The "Take no Responsibility" administration in overdrive

I'm failing to see the distinction.

Attorney General William Barr says law enforcement officers were already moving to push back protesters from a park in front of the White House when he arrived there Monday evening, and he says he did not give a command to disperse the crowd, though he supported the decision.

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“They told me they were about to make the announcement and I think they stretched the announcements over 20 minutes. During the time I was there, I would periodically hear announcements,” Barr said.

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Barr said it was a Park Police tactical commander — an official he never spoke to — who gave the order for the law enforcement agencies to move in and clear the protesters.

“I’m not involved in giving tactical commands like that," he said. “I was frustrated and I was also worried that as the crowd grew, it was going to be harder and harder to do. So my attitude was get it done, but I didn’t say, ‘Go do it.’”

  Politico

Im not sure a denial could get more pathetic.

[T]he White House and others said repeatedly that the attorney general ordered officers to clear the park.

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[A]dministration officials have spent much of the week trying to explain how the situation escalated and why smoke bombs, pepper balls and police on horseback were needed to clear the largely peaceful crowd.

Earlier in the week, White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany told reporters it was Barr who made the decision to push back the security perimeter outside the White House on Monday morning. McEnany said that when Barr arrived at Lafayette Park later that day to survey the security situation, he was surprised to see that action had not yet been taken.

“So he said that we needed to get going with moving that perimeter. He told the officers that out there,” McEnany said Wednesday. A person familiar with the matter also said earlier this week that Barr told law enforcement to take action to move the perimeter when he arrived in the park.

Pass the buck administration.

Many of the apparently federal agents [patroling DC] have refused to identify which agency they work for. [Eagle-eyed protesters have identified some of them as belonging to Bureau of Prisons’ riot police units from Texas, but others remain a mystery.

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Just like its laws, there are too many federal agents for the government to keep track of.

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[A]bsent identifying signs of actual authority the rows of federal officers appear all-but indistinguishable from the open-carrying, white militia members cosplaying as survivalists who have gathered in other recent protests against pandemic stay-at-home orders. Some protesters have compared the anonymous armed officers to Russia’s “Little Green Men,” the soldiers-dressed-up-as-civilians who invaded and occupied eastern Ukraine. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to President Donald Trump Thursday demanding that federal officers identify themselves and their agency.

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[I]t helps to understand the dense and not-entirely-sensical thicket of agencies that make up the nation’s civilian federal law enforcement. With little public attention, notice and amid historically lax oversight, those ranks have surged since 9/11—growing by roughly 2,500 officers annually every year since 2000. To put it another way: Every year since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has added to its policing ranks a force larger than the entire Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Nearly all of these agencies are headquartered in and around the capital, making it easy for Attorney General William Barr to enlist them as part of his vast effort to “flood the zone” in D.C. this week with what amounts to a federal army of occupation, overseen from the FBI Washington area command post in Chinatown. Battalions of agents were mustered in the lobby of Customs and Border Protection’s D.C. headquarters—what in normal times is the path to a food court for federal workers. The Drug Enforcement Administration has been given special powers to enable it to surveil protesters. It is the heaviest show of force in the nation’s capital since the protests and riots of the Vietnam War.

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The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, which serves as the general academy for federal agencies who don’t have their own specialized training facilities, lists around 80 different agencies whose trainees pass through its doors in Georgia, from the IRS’ criminal investigators and the Transportation Security Administration's air marshals to the Offices of the Inspector General for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Railroad Retirement Board. Don’t forget the armed federal officers at the Environmental Protection Agency or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Law Enforcement, whose 150 agents investigate conservation crime like the Tunas Convention Act of 1975 (16 USC § 971-971k) and the Northern Pacific Halibut Act of 1982 (16 USC § 773-773k).

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A morning run around the National Mall and Capitol Hill might see you cross through the jurisdictions of the federal U.S. Capitol Police, the Park Police, the National Gallery of Art police, the Smithsonian Office of Protective Services, the Postal police, Amtrak police, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing police, the Supreme Court police, the Uniformed Division of the Secret Service, the Government Publishing Office police, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service. (Only recently did the Library of Congress police merge with the Capitol Police across the street into one unit.) Run a bit farther and you might encounter the FBI Police or the U.S. Mint police. And that’s not even counting the multistate Metro Transit police and the local D.C. Metropolitan Police.

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[T]he roughly 20,000 federal prison guards known formally as the Bureau of Prisons—whose riot units make up a sizable chunk of the officers imported to D.C. and who represent the single largest component of federal officers in the Justice Department—are concerning to see on the streets in part because they’re largely untrained in civilian law enforcement; they normally operate in a controlled environment behind bars with sharply limited civil liberties and use-of-force policies that would never fly in a civilian environment.

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[U]nder the Trump administration, many of these agencies have been rudderless—overseen by rotating series of acting officials. More than half of all federal civilian law enforcement right now is being led by temporary acting officials, everything from ICE and CBP to DEA.

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Beyond those 132,000 federal civilian law enforcement, the U.S. has tens of thousands of military law enforcement officers, including military police units and investigators like the 2,000 agents of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the 1,200 agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service or the 900 agents of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. Plus, the 40,000 armed personnel of the U.S. Coast Guard, which has broad law enforcement powers on the nation’s rivers, lakes and oceans, but is counted as part of the military.

Then there are the officers who can be spotted across Northern Virginia in white marked patrol vehicles labeled only as “United States Police,” the purposefully vague public name given to what is formally known as the CIA’s Security Protective Services, who provide security to the CIA and the Office of Director of National Intelligence. They carry weapons, but have limited law enforcement authority. (As one agent told me, only half-joking, “We can’t arrest you, but we can kill you.”)

  Politico

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