The Trump-Barr Horror Show
FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | October 8, 2020
“Attorney General Barr is a dangerous man without a moral compass and without any perceivable commitment to the rule of law.”
This week the Trump/Barr parade of horrors continued.
Donald Trump ranted and raved; Attorney General William Barr continued to grossly abuse his office.
Barr and Trump are engaged in new, unprecedented steps to undermine and – if necessary – try to steal the presidential election that current polls show Vice President Biden is winning.
According to an article in ProPublica yesterday, the Justice Department has issued a new guidance on election fraud, overriding a decades-long policy that “generally bars prosecutors not only from making any announcement about ongoing investigations close to an election but also from taking public steps — such as an arrest or a raid — before a vote is finalized.”
The change in this policy will now allow Barr, who continues to attack mailed ballots and alleged “election fraud,” to have the government try to block the counting of votes cast by mail. Polls have shown that far more Democrats are planning to vote by mail than Republicans.
Barr’s long-running effort to misuse the Justice Department to help Trump win the election also showed up this week in steps taken by John Ratcliffe, the Trump-appointed Director of National Intelligence.
Ratcliffe, a former Republican House Member and Trump acolyte, announced he was sending the Justice Department nearly 1,000 pages of materials for Barr’s investigation into the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. This information, which reportedly remains classified, is likely to end up in Trump’s rantings in the closing weeks of the presidential election.
On Tuesday night and into Wednesday, Trump engaged in a bizarre tweet storm involving dozens of tweets in which, among other things, he questioned why Barr had not arrested Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton. These are the ravings we expect from a two-bit, third-rate dictator, not from the President of the United States. Trump’s frenzied state was clear again this morning when he went after his loyal henchman, saying Barr would be treated by history as “a very sad situation” if he doesn’t indict people.
Attorney General Barr is a dangerous man without a moral compass and without any perceivable commitment to the rule of law.
He has been, and still is, engaged in extraordinary and unprecedented abuses of his office and perversion of the Justice Department. Barr is doing incalculable damage to the Justice Department and potentially to our constitutional system of representative government.
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