’s sympathy for the Russians was publicly evident from his first day in office until this moment.
Trump’s obstruction of justice was also in plain view without the Mueller Report which only highlighted it and filled in the details. Mueller listed ten instances in which Trump might be guilty of obstruction and he laid them out as a roadmap for congress, who, in the moment, whiffed.
In her decision Wednesday, Judge Jackson said, “The Attorney General’s characterization of what he’d hardly had time to skim, much less, study closely, prompted an immediate reaction, as politicians and pundits took to their microphones and Twitter feeds to decry what they feared was an attempt to hide the ball.”
Jackson has pretty much reached the same conclusion, writing that Barr’s actions indicated “the fact that (Trump) would not be prosecuted was a given.”
You will remember that Mueller himself feebly protested the early, inaccurate summation of his report in a letter to Barr but did not follow up in any significant way. Nor did anybody else.
In this retrospective light, Barr was clearly the most significant of Trump’s enablers and posed, simultaneously, the greatest threat to rule of law in the country. While in his final days in office, Barr did not support Trump’s Big Lie, but he had certainly laid down the political basis for that fiction over the previous two years.
Barr has previosuly gloated that “history is written by the winners. An unfortunate truth, but Barr will hardly loom as some sort of hero or victor.
Once the memo becomes public, and it will, Barr’s legacy as a lying crook and all-around scum bag will be cemented.He’s a good deal along that way already as Lloyd Green notes in The Daily Beast:
For the record, Judge Jackson’s recent opinion was not written on a blank slate. Judge Reggie Walton, a George W. Bush appointee, had already blasted Barr’s allergy to the truth. In a March 2020 decision in a related case, the judge “seriously” questioned Barr’s integrity and credibility, and deployed words like “distorted” and “misleading” to make his point…
…Barr’s reputation also stands to be tarnished by his efforts to put his thumb on the scale in connection with the sentencing of a since-pardoned Roger Stone and the Mike Flynn debacle. Like Stone, Flynn too received a Trump pardon. But along the way, Barr’s handling of Flynn’s case raised eyebrows from the bench.
Specifically, Judge Emmet Sullivan hammered Barr while dismissing, at the DOJ’s request, its own case against Flynn after he had pleaded guilty. Sullivan observed, “In view of the government’s previous argument in this case that Mr. Flynn’s false statements were ‘absolutely material’ because his false statements ‘went to the heart’ of the FBI’s investigation, the government’s about-face, without explanation, raises concerns about the regularity of its decision-making process.”
“Raises concerns”? Talk about understatement.
The ball is now in the court of current A.G. Merrick Garland who will either appeal Judge Jackson’s order to release the Barr memo within 10 days from now or just let it out. I don’t think Garland is going to be carrying any water for his predecessor and you can count on that memo surfacing sooner rather than later.
Before I go, a few words about the Facebook decision on Trump. A whole lot of people are running around like headless chickens clucking about this or that remedy.
“Break up Facebook” is a nifty little slogan but, um, just a little short on details. Applying monopoly law to FB might be an interesting way to create a couple of new tech billionaires i.e., those who would take over Instagram and WhatsApp from an unbundled FB. Big deal. Not sure that would make much difference out here in the real world. Once of the great allures of FB is being able post into the broadest system possible.
The more pressing problem with Facebook is that it has NO real standards. What it does have is applied haphazardly and sometimes arbitrarily (triggered by some obscure algorithm). Of course, for legal reasons, FB wants to be considered an open platform and not a publication – the difference being no real editorial responsibility in the first option.
This is not an easy fix. Most people I know don’t want FB to be in the position of deciding what is and what is not fit for posting, nobody elected them as arbiters of the truth. On the other hand, most rational people are probably OK with banning truly dangerous posts, those that call for imminent violence or that engage in lying so gross as to threaten societal stability (Trump is guilty of both). I don’t know. Maybe that notion of an imminent threat should be the standard and only if it is equally and stringently enforced.
As we mull the Facebook news this week, keep in mind that the Trumpian accusations that the platform is biased toward the Left should be soundly rejected. On most days, like today, some nine out of ten of the most popular links go straight to the Alt-right: Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, Fox News and so on. Bottom line: Facebook is most certainly a massive institution that needs scrutiny and serious reform. But first, you have to accurately describe the problem. The problem, today, is that FB is the Number One source for delusion, conspiracy theories, and general disinformation. “Breaking it Up” might be a good idea, but it won’t solve this central issue.
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