How'd Bill do in the Senate? - Addendum to How's Bill doing in the Senate series

The story is that Biden pressured Ukraine to get a a prosecutor dismissed as to protect his son's interests.

At one point, Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in United States loan guarantees if then-prosecutor Viktor Shokin wasn’t ousted. Shokin, who had been accused of ignoring corruption in his own office, was soon voted out by the Ukrainian Parliament.

But the Times noted Biden’s son, Hunter, had a stake in the outcome. Hunter Biden at the time was on the board of an energy company, Burisma Holdings, owned by a Ukrainian oligarch, Mykola Zlochevsky, and making as much as $50,000 per month for his work. And the newspaper said the oligarch had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor.

The former vice president’s campaign maintained Joe Biden was acting to carry out U.S. policy and not protecting the interests of his son. In fact, Biden’s campaign claims he learned of his son’s role in the energy company from news reports.

  Newsmax

Sure, I believe that.



And will she or anyone else do anything about it?  I think I know the answer to that question. Some people, however, have spent some time behind bars for lying to Congress.



Don't hold your breath.

Pelosi also told her colleagues during the meeting that she couldn’t sleep Wednesday night after watching Barr’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, during which he challenged Mueller’s legal theories and framework and endeared himself to Trump and his GOP allies.

She added that impeachment is “too good for” President Donald Trump, reiterating her opposition to launching impeachment proceedings even as a growing chorus of Democrats is calling for just that.

  Politico

[Barr] knows that Senate Democrats don’t have the votes or the power to do anything substantial to impair his tragic choice to protect President Trump from the substantiated allegations against him. And so the nation’s chief law enforcement official and top prosecutor, at taxpayer expense, spent hours spinning like a defense attorney with his client’s liberty on the line.

[...]

It was as disgraceful a performance by an attorney general as I have seen in 22 years as a legal analyst and commentator. And I say that having extensively covered the hapless appearances of Alberto Gonzales. He was the attorney general at the heart of the Bush administration’s U.S. Attorney scandal a decade ago. At least he had the excuse of being as dumb as a rock. Barr is no dummy. He knows precisely what he’s doing. His audience is an audience of one. It always has been. And he made it clear Wednesday, as if it had not been before, that he is no honest broker for the Justice Department. He’s just another hack.

[...]

Barr refused to show a shred of independence from Trump or even pretend he needed to. The attorney general refused even to acknowledge what we all know to be true and what littered the Mueller report: that the president lied and deceived, repeatedly, for a long period, to protect himself and his political interests.

[...]

Never mind the legal definitions of obstruction of justice or conspiracy, or the procedural standards under which federal prosecutors are supposed to operate, or the superheated politics of our time, Barr told lawmakers that he began to work on his letter exonerating Trump before he received the Mueller report. In response to a question by Sen. Kamala Harris, for example, he even conceded that neither he or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein have eve[r] reviewed the underlying evidence that the special counsel compiled.

[...]

It’s jarring to get the feeling, through hours of contentious testimony, that Barr wasn’t remotely interested in signaling to lawmakers, or the rest of us, that he can be trusted to shepherd the 14 or so other active federal investigations that Mueller referred to prosecutors in New York and other offices around the nation.

[...]

Maybe I missed it, it’s possible, but I did not see or hear a single Republican member of the committee say a single critical thing about the president in the wake of Mueller’s work. Nor was anyone on that side of the room particularly critical of Barr. Instead, from Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, we got a promise at the end of the hearing that there was no need to call Mueller himself to testify before the committee.

[...]

They don’t want to hear from former White House Counsel Don McGahn, whom Trump asked to lie, or from anyone else who chronicled the ways in which the president tried to cover up his Russia ties. Instead, the same folks who gave us Kenneth Starr and endless Benghazi hearings now say they will spend their time trying to dig up more dirt about Hillary Clinton and trying to bash the FBI.

[...]

It will have to be the House that subpoenas Mueller or McGahn to testify. It will have to be the House that calls Barr onto the carpet for his attempt to trick the American people into thinking Mueller’s report was kinder and gentler to the president than it actually was.

“We’re out of it,” Barr said at one point. “We have to stop using the criminal justice process as a political weapon.”

  Rolling Stone

As he investigates Hillary and the FBI.

Also, it appears Rudy Giuliani never filed that Mueller report rebuttal they said was coming and that Barr gave them the report before releasing it so they'd have a jump start.  Haven't heard a thing about it since mid-April.

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

UPDATE:



Yes, Pat.  What are you going to do about it?