Justice Department memo exonerating Donald Trump was a 'fundamental betrayal': former solicitor general
Since leaving the White House, former President Donald Trump hasn’t been shy about lambasting former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr— who he now despises for refusing to go along with the Big Lie and Trump’s false, totally debunked claim that widespread voter fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election. Trump now views Barr as a Republican who, like former Vice President Mike Pence, didn’t have the courage to stick by him.
But before the election, Barr’s critics often slammed him for being a Trump loyalist who defended Trump vigorously after former Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered his final report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Attorney Neal Katyal, in an op-ed published by the New York Times on August 30, offers some reasons why a recently released March 24, 2019 memo paints such a troubling picture of Barr and his relationship with then-President Trump.
The memo, released by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on August 21, details Barr’s justifications for the DOJ clearing Trump of obstruction charges. These days, Trump views Barr as a traitor to the MAGA cause. But in 2019, he praised Barr as someone who had the backbone to come through for him in a way that former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions didn’t.
“The memo released last week by the Justice Department closing the book on the report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election is a frightening document,” explains Katyal, a former solicitor genreal who is often featured as a legal expert on MSNBC. “Critics have rightly focused on its substance, slipshod legal analysis and omission of damning facts. But the process by which that memo, sent in March 2019, came to be is just as worrisome.”
The attorney continues, “Delivered to the attorney general at the time, Bill Barr, the memo was written by two political appointees in the Justice Department. Mr. Barr used the memo to go around the special counsel regulations and to clear President Donald Trump of obstruction of justice. If left to fester, this decision will have pernicious consequences for investigations of future high-level wrongdoing."
Katyal goes on to offer some more reasons why he finds the March 24, 2019 memo so troubling. As Katyal sees it, the memo is an example of the United States’ system of checks and balances being undermined during the Trump years.
“The 2019 memo tendentiously argued that Mr. Trump committed no crimes — leaving the final decision on the matter to Republican-aligned appointees instead of to the independent special counsel,” Katyal notes. “The challenge in devising the regulations was to develop a framework for the prosecution of high-level executive branch officials — which is harder than it sounds, because the Constitution requires the executive branch to control prosecutions. So, we are left with one of the oldest philosophical problems: Who will guard the guardians?”
During Mueller’s investigation, many MAGA Republicans tried to paint him as a Democratic partisan — even though the former FBI director was a conservative and a lifelong Republican who had been on very friendly terms with the George W. Bush Administration. But during the Russian investigation, Mueller’s admirers often praised him for valuing country over party. When Democrats and Never Trump conservatives used the word “institutionalist” to describe Mueller in 2017 or 2018, it was meant as high praise.
A special counsel in a federal investigation, Katyal stresses, needs to be someone who is independent rather than partisan — which Special Counsel Mueller was. But Barr, Katyal laments, undermined Special Counsel Mueller’s work in the end.
“We created the role of special counsel to fill a void — to concentrate in one person responsibility and ultimate blame so that investigations would not be covered up from the get-go and to give that person independence from political pressure,” Katyal writes. “It is outrageous that Mr. Barr acted so brazenly in the face of this framework. The point of requiring a special counsel was to provide for an independent determination of any potential criminal wrongdoing by Mr. Trump. But the political appointees in his Justice Department took what was the most important part of that inquiry — the decision of whether he committed crimes — and grabbed it for themselves. This was a fundamental betrayal of the special counsel guidelines not for some principle, but because it protected their boss, Mr. Trump.”
Read more here: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/08/bill-barr-donald-trumpjustice-department-mueller-obstruction-memo'Trump is one with the fringe and crazy': Nicolle Wallace unloads on latest Truth Social rants
Donald Trump's social media website has been authorizing QAnon fanatics, but now Trump insiders on the site have taken the next step to promoting the QAnon world of conspiracy theories.
Speaking about the shocking morning of memes that Trump reposted, MSNBC reporter Ben Collins explained that Trump shared a meme referring to "The Storm," a QAnon conspiracy that says the so-called "deep state," Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden will be "rounded up and executed in public."
"This is a very dark space for the ex-president to be headed," said Collins.
QAnon forums have been quiet lately, he said because they ran out of hope that Trump was secretly still running the country, or that he would somehow rise to power. Trump sharing their posts has fired them up again, said Collins. One of the posts from the former president said, “nuke them from orbit” a reference to Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton suggesting bombing them. Commenters begged for Trump to kill them in the comments.
"Your Twitter feed is the stuff of my nightmares," MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace said of the screen captures Collins had posted. She said that she's been sending it around to political folks
She went on to cite a comment from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), saying, "I just think everyone, including the mainstream press, needs to take seriously the growing culmination between Trump's operation, the extremist 4chan/Q crowd and the monarchist new right." She also played a clip of FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump. Wray warned that there is a growing domestic terrorism movement from these groups.
Earlier Tuesday, it was revealed that the Google App store would not provide the Truth Social app to users because they don't have content moderation systems in place to ensure they could comply with the terms of service for Google's App store.
"There's such a -- I grapple with it myself — I did all day preparing for this hour," confessed Wallace. "There's such a temptation to say, 'it's the whack jobs,' 'it's the fringe,' 'it's not the mainstream.' But it feels like an urgent political mission -- and I think that's the point of Chris Murphy's tweet -- to explain that Donald Trump is one with the fringe and the crazy and the belief system that, again, is at the very intersection of ideology and domestic violent extremism."
Pollster Cornell Belcher explained that even if 5 percent of Americans buy into the QAnon conspiracies about assassinations, that's still 20 million Americans. Matthew Dowd noted that many of them are also armed, which the United States in a dangerous situation.
Watch:
