In fact, Barr has a history of misleading Congress and the public in service to Republican presidents and officials. When Barr was head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), Ryan Goodman noted at the Just Security blog, news leaked on Oct. 13, 1989, that a secret OLC memo concluded that the FBI could forcibly abduct people in other countries without the consent of the foreign state. It appeared to clear the way for US forces abducting Panama’s leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega.
“Members of Congress asked to see the full legal opinion. Barr refused, but said he would provide an account that ‘summarizes the principal conclusions.’ Sound familiar?” wrote Goodman, a law professor at New York University School of Law.
Congress eventually issued a subpoena to wrench the full OLC opinion out of the Justice Department. When the opinion was finally made public in 1993, after Barr left office, it was clear his 13-page summary failed to fully disclose the opinion’s principal conclusions — one of which was that the president could violate the UN Charter because such actions are “fundamentally political questions.” The 1989 opinion ignored the president’s constitutional duty to “take care” that US laws, including ratified treaties, be faithfully executed, Goodman noted. Barr didn’t even tell Congress the memo discussed international law.
Perhaps more notorious was Barr’s role in undermining the Iran-Contra investigation by Independent Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh in 1992. Walsh was appointed independent counsel in 1986 to investigate the exchange of arms for hostages with Iran during Ronald Reagan’s administration and determine if crimes had been committed — and whether the Reagan campaign colluded with Iran in 1980 to hold onto American hostages until after the presidential election, as the then-president of Iran asserted. Walsh was closing in on then-President George H.W. Bush’s role in the scandal.
Barr got his professional start in the CIA in 1973 as a policy analyst and legislative counsel when Bush was director, and Bush appointed Barr to head the OLC in 1989. In May 1990, Barr was promoted to Deputy Attorney General and in August 1991, when then-Attorney General Richard Thornburgh quit to campaign for the Senate, Barr was named attorney general.
As Thom Hartmann noted in a column for the Independent Media Institute in March, Walsh had pursued documents in the possession of Reagan’s former defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, who evidence showed was in on the deal, and Bush’s diary, which could corroborate it. Elliott Abrams had already been convicted of withholding evidence from Congress, and he may have had even more information, too, if it could be pried out of him. .
Weinberger, trying to avoid jail, was preparing to testify that Bush knew about it and even participated, and Walsh had already demanded that Bush turn over his diary from the campaign.
Conservative columnist William Safire referred to Barr in 1992 as the “Coverup-General,” noting that in another scandal — having to do with Bush selling weapons of mass destruction to Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein — Barr was already covering up for Bush, Weinberger, and others from the Reagan administration.
On October 19, 1992, Safire wrote of Barr’s unwillingness to appoint an independent counsel to look into “Iraqgate”:
“Why does the Coverup-General resist independent investigation? Because he knows where it may lead: to Dick Thornburgh, James Baker, Clayton Yeutter, Brent Scowcroft and himself [the people who organized the sale of WMD to Saddam]. He vainly hopes to be able to head it off, or at least be able to use the threat of firing to negotiate a deal.”
Two months later, with Bill Clinton preparing to move into the White House, Barr advised Bush to pardon Weinberger and five others, including Abrams, which Bush did on Christmas Eve, 1992.
The New York Times reported, “Mr. Walsh bitterly condemned the President’s action, charging that ‘the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.’”
Independent Counsel Walsh added that the diary and notes he wanted to enter into a public trial of Weinberger represented “evidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.”
Now, by cherry-picking Mueller’s report, handing Trump the talking points he needed to claim he was cleared, and refusing to hand over an unredacted Mueller report on the evidence against Trump or to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, and interfering with the House’s efforts to conduct its own investigation, Barr may have done it again.
After Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report was made public, Trump said the efforts by law enforcement to investigate influence by Russia on the 2016 election were evidence of an attempted coup.
For example, he told Sean Hannity of Fox News April 25: “This was a coup. This was an attempted overthrow of the United States government. ... I think it’s far bigger than Watergate. I think it’s possibly the biggest scandal in political history in this country. Maybe beyond political. … This was a coup. This wasn’t stealing information from an office in the Watergate apartments. This was an attempted coup.”
PolitiFact, the independent fact-checking organization, noted April 29 that, according to Mueller’s report, the triggering event for the FBI opening a counterintelligence investigation into links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government was an April 2016 meeting between Trump’s campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and a source who said Russian government officials could offer “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.”
PolitiFact ruled that Trump’s claim the investigation was part of an attempted coup was a “pants on
fire” lie. “The Russia investigation stemmed from a by-the-rules law enforcement inquiry. That’s far different than a coup, for which the defining characteristic is that it occurs outside the legal system. It’s also worth noting that the original investigation began before Trump had even been sworn in, meaning he wasn’t even eligible to be deposed by a coup.”
But by insisting that Mueller and the Democrats were trying to pull off a coup, Trump, as he often does, follows the late Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ strategy of accusing opponents of the perfidy that he actually plans. And there is plenty of evidence that Trump is planning his own coup to overthrow democracy.
On May 5, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the New York Times she was concerned that Trump would not give up power voluntarily if he lost the election by a slim margin, which Trump could claim was dubious. Later that day, Trump retweeted a demand from Jerry Falwell Jr. that Trump’s term be extended by two years to make up for the two years “stolen” from his presidency by the “corrupt, failed coup” that was Mueller’s investigation.” Trump added, “... they have stolen two years of my (our) Presidency (Collusion Delusion) that we will never be able to get back.”
Democrats need to insist that the Department of Justice and White House cooperate with the House Judiciary inquiry and reassert the checks and balances the Constitution provides. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2019
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