You CAN indict an attorney general and a secretary of state

When a summary appeared last week of the July phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, the scope of involvement by the Trump administration seemed at first to be limited. Trump had mostly used his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to pursue his project, it seemed.

But that picture has quickly changed. The release of a whistleblower report Thursday suggested an active role by Barr, and said that a dozen US officials had listened to the Trump-Ukraine phone call, and that summaries of the call had been distributed more widely – raising the question of what proportion of Trump administration energies in recent months have been devoted to Trump’s pet projects.

[...]

Both William Barr, the attorney general, and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, collectively participated in contacts between Trump and leaders of at least four foreign countries, according to multiple reports.

Those contacts were variously aimed at producing stories that could damage Joe Biden, Trump’s potential 2020 opponent, or at producing stories that could undermine the US intelligence community assessment from 2017 of Russian election tampering in the last election, the reports said.

[...]

Barr and Pompeo – whose vast portfolios nominally run from administering criminal justice in the United States to securing international alliances and combating threats abroad – have separately tried to distance themselves from the avalanching revelation that Trump’s conduct of the matters of state has apparently, in significant proportion, been devoted to the pursuit of the president’s personal bugbears and ambitions.

  The Guardian

When you live with pigs, you learn to grunt.

Barr was previously reported to be “surprised and angry” to find his name mentioned in a summary of a call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, while Pompeo, when asked what he knew about that phone call, replied that he had not seen a copy of the whistleblower document that flagged it: “I haven’t seen the complaint,” he told ABC News.

For Barr: sure, he's angry. He thought, for whatever reason(s), that his name would be kept out of it. And for Pompeo: that's not an answer to the question.

In fact, Pompeo reportedly took part in the call, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing a senior state department official. For his part, Barr flew to Italy and to London to ask for help in “investigating” the roots of the Russia investigation, the Washington Post reported.

He was in Italy when the complaint became public knowledge, which was just recently. So, they're still at their ventures on behalf of Trump's reelection campaign.

Trump also asked the Australian prime Scott Morrison for help, and Morrison agreed to assist, something first reported by the New York Times, and confirmed by the Australian government.

“It should trouble all of us that the attorney general is flying overseas and spending his time focused on discrediting the origins of the Mueller probe instead of combating crime here in the US,” tweeted the former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti. “His personal involvement reinforces the view that he does Trump’s bidding.”

“Pretty clear that Barr is working feverishly [with] Trump to produce some kind of anti-Mueller report,” tweeted the MSNBC host Chris Hayes.

The justice department defied that characterization, issuing a statement Monday describing Barr’s work as business-as-usual to support the US attorney John Durham’s ongoing investigation of the FBI’s former investigation of Russian election tampering. The justice department opened the counter-investigation following Trump’s repeated claims that his campaign, which had serial secret contacts with Russian operatives, had been unfairly targeted for scrutiny.

[...]

But it was very unusual for the attorney general, much less the president, to be personally involved at such lengths in an internal investigation.

[...]

“In a real investigation, all that is needed is a request from a line prosecutor to the foreign country, made through the [justice department] Office of International Affairs, and pursuant to the terms of a mutual legal assistance treaty,” tweeted Harry Sandick, a former prosecutor in the southern district of New York.

[...]

Pompeo oversees the internal state department investigation – but has refused questions about it.

Trump finally got the attorney general he wanted.

One night in late October,
When I was far from sober,
Returning with my load with manly pride,
My poor feet began to stutter,
So I lay down in the gutter,
And a pig came near and lay down by my side;
Then we sang “It’s all fair weather when good fellows get together”,
Till a lady passing by was heard to say:
“You can tell a man who boozes,
By the company he chooses”,
And the pig got up and slowly walked away.

~Anonymous

UPDATE:

To be clear, this is not assistance in investigating the Bidens, but in the ostensibly legitimate investigation into the investigators of the Mueller investigation.

UPDATE: