Back In The USSR Timeline Part 12 — Bill Barr and the Mueller Report
Bill Barr has written a memoir about his time as Trump’s personal injury attorney and is getting the royal treatment as the media rolls out the red carpet for him to pimp his stupid book. He’s profitting off of information that he was obligated to share as attorney general and is taking the opportunity to rebrand himself as one of the good guys. He is not. He’s a liar and a traitor and heartless, ruinous pig who belongs in jail. Don’t buy or read his bullshit.
After Jeff Sessions “resigned,” and the temporary AG was beaten up pretty good, Bill Barr took over on February 15, 2019. He fooled senators into believing he was willing to come out of retirement to serve the country (he’d already been AG during the George H.W. Bush administration where he was very “helpful” in covering up Iran Contra crimes for Reagan and Bush). He fooled Trump, too by duping him into picking him by writing a memo that said presidents are kings. The judiciary committee was grateful that anybody would take the job. After he was confirmed his daughter got a job working in the federal financial crimes office. Oh and her husband got a job in the White House counsel’s office, advising Trump on the Mueller probe.
He had only been on the job for less than a week when Bob Mueller announced he was wrapping up his investigation. On March 23 he turned it over to Barr who then wrote a letter to Congress to let them know that he was in receipt of the report (he referred to it as “his baby” once he got it) and would release more information over the weekend. He did not. Instead, he released a 4 page letter “summarizing” the report. In it he summized that the Trump campaign did not conspire with Russia to win the presidential election nor did it obstruct justice with corrupt intent.
The Dems said they wanted to see the report, not a 4 page summary. He wouldn’t do it. People took to the streets to demand that he release the report and he wouldn’t do it. House Democrats gave him until midnight on April 2, 2019 to give them the full report or else. He wouldn’t do it. He dicked them around and kept promising to release it but just kept blowing them off. He refused to say if the White House had seen it, either. Republicans were against releasing it altogether.
He finally relented by releasing a redacted report where everything embarrassing or incriminating was blacked out. It wasn’t the Mueller Report. It was the Bill Barr redacted report. He did a press conference on April 17, 2019 without Bob Mueller to summarize and spin the Mueller report. He basically said there was no collusion (not a legal term but a Trump/Republican talking point) and that Trump was pretty much clear of any wrong doing or suspicion. He never mentioned Russia interfering in the election. That was in the report. He never mentioned the people who were in jail or who would be going to go to jail because they were involved in Russia interfering in the election. That was in the report. He basically used his redacted report to serve as a victim impact statement, which revealed him to be Trump’s personal attorney instead of the American people’s attorney. He summed the report up by portraying Trump as the victim. He blamed the media and Trump’s opponents for making something out of nothing. When a reporter asked him if he thought it was appropriate that he spin the contents of Mueller’s report before giving it to Congress, he said “no” and walked away.
Bill Barr timed the release of the redacted Mueller Report the day before a two week recess for Congress. It was Easter and Passover weekend so everybody would be gone and the Capitol would be empty. No media. No protesters. No public attention for a sitting president who had just been outed for committing crimes.
Bob Mueller and his team were pissed off. After keeping tight lipped for 2 years while they were working on their investigation, they spoke up to say that they had released their report with their own summary which was meant to be released with the report and that they had done it in such a way that it would require minimum redactions. Their report revealed alarming and significant evidence against Trump. Bill Barr ignored them and wrote his own summary to make it sound like the report was no big deal. Bob Mueller, who was once so close to Bill Barr personally that they each attended special family events for each other, was so pissed that he sent Barr a letter and followed it up with a phone call to confront him. He called him out for not fully capturing the context, nature, and substance of his office’s work and conclusions.
Anybody who took the time to read the redacted report understood how bad it was for Trump. They understood, too that it was bad for Bill Barr because he lied about it. Didn’t matter. They both got away with it.
Most people didn’t take the time to read the report. The Republicans flat out refused to read it. The Dems wanted to get to the bottom of Trump’s relationship with Russia but they were outnumbered. The Republicans didn’t want the Dems to get to the bottom of anything because if they did, they’d find the GOP there, rock bottom.
Republicans went through the motions to make it look like there was some sort of oversight, but it was a joke. Barr teamed up with the chair of the Judiciary Committee, Lindsey Graham, to “investigate the investigators.” Graham held a publicized hearing and dropped the f-bomb, spent 15 minutes talking about Hillary, admitted he hadn’t read the report, and ended with reading Peter Strzok’s texts out loud.
Trump started his own Russia investigation and told Bill Barr to declassify documents so he could get the identities of CIA informants. Barr hired 5 attorneys to look into whether or not the Mueller investigation was even legal. Bill Barr went on TV and said that the government spied on its citizens.
How was Congress going to exercise its duty to get rid of a corrupt attorney general standing in the way of justice when the Republicans in Congress were just as corrupt? For the first time in American history, the most powerful prosecutor in the world was covering for the most powerful man in the world.
The media was as soft on Bill Barr then as they are now, letting him sell his bullshit on all of their platforms, spaces and channels for nothing.
