AG Barr, Master at Deception...

There will be somewhere in the vicinity of 40% of the population that will declare the following false.Or that it just doesn't matter because things are great with the economy percolating and employment booming. As if that's ALL that matters. For those folks decency, truth, honesty, fidelity to the Constitution, and other such lofty ideals really aren't important.

Believing the truth doesn't matter, or if it does it really isn't all that important are the two defining "values" of the trumpian cultists. When the nation's Attorney General shows support for Trump's lies and deceit by mounting his own propaganda campaign in defense our American justice system is threatened. In a big way.

President Trump is openly telegraphing that he fully expects his attorney general to validate one of his biggest lies: that the real crime in 2016 wasn’t Russia’s sabotaging of our election but rather the decision by law enforcement to investigate it.

New public comments from William P. Barr provide Trump with ample grounds for being confident that Barr will deliver for him.

But Barr’s latest claims about the Russia investigation rest on a serious misrepresentation that has not gotten the focus it deserves — and is more pernicious than it first appears.

In a much-discussed interview with NBC News, Barr criticized the Department of Justice’s inspector general for concluding that the FBI’s launch of an investigation into Russian interference — and potential Trump campaign coordination with it — had a legitimate basis.

Barr’s full interview is now online, and it’s worse than you thought. It whitewashes away a crucial aspect of the I.G.’s conclusions in a way that’s easy to overlook but serves Trump’s political needs in deeply disingenuous fashion.

One key argument Barr makes is that the FBI’s decision to launch that investigation had a “very flimsy” basis that lacked “sufficient predication.”

Barr casts this as rooted in deeply held pro-democracy principles. He claims “the incumbent government used the apparatus of the state” to “spy on political opponents,” in a way that could have affected “the outcome of the election” and thus posed a “danger to our free system.”

Barr claims there was never any serious evidence of “collusion” and excoriates the FBI for having an inadequate basis for launching the investigation, given the “very potent powers” the FBI has at its disposal. “At the end of the day,” he asks, “is what you’re relying on sufficiently powerful to justify the techniques you’re using?”

And Barr insists the inspector general’s analysis of this was “very limited,” vowing that his own forthcoming review would take a much more thorough look at the investigation’s genesis.

Barr’s deceptive whitewash

In saying those things, Barr is rewriting the story of 2016 in a subtle but consequential way. He’s implying that the FBI’s initial investigation was only motivated by what it had learned about the Trump campaign’s intentions with regard to coordinating with Russia’s electoral subversion effort.

But Barr is leaving out crucial facts and context. In fact, when the FBI launched this investigation, it had already developed an awareness that Russia was undertaking this attack on U.S. democracy — separate and apart from any Trump campaign involvement with it. This was a critical reason the FBI launched its investigation.

The inspector general’s report is very clear and emphatic on this point. As it recounts, at the time the FBI opened the probe in July 2016, it was already aware of extensive efforts by Russia to influence the election.

This didn’t just include an FBI awareness of extensive Russian efforts to hack into Democratic computer systems. As the I.G. notes, it also involved “numerous attempts to hack into state election systems,” including “confirmed access into elements of multiple state or local electoral boards.”

As the decision was intensively debated among top intelligence officials, the I.G. notes, what was already known about the Russian attack was critical. Officials told the I.G. that the new information about the Trump campaign precipitated the investigation, but only on top of the fact that Russia was already “targeting U.S. political institutions” and trying to manipulate the “U.S. democratic process.”

SKIP

Barr’s cynicism helps Trump

It’s galling in the extreme that Barr would piously claim concern for preserving the sanctity of our elections while hand-waving away the massive outside disruption effort as a central reason the investigation was legitimately launched.

This also serves numerous Trump political purposes. It helps Trump make the fact of that Russian attack disappear — and by extension the betrayal of our country his campaign engaged in when it did actively work to coordinate with and benefit from it.

This has been a central Trump goal for years: Son-in-law Jared Kushner dismissed the Russian effort as “a couple of Facebook ads,” and campaign manager Brad Parscale insisted Russia “never” helped Trump.

In fact, this was a serious and disruptive attack on our democratic processes and on liberal democracy itself. Barr is helping make all that go poof.

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When you have your Top Cop (the USA AG) and the President of the United States spreading propaganda and lies that would make Joseph Goebbels proud you ought to realize we have a very big problem. A problem that if not excised, and excised quickly, our grandchildren and future generations will live in a very different, less free society than we have enjoyed.

Our founders are surely spinning in their graves. Or would be if that were possible.