HoltesThoughts: Trump Got His Chaika!

Separated At Birth?

Trump, in Bill Barr, got his "Chaika"/Roy Cohn type of prosecutor general to replace the role of Attorney General. He wants this because it is who trump is. Anyone who knows him knows that Trump habitually abuses power using the law. He is famous for three things:

“First he flatters you;”

“then he bullies you;”

“then he sues you;” – Only now he can do what he really wants to do, he investigates you and tries to put you on trial!

Which is why he wanted his own Chaika

AND HE GOT HIM in William P. Barr!

Discussion

Months ago I wrote about Yuri Chaika. I learned a lot about who he was from a “Pussy Riot” video and other materials [Warning the images are disturbing, See: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VakUHHUSdf8]. Trump was beating on Jeff Sessions for not recusing from the Mueller Investigation. Trump had been a protege of Roy Cohn and wanted a “Wartime Consiglieri” style lawyer like Roy Cohn was, or the lawyers depicted in “The Godfather,” When Trump made Matt Whitaker his acting Attorney General, we knew he was headed that way. Well Bill Barr is so much like Chaika, it's amazing. I think a picture conveys it better than a thousand words.

Since I posted this a month ago (6/4/2019), Mr Barr has found or evidence has come out that he's behind:

Blocking testimony and legal subpoenas.

Barr issued a 33 page opinion excusing the Treasury from turning over Trump's Tax information claiming:

“The provisions in 26 U.S.C. § 6103 protecting confidentiality of tax returns prohibited the Department of the Treasury from complying with a request...

Despite acknowledging that:

“The text of section 6103(f ), the statutory exception under which the request was made, does not require the Committee to state any purpose for its request...“

As usual the very Trumpian Barr claims that nevertheless it is somehow:

“Congress could not constitutionally confer upon the Committee the right to compel the Executive Branch to disclose confidential information without a legitimate legislative purpose.”

He did that despite the request listing a number of legislative purposes. Nevertheless the opinion claimed that the reason that the Committee wanted the tax returns was to make them public, which is not true. So the reason itself is a lie... the language of 6103 is clear:

“(1) Committee on Ways and Means, Committee on Finance, and Joint Committee on Taxation Upon written request from the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means of the House of Representatives, the chairman of the Committee on Finance of the Senate, or the chairman of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Secretary shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request, except that any return or return information which can be associated with, or otherwise identify, directly or indirectly, a particular taxpayer shall be furnished to such committee only when sitting in closed executive session unless such taxpayer otherwise consents in writing to such disclosure.”

it says shall not can. There is not supposed to be discretion.

A History of Cover Ups

William Pelham Barr has a long history of bad behavior. I first encountered him in the 80s, though I didn't know it at the time. I wrote on this a long time ago.

Iran Contra Versus Bill Barr

I worked for a warehouse that may well have been periphrialy involved in one of the scandals he was involve in. We tried to stop a series of thefts of PCs from our warehouse. I understand in retrospect that the software stolen was loaded with PROMIS financial tracking software, though at the time all I knew was that their contents were secret and they were supposed to go to DOJ, State Department, CIA and NSA. I did a lot of inventory control in those days and after the first machines disappeared I'd spent hours hunting the warehouse and records hoping to find out what happened to them. It became obvious that the thieves had access to the warehouse and it was an inside job. Nevertheless my two regional manager bosses, Roy Arnsmeyer and another guy whose name escapes me, who were out of town doing sales when the events happened, were both fired as scapegoats, and the team who were probably responsible for the thefts, suddenly got the money after all this happened to buy out the company. Burnham is still around. It does international moves now. The replacement boss Max Herring, is buried now. I still remember his security officer telling me "it never happened" and to never talk about it [or bad things might happen to me]. I was pissed then and I'm still pissed 30+ years later. Bad things happened anyway.

In October 1992, about 5 years after those events The Village Voice published an article with the title:

“Attorney General William Barr is the Best Reason to Vote for Clinton”

The author, Frank Snepp had served in the CIA with Bill Barr. Both had been anti anti-war Demonstrators as students at Columbia University in 1968. They had also met in 1971 when Barr had been a “novice” China Analyst for the CIA. Barr's approach to anti-war demonstrators, was to bring in the Police. Same to Cuban detainees in 1991.

But what endeared William Pelham Barr to George Herbert Walker was his smooth Tongue. As far back as 1976, it was Barr who wrote the “pap sheets” that helped GHW fend off Church Committee oversight. Barr, became an “implacable” enemy of congressional oversight, back then! Barr became a fixer, and when he left the CIA in 1977 and became clerk for Malcolm Wilkey he would use his influence with the judge to turn the "house banking scandal," also of 1992, he would use his influence over the judge to make it a:

“wrenchingly partisan inquiry. Feeding the press overheated charges of wrongdoing, he scored points off the Democratic Congress just as the administration itself was being pilloried for its failed economics.” [Village Voice]

Barr can play juries, judges and the press, like a fiddle. And he has no qualms about going back and forth from being an insider favoring his legal clients to being an outsider playing on his inside connections. In the 1980s he worked for the Office of Legal Council, where he penned opinions about abortion and tuition assistance, both of which were, against. Then he worked for Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge, who represented BCCI for at time. Then back to justice, where he was supposed to investigate BCCI. Impartiality has never been his thing.

“A federal judge accuses the Justice Department of trying to “shape” a case involving illegal loans to Iraq. The House Judiciary Committee blasts federal attorneys for compromising their reputation for impartiality in the investigation of a computer-software theft. CIA officials charge a deputy attorney general with advocating the suppression of evidence in a sensitive sentencing hearing.” [Village Voice]

That computer software theft, was the software on the IBM PC's that were disappearing from my warehouse in the late 80s. I'd quit the job and was working for CDSI by that time, but I also read the newspapers. William Barr was part of the cover up of the Promis Scandal, according to Congress. The thing is that Congress should have impeached Bill Barr, not stopped when Bill Clinton was elected. He got his sense of impunity from these events. In retrospect, the Iran Contra affair was not “scandalmongering” but the beginning of a move towards a “Unitary State” i.e. dictatorship.

“To even the most avid scandalmonger, these may sound like the ravings of a fevered Orwellian imagination. But in fact they are all part of a litany of wrongdoing leveled at George Bush’s Justice Department in the past two months alone. And at the center of the criticism is the chief articulator of Bush’s imperial presidency, the man who wrote the legal rationale for the Gulf War, the Panama invasion, and the officially sanctioned kidnapping of, foreign nationals abroad — Attorney General William P. Barr.” [Village Voice]

The Village Voice article went on to quote William Safire's accusation that Barr was the “cover up general” for George Herbert Walker Bush [Bush 41]. He would go on to use pardons to shut down the Iran Contra investigation, and take a lucrative job as an uber lobbyist creating and representing giant telecoms. But he was much more than a “cover up King.” The Village Voice alleged:

“While the president, for example, hails a “new world order” based on the rules of law, Barr’s briefs give us broken international covenants. Though conservative purists pretend that the Justice Department remains reactive, the attorney general, bolstered by an activist Supreme Court, sets aggressively conservative social agendas on everything from abortion to immigration — while stalling off inquiries into a myriad of scandals. Indeed, nothing better sums up the political gospel and failings of George Bush’s reign on the eve of this election than the handiwork of his chief lawyer. [Village Voice]

Barr had written the rationale for the invasion of Panama, exempted the President from US Treaties, and tried to exempt him from being under the law. Barr, more than Nixon either, embraced the notion that “If the President does it it must be legal.” The same notion that Nixon failed to establish.

Barr Versus Mueller

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6153902-DOJ-opinion-on-Treasury-withholding-Trump-s-tax.html

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