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Welcome to the official home and wonderful world of Pulitzer Prize Winning Political Cartoonist Michael P. Ramirez, daily editorial cartoonist for the Las Vegas Review Journal |
Barr 05-03-19
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MAY 3, 2019 BY SCOTT JOHNSON POWERLINE
FOR FEAR OF WILLIAM BARR The Democrats’ hysteria over Attorney General William Barr is directly proportional to their fear of the damage they fear he might do, Kim Strassel explains in her Wall Street Journal Potomac Watch column here: Mr. Barr made real news in that Senate hearing, and while the press didn’t notice, Democrats did. The attorney general said he’d already assigned people at the Justice Department to assist his investigation of the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. He said his review would be far-reaching—that he was obtaining details from congressional investigations, from the ongoing probe by the department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, and even from Mr. Mueller’s work. Mr. Barr said the investigation wouldn’t focus only on the fall 2016 justifications for secret surveillance warrants against Trump team members but would go back months earlier. He also said he’d focus on the infamous “dossier” concocted by opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and British former spy Christopher Steele, on which the FBI relied so heavily in its probe. Mr. Barr acknowledged his concern that the dossier itself could be Russian disinformation, a possibility he described as not “entirely speculative.” He also revealed that the department has “multiple criminal leak investigations under way” into the disclosure of classified details about the Trump-Russia investigation. Do not underestimate how many powerful people in Washington have something to lose from Mr. Barr’s probe. Among them: Former and current leaders of the law-enforcement and intelligence communities. The Democratic Party pooh-bahs who paid a foreign national (Mr. Steele) to collect information from Russians and deliver it to the FBI. The government officials who misused their positions to target a presidential campaign. The leakers. The media. More than reputations are at risk. Revelations could lead to lawsuits, formal disciplinary actions, lost jobs, even criminal prosecution. The attacks on Mr. Barr are first and foremost an effort to force him out, to prevent this information from coming to light until Democrats can retake the White House in 2020. As a fallback, the coordinated campaign works as a pre-emptive smear, diminishing the credibility of his ultimate findings by priming the public to view him as a partisan. In Freudian terms, the Democrats’ hysteria over Barr is overdetermined. They also fear him because he is smarter than the whole lot of them put together. JOHN adds: I doubt that Barr’s investigation will ever get this far, but let’s not forget that the ultimate questions are, What did Barack Obama know, and when did he know it? read more MAY 1, 2019 BY JOHN HINDERAKER POWERLINE BLOG
THE BARR TESTIMONY: DEMOCRATS GONE WILD The big news story today, if you believe the press, is Attorney General William Barr’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Much could be said both about the hearing and the press reaction to it; here are a few observations. First, the story began yesterday with Robert Mueller leaking his March 27 letter to Barr to the Washington Post. This leak was a purely political act. It was intended to provide fodder for today’s hearing, and it did. Mueller is a political player in D.C., and his investigation was a political investigation. His report was a political document. Mueller’s nakedly political act in leaking his letter to the Post was clarifying. Second, Mueller’s letter complained about the short summary of the Mueller report’s conclusions that Attorney General Barr released in advance of the report itself. But Mueller did not claim that anything in Barr’s summary of findings was incorrect or untrue. On the contrary, Mueller’s letter of March 27 merely asserted that Barr’s short account did not fully capture the flavor of Mueller’s 400-plus page report: The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions. Of course it didn’t. It didn’t purport to. But that sentence is the only criticism of Barr’s statement that Mueller has made. Barr says that he talked with Mueller on the telephone after receiving the letter, and in that conversation Mueller admitted that nothing in Barr’s statement was incorrect. Third, today’s faux controversy represents a ridiculous moving of the goalposts. Mueller was charged with investigating whether anyone in Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russians. No one did, and Mueller so reported. That is pretty much the end of the matter, as far as nearly all voters are concerned. Now, instead of talking about collusion, the Democrats want to talk about whether Attorney General Barr’s statement accurately summarized the findings of Mueller’s report. Who cares? Read the report for yourself, it has been made public. One thing Barr got right for sure: the Mueller report finds no collusion. Fourth, Mueller’s real grievance is that his report hasn’t hurt President Trump as much as Mueller had hoped. Knowing that collusion was a dud, Mueller and his team of Democratic Party loyalists worked as many anti-Trump nuggets into the report as they could. Yet for the most part, these have been ignored or have fallen flat. Most people thought Mueller was investigating collusion, and when it became clear there was no collusion, they moved on. Mueller is trying to serve his party by focusing attention on the random smears of Donald Trump and his administration that are contained in the report. read more |
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