Well, well, well

On [AG William] Barr’s public financial disclosure report, he admits to working for a law firm that represented Russia’s Alfa Bank and for a company whose co-founders allegedly have long-standing business ties to Russia. What’s more, he received dividends from Vector Group, a holding company with deep financial ties to Russia.

On his financial disclosure report, Barr notes that he earned anywhere from $5,001 to $15,000 in dividends from the Vector Group.

The company’s president, Howard Lorber, brought Trump to Moscow in the 1990s to seek investment projects there. The trip is widely seen as the first of many attempts to establish a Trump Tower in Moscow.

The problem, says Shugerman, “is the appearance of bias.”

He added that Donald Trump Jr. “allegedly called Lorber as he was setting up the Trump Tower meeting with a Russian [lawyer]. Lorber has extensive ties to Russia and was allegedly assisting with Trump Tower Moscow plans. On top of Barr’s other choices, which reflect partisan bias, it is bad judgment…to have any financial ties to a person so directly entangled with Trump, Don Jr. and the core of events and questions of the Russia investigation.”

[...]

Barr’s former law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP, where he was counsel from March 2017 until he was confirmed as attorney general in February 2019, represented Russia’s Alfa Bank. (Barr earned more than $1 million at Kirkland.)

Barr also supervises, at Justice, another Kirkland & Ellis alumnus with Alfa ties. Early last year, Trump nominated Kirkland & Ellis partner Brian Benczkowski to the Justice Department’s criminal division. In his role with the law firm, Benczkowski had represented Alfa Bank and supervised an investigation into suspicious online communications between the bank and servers belonging to the Trump Organization.

Investigators found no evidence that the Trump Organization had communicated with Alfa. Still, the bank is partially owned by Russian oligarch German Khan, whose son-in-law, the London-based lawyer Alexander van der Zwaan, was indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for lying to investigators about a report his firm had written for Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

[...]

These facts didn’t get much attention during Barr’s confirmation hearing, as Congress was hyperfocused on an unsolicited memo Barr wrote prior to his nomination, which criticized the special counsel’s investigation—and whether he would release an unredacted Mueller report to Congress. Much of the information is public, but it has so far been unreported in relation to Barr.

[...]

[N]o matter what appears in Barr’s color-coded version of the report, his motives will continue to be questioned.

  Newsweek

As well they should.

There are other connections mentioned in this article, and all reasons Barr should have been recused from dealing with the Mueller investigation in any way. But one last one I want to point out:

Barr has significant assets, between $100,000 and $250,000, with Deutsche Bank, which was the only bank that would lend to Trump when all other banks viewed him as too hot to handle. The bank has also been implicated in Russian money-laundering scandals.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.