President Trump is openly telegraphing that he fully expects his attorney general to validate one of his biggest lies: that the real crime in 2016 wasn’t Russia’s sabotaging of our election but rather the decision by law enforcement to investigate it.
New public comments from William P. Barr provide Trump with ample grounds for being confident that Barr will deliver for him.
[...]
Barr’s
full [NBC News] interview is now online, and it’s worse than you thought. It whitewashes away a crucial aspect of the I.G.’s conclusions in a way that’s easy to overlook but serves Trump’s political needs in deeply disingenuous fashion.
[...]
He claims “the incumbent government used the apparatus of the state” to “spy on political opponents,” in a way that could have affected “the outcome of the election” and thus posed a “danger to our free system.”
Barr claims there was never any serious evidence of “collusion” and excoriates the FBI for having an inadequate basis for launching the investigation, given the “very potent powers” the FBI has at its disposal.
[...]
Barr insists the inspector general’s analysis of this was “very limited,” vowing that his own forthcoming review would take a much more thorough look at the investigation’s genesis.
[...]
In saying those things, Barr is rewriting the story of 2016 in a subtle but consequential way. He’s implying that the FBI’s initial investigation was
only motivated by what it had learned about the Trump campaign’s intentions with regard to coordinating with Russia’s electoral subversion effort.
[...]
In fact, when the FBI launched this investigation, it had
already developed an awareness that Russia was undertaking this attack on U.S. democracy — separate and apart from any Trump campaign involvement with it. This was a critical reason the FBI launched its investigation.
The inspector general’s report is very clear and emphatic on this point.
[...]
As the I.G. notes, it also involved “numerous attempts to hack into state election systems,” including “confirmed access into elements of multiple state or local electoral boards.”
“It was in this context” that the FBI launched its investigation, the I.G. reports, when the FBI learned that a Trump campaign adviser had revealed he’d learned that Russia possessed dirt on Hillary Clinton.
[...]
Officials told the I.G. that the new information about the Trump campaign precipitated the investigation, but only
on top of the fact that Russia was already “targeting U.S. political institutions” and trying to manipulate the “U.S. democratic process.”
This context, the I.G. concludes, helped provide the FBI with the “legitimate law enforcement purpose” of protecting against “a national security threat or federal crime.”
This is entirely elided by Barr.
[...]
It’s galling in the extreme that Barr would piously claim concern for preserving the sanctity of our elections while hand-waving away the massive outside disruption effort as a central reason the investigation was legitimately launched.
[...]
In fact, this was a serious and disruptive attack on our democratic processes and on liberal democracy itself. Barr is helping make all that go
poof.
This also serves to downplay the threat of another outside attack and Trump’s eagerness to benefit from that, too, which he has openly telegraphed. And anything that obscures that eagerness helps Trump dodge accountability for his use of his office to extort another foreign power into helping rig the next election, for which he’s being impeached.
[...]
Trump wants to make all of those facts disappear. And Barr is effectively using the power of law enforcement to help him do it.
Greg Sargent @ Wapo
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