Lowering the Barr

If there was any doubt about AG William Barr’s political bias, that was removed during the course of this week’s Senate Judiciary committee testimony, during which he masterfully dodged, equivocated and split hairs to try to defend his blatantly partisan actions in his handling of the Mueller report. This followed the bombshell revelation that Mueller actually sent him two letters in late March objecting to the slanted and prejudicial implications of Barr’s four page summary of Mueller’s report. The second letter was provided to the committee by Barr the morning of the hearing, probably only because of the explosive media revelation of its existence the previous day. The fact that he had concealed it that long is further proof of his dishonesty, after having testified under oath in both Senate and House committees earlier in April that he did not know whether Mueller agreed with his conclusions and did not know anything about reported Mueller team investigators’ dissatisfaction with his summary letter. His attempted justifications for those clearly misleading answers were a paradigm of lawyerly sliminess, and there were many other examples of that on display during the hearing. Whether he actually technically lied under oath, as claimed by Nancy Pelosi, is debatable, but the conclusion that he has done and continues to do Trump’s bidding to the extent he thinks he can get away with it is irrefutable. Of course, the Republicans are trying to refute and ignore that, with most of their hearing questions related to really important things like Hillary Clinton‘s emails and the alleged corruption involved in the initiation of the Russian interference investigation, which Barr seemed to want to encourage. Now he has refused to appear for the House judiciary committee hearing over a dispute in format and has refused their subpoena for the unredacted Mueller report, one or both of which will hopefully lead to a contempt of Congress resolution. However, that will accomplish little, and all of this, as well as Trump’s promise to stonewall all of the House Democrats’ subpoenas for both data and witnesses in all of their committee investigations, will probably drag on for many months in the courts, and will certainly significantly delay and stymie the Democrats’ aim for public hearings to sway public opinion in their direction. It seems that Trump may actually be trying to goad Democrats to begin impeachment hearings, since he knows he will not be removed by the Senate and he may view that as a political asset for him with his base. And the latest polls show only a little over a third of the public favors impeachment at this point, even though a majority believe Trump or his campaign probably committed crimes! The fatigue factor has probably taken a major toll by this point, and unfortunately the White House strategy has apparently been successful in influencing public opinion. It looks like the next year and a half will just be consumed by more protracted battles between Trump et al and the House Democrats, which many people will just want to tune out no matter what revelations come out. Although those of us who follow events closely will continue to be outraged by all of this behavior by Disgusting Donald and his motley crew, the sad reality is that most Americans probably just don’t care unless it affects their daily lives in an obvious way!