Barr’s Senate Testimony
Barr appeared before the committee on May 1, ostensibly to answer questions about his four-page letter and handling of the Mueller report in general. Of course, his ability to answer questions on any topic requires that questions be asked. Instead, Democrat Mazie Hirono opened her “examination” of Barr with this hate-filled diatribe: “Mr. Barr, the American people know you are no different from Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway, or any of the other people who sacrifice their once decent reputation for the grifter and liar who sits in the Oval Office.”12
Hirono then went on for over three more minutes spewing similar invective without managing to formulate a single question for Barr. Along the way, she made the ridiculous claim that Barr had previously lied to Congress, which I’ll get to momentarily. But her unhinged rant was a perfect example of why so many members of Congress admit open sessions of this type are practically worthless. They turn out to be nothing but grandstanding and get Congress nowhere closer to the truth.
Kamala Harris managed to ask Barr some questions but pursued several ridiculous and irrelevant lines of inquiry. One was to establish that Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein had made their decision not to charge the president with obstruction of justice based purely on Robert Mueller’s report and not on the underlying evidence that supported Mueller’s conclusions. The Left-wing media was atwitter with delight over Harris’s supposed bombshell revelation, but this is a nonissue. In Barr’s own words:
The evidence represented in the report. This is not a mysterious process. In the Department of Justice we have pros-memos [memos recommending prosecution] and declination memos [memos recommending the attorney general decline to prosecute] every day coming up. And we don’t go and look at the underlying evidence. We take the characterization of the evidence as true.13
I have to give Senator Harris credit for making nothing sound like something for the benefit of her political allies in the media. Perhaps, in a vacuum, a layperson would hear, “He decided not to prosecute without looking at the underlying evidence” as something outrageous. As a lawyer, judge, and former prosecutor, I can tell you this is less than a nothing burger. Think about what Harris is really saying. Special Counsel Mueller spent two years interviewing people, executing search warrants, and performing other forms of investigation. No attorney general would be expected to go through every word of testimony, the reports on every search warrant and FBI interview, and draw his own conclusions. That would constitute redoing all the work Mueller just finished in formulating the report!
If an attorney general were expected to review every piece of underlying evidence federal prosecutors gather during often years-long investigations to either recommend prosecution or declination, no one would ever be prosecuted. As Barr said, examining the underlying evidence was Mueller’s job.
Besides its silliness, the irony and hypocrisy of this line of questioning is too rich for words. Barr had made a far less redacted version of the Mueller report available to Congress and not a single one of them bothered to examine it. But they are now criticizing Barr for accepting Mueller’s representation of the evidence in his own investigation, conducted by an overwhelmingly Democrat panel of lawyers.14 Don’t they realize how ridiculous they look?
Next, Harris asked a series of questions the purpose of which was to—get this—suggest Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should not have participated in the decision not to charge President Trump with obstruction of justice because he was also a witness in the matter of the firing of James Comey. Harris asked Barr if he had consulted with DOJ ethics officials before enlisting Rosenstein to participate in that decision to ensure Rosenstein was not seen to have a conflict of interest.
I must admit I burst out laughing when she went down this road. Conflict of interest? If anything, Rosenstein’s conflict would be against the president, not for him! This is the man widely believed to have offered to wear a wire when talking to President Trump to try and establish a case to remove the president from office based on Article 25.15 Was Harris seriously trying to suggest Rosenstein might be too biased in favor of the president?
But let’s get to the heart of what all this attempted smearing of Barr is really about. It’s about the ongoing inspector general investigation of the origins of this whole attempted coup. Harris opened her segment of this sideshow by asking Barr, “Attorney General Barr, has anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone?”
Asked or suggested? Anyone? This was an obvious attempt to get Barr on the record saying “no” and then later claim he lied to Congress, having perhaps forgotten a conversation with some insider at the White House that never went anywhere. Perhaps Harris was attempting to “trigger” Barr by exhibiting such open hostility toward him.
No such luck. Barr’s blood pressure didn’t rise one beat. He hesitated in answering, but any objective observer would conclude his only hesitation was his own good faith effort in attempting to answer Harris’s question with a “yes or no,” as requested, without misleading the other members of Congress. Barr admitted, “I’m trying to grapple with the word ‘suggest,’” and then continued, “There have been discussions of matters out there that… they have not asked me to open an investigation.”
“Perhaps they’ve suggested?” replied Harris. “Hinted? Inferred?”
Give it a rest, Kamala. You know you’re reaching and so does the American public, or at least that part of the public that doesn’t desperately need to believe there is some reason to end the Trump presidency without actually winning an election. If there is a scandal here, it’s that Comey, Brennan, McCabe, Clapper, and the rest of the coup conspirators weren’t even investigated by Mueller’s team of Trump-hating lawyers.
Luckily for Harris and the Democrat smear brigade, the media are on their side, as always. After Harris melodramatically marched out of the Senate hearing to mug for the cameras and call for Barr’s impeachment, Vanity Fair proclaimed “Kamala Harris Guts Barr Like a Fish, Leaves Him Flopping on the Deck.”16 Greg Sargent at the Washington Post claimed Harris had “roasted” Barr while falsely stating Barr refused to answer Harris’s question of whether anyone had asked him to open an investigation.17 Barr was forthright in stating he hadn’t been asked but “matters out there” had been discussed.
That bastion of hard-hitting journalism, CNN, ran video of Barr’s testimony with the headline, “See Kamala Harris Stump William Barr During Hearing.” That’s classic CNN. It’s technically true that Barr was stumped, but it was over Harris’s deliberately problematic wording of the question, not because Barr was fraught over having been caught red-handed regarding something improper. Again, the AG’s office should be investigating a lot of people involved in trying to overturn the 2016 election.
With the avalanche of uncritical media trumpeting the Democrats’ newest fantasy, it’s no surprise that calls for Barr’s resignation or impeachment were immediate. They were simply the latest outrage and unsupported demands of the loony Left. But then to add more drama to the report that defeated the mainstream media’s Trump-Russia collusion fiction, the Left weaves yet another new web: that Barr misrepresented the Mueller report.
A letter written to Barr on Mueller’s letterhead suggests that Barr’s conclusions did not “fully capture the content and substance” of findings by Mueller. The Left does its crazy dance again. The truth? Barr called Mueller immediately after seeing the letter.
Barr said that the letter was received on a Wednesday night in the White House. Apparently, it goes through a screening process, so Barr got it on Thursday morning. He immediately called Mueller and, according to his testimony in Congress, “I asked him if he was suggesting that the March twenty-fourth letter was inaccurate and he said, ‘No,’ but that the press reporting had been inaccurate.”
Did you get that? Mueller himself said Barr’s letter was accurate. But he was frustrated with the press’s inability to capture certain nu
ances, i.e., prejudicial evidence that Mueller thinks makes the president look bad but which doesn’t indicate any criminal wrongdoing. In other words, Mueller is upset Barr didn’t help the Left-wing media spin the report for political reasons, since there was no basis for legal action.
You have to love the irony here regarding Mueller’s disappointment in the media and his implication Barr had something to do with it. Since when is Barr, a Republican, able to convince the media of anything?
Hey, Bob, go complain to your Deep State pals. Start with Jim Comey. Have Comey call his pals at the New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC. He’s proven he’s good at that. He’ll tell the media what you want them to hear; he doesn’t have Barr’s commitment to the truth. And next time, Bob—let’s hope there never is one for you—don’t write a 448-page report and expect everyone to get it just the way you wanted in four pages.
Barr Didn’t Lie
Mueller’s whining letter to Barr and their subsequent conversation became the supposed basis for the next baseless attack on Barr—that he lied to Congress during a previous appearance in April. While I agree with National Review’s Andrew McCarthy—a onetime “Never Trumper” who contributed to NR’s January 2016 issue wholly devoted to opposing Donald Trump18—that this allegation may be “too stupid to write about,” the media have made it necessary to debunk this whopper.
It’s important to remember the timeline to understand what the Democrats are alleging. Barr released his four-page letter on March 24 of this year. Mueller writes his letter to Barr on March 27, which Barr sees on March 28, after the screening process. On April 9, Barr testifies before Congress. During that testimony, the following exchange occurred between Barr and Democrat Congressman Charlie Crist of Florida:
CRIST: Reports have emerged recently, General, that members of the special counsel’s team are frustrated at some level with the limited information included in your March twenty-fourth letter… that it does not adequately or accurately necessarily portray the report’s findings. Do you know what they’re referencing with that?
BARR: No, I don’t. I think—I think… I suspect that they probably wanted more put out, but, in my view, I was not interested in putting out summaries or trying to summarize because I think any summary, regardless of who prepares it, not only runs the risk of, you know, being under-inclusive or over-inclusive, but also, you know, would trigger a lot of discussion and analysis that really should await everything coming out at once. So I was not interested in a summary of the report.… I felt that I should state the bottom line conclusions and I tried to use Special Counsel Mueller’s own language in doing that.19
As juvenile as this sounds, the Democrats are claiming this answer was a lie because Barr already had Mueller’s March 27 letter, so when he said, “No, I don’t” in answer to Crist’s question, “Do you know what they’re referencing with that?” he was not telling the truth. Supposedly, he knew what Mueller’s staff was “referencing” because he had the letter.
First, as Barr later pointed out, he wasn’t talking to unnamed members of Mueller’s staff; he was talking directly to Mueller, whom he has known for decades. And it obviously would not be true to say Barr knew what the staff was concerned about, because after reading the letter, he didn’t even know what Mueller was concerned about. That’s why Barr called Mueller to ask!
To which Mueller answered that he wasn’t concerned about what Barr did, but rather how the media reported it. As Mueller said this directly to Barr on or about March 28, it would stand to reason Barr would not know what Mueller’s staff might be concerned about twelve days later on April 9. Given that Barr was not required to do anything at all with the Mueller report except decide whether or not to prosecute, I’m not sure why anyone thinks Barr should even care what Mueller’s staff thinks about his handling of the report.
Yet, Barr again goes the extra mile in trying to be cooperative with a hostile Congress and speculates, probably based upon the cryptic statements in Mueller’s March 27 letter, that he suspects they “may have wanted more put out.” Barr is uncharacteristically speculating here in an attempt to provide an answer; Mueller’s letter said nothing about putting out more information. It merely said Barr’s letter “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions.”
What Barr is very obviously not doing is lying. You can tell that from his demeanor during the exchange, in addition to examining the facts. The only truthful answer Barr could have given Crist about why Mueller’s staff might be frustrated with Barr’s March 24 letter was “I don’t know.” There was no reason for Mueller’s staff to be frustrated, other than that their two-year, $34 million revenge investigation didn’t achieve its primary goal—to overturn the 2016 presidential election.
I have to give the devils their due. The Democrats are the best chess players out there. They’re demonizing Barr without even having anything to demonize him for, but Barr has remained very calm. He wasn’t flustered by Mazie Hirono’s unhinged attack or her false allegations. This is the woman who says all men should just shut up, all women accusers must be believed, and there is no presumption of innocence—if you’re a Republican male. That’s where we are in this country.
Resistance and Revenge Are Futile
There isn’t anything left to accuse Barr of at this point. The Democrats won’t be able to stop him from doing his job. Barr will get to the bottom of the origins of the counterintelligence investigation on the Trump campaign, including when it really started and why. He will find the truth about the FISA warrant to surveil the campaign, especially now that the president has decided to declassify (sooner than originally thought), and whether or not there was any new evidence in subsequent FISA warrant applications that justified continuing wiretaps.
Barr is the Democrats’ worst nightmare. He’s a veteran prosecutor with no discernible ego. He’s not looking to write a book. He appears impervious to politics. When he’s asked questions by grandstanding politicians, he doesn’t take the opportunity to grandstand himself. If he can answer the question with a “yes” or “no,” he does. It even catches me by surprise at times. For the Deep State actors who attempted to take down the duly elected president, knowing a man like this is on their trail must be terrifying.
It all comes down to twenty-eight little words Barr uttered during his Senate testimony:
“I think spying did occur. The question is whether it was adequately predicated. And I’m not suggesting that it wasn’t adequately predicated. But I need to explore that.”20
Explore it he will and it’s unlikely to end well for the Comeys, Clappers, and Brennans of the previous administration. I believe justice is coming.
Meanwhile, the Left simply refuses to accept that the Mueller investigation is over. They are fixated on obstruction of justice but make no mistake. If Mueller wanted an indictment for obstruction, he would have recommended one.
Mueller tried to make that case for two years. He had an army of investigators, search warrants, subpoenas, and grand juries. He came up empty. His leaving the obstruction question open was political whoremanship. It was Mueller’s attempt to satisfy an unsatisfied client by leaving crumbs the Democrats could fight over. This whole thing has been the biggest political con job and the closest thing to a successful coup in American history. Everything I said in my book, Liars, Leakers, and Liberals was right.
They hate Trump and they’ll do anything, including subjugating the Constitution and our system of justice, to try to destroy the man. Their desperation to hang on to a narrative so torn up, worn out, and destroyed isn’t even entertaining anymore. It’s almost not even worth talking about.
What is worth talking about is how the tables will turn. Pursuant to his statement to the US Senate, Barr has appointed John Durham to “determine if intelligence collection involving the Trump campaign was lawful and appropriate.”21 Durham is another one the Democrats will find impossible to discredit. He has experience investigating law
enforcement corruption, including at the FBI and CIA. He was confirmed unanimously by the Senate and was described by the two Democrat senators from Connecticut as a “fierce, fair prosecutor” who knows how to try tough cases.22
Even CNN admits Durham is “known for bringing independent rigor to challenging and politically sensitive cases.”23 Like Barr, Durham has never run for elected office. He’s not a politician. It’s not in his blood. He’s a truth seeker, pure and simple. And he appears to be cut from the same cold, relentlessly logical cloth as Barr.
God help the real conspirators in this case.
Grab your popcorn, Junior Mints, or whatever makes you happy. The real show is about to begin. Multiple criminal leak investigations are underway. The FISA warrants are being reviewed. The investigation Peter Strzok tried so hard to avoid is beginning and the inspector general’s report, expected to be damning to Comey’s FBI and Lynch’s DOJ, will be out soon. Then, it’s showtime for Obama, Brennan, Clapper, Lynch, Rice, Strzok, McCabe, and the whole Cardinal Comey crime family, who devoted themselves not only to obstructing the will of the American people but also the very foundation of justice in this great nation.
This will be true reality TV. No scripts, no rehearsals, just a gang of criminals pointing fingers at each other to save their own hides. It will be like a combination of true crime and the reality show Survivor. The Deep State Exposed.
They are not going quietly into the night and it will be a joy to watch.
Radicals, Resistance, and Revenge Page 4