Today’s Campaign Update (Because the Campaign Never Ends)
This is all good to know. Now, some indictments and perp walks, please? – In his interview aired on The Ingraham Angle last night, William Barr laid down several key markers. During the course of the 7-minute clip below, he endorses President Trump’s firing of corrupt ICIG Michael Atkinson – directly refuting the assessment of his plodding underling, DOJ IG Michael Horowitz – and clarifies that U.S. Attorney John Durham’s role is to prosecute the guilty, not necessarily to write a report.
Unfortunately to many of us, he also endorses the renewal of the FISA law that has been so horribly and systematically abused by the hopelessly corrupt FBI. But even there we find some encouraging news: Rather than repeating his demand for a “clean” renewal of the statute, he talks about putting in some “safeguards” that would work to prevent further abuse. But he does not clarify whether he means those safeguards to be in the statute – which would give them the force of law – or in FBI ‘procedure,’ which would make them nothing more than an inconvenience for corrupt FBI officials to continue to ignore.
Below is the video clip, followed by a transcript:
Transcript:
Ingraham – I believe you urged consideration of the federal inmate population given the coronavirus. Where does that stand now?
Barr – We’re not going to open our prisons and let prisoners go free. Our mission is to protect the public, and we’re not going to do anything that’s contrary to that. Where we find a prisoner who is vulnerable because of their age or medical condition; that has served the substantial part of their sentence; has not been convicted of a sexual assault or a violent crime; does not pose a threat to the community; we are using every tool we have to put them into home confinement, provided we thing home confinement will not be more dangerous than staying where they are. And also, after a quarantine period where we are sure they’re not taking the disease into the public.
Ingraham – You have been criticized recently for focusing on the drug cartels during the Covid virus [plays clip of idiot reporters].
Barr – Well, it might come as a surprise to some of these people that the Justice Department has 115,000 people who are dedicated to protecting the public safety, including preventing narcotics trafficking. And we’re actually able to do more than one thing at a time. And we’re handling different kinds of cases. Maybe fraud isn’t on the top of their mind, but we still police fraud. It’s interesting, because drugs kill 70,000 Americans a year – 70,000 a year. It’s poison, and we have to make sure that during this period the cartels are not taking advantage of the United States and pumping this poison up into the United States.
Ingraham – And the border is getting tougher to penetrate now, and so they’re coming in via boat and navigable waterways.
Barr – Right, and they’re relying more on boats to bring the cocaine up from South America up for further transportation into the United States. So, the Justice Department can do more than one thing at once. I’m amused whenever I see, you know, ‘Barr has intervened in this case, or Barr has done such and such’ at the time of the Covid crisis. Business for the Department of Justice has to continue.
Ingraham – John Brennan has come out, smashing the President’s firing of Inspector General Michael Atkinson, let’s listen:
[Brennan Clip] – By removing Mr. Atkinson, and I think also sending a signal to others, Mr. Trump continues to show his insecurity in terms of trying to stop anybody who was going to expose, again the lawlessness, that I think he not only has allowed to continue, but also that he abets.
Barr – I think the president did the right thing in removing Atkinson. From the vantage point of the Dept. of Justice, he had interpreted his statute; which is a fairly narrow statute that gave him jurisdiction over wrong-doing by intelligence people; and tried to turn it into a commission to explore anything in the government, and immediately report it to congress without letting the executive branch look at it and determine whether there was any problem. He was told this in a letter from the department of justice, and he is obliged to follow the interpretation of the department of justice, and he ignored it. So I think the President was correct in firing him.
Ingraham – And it’s the second inspector general he’s fired since the beginning of this pandemic. And of course that is used to say: ‘well, the president doesn’t want a watchdog’.
Barr – No, I don’t think that’s true. I think he wants responsible watchdogs.
Ingraham – What can you tell us about the state of John Durham’s investigation? People have been waiting for the, the final report, on what happened with this, what can you tell us?
Barr– Well I think a report y’know, may be, and probably will be, a by-product of his activity; but his primary focus isn’t to prepare a report, he is looking to bring to justice people who were engaged in abuses if he can show that there were criminal violations; and that’s what the focus is on. And, as you know being a lawyer yourself, building these cases – especially the sprawling case we have between us that went on for two or three years here – it takes some time, it takes some time to build the case.
So he’s diligently pursuing it. My own view is that the evidence shows that we’re not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness, there was something far more troubling here; and we’re going to get to the bottom of it. And if people broke the law, and we can establish that with the evidence, they will be prosecuted.
Ingraham – The president is very frustrated, I think you obviously know that. About Andrew McCabe, he believes that people like McCabe and others just were able to basically flout the laws, and so far with impunity.
Barr – I think the president has every right to be frustrated, because I think what happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history. Without any basis, they started this investigation of his campaign; and even more concerning actually, is what happened after the campaign; a whole pattern of events while he was President, to sabotage the presidency. And I think that, or at least had the effect of sabotaging the presidency.
Ingraham – Will FISA abuses be prevented going forward given what happened here where FISA judges were not given critical pieces of information; material facts about evidence that informed the governments’ okaying of surveillance on American citizens.
Barr – You know I think it’s possible to put in a regime that will make it very hard, either to willfully circumvent FISA, or to do so sloppily without due regard for the rights of the American person involved. And also to make it very clear that any misconduct will be discovered and discovered fairly promptly. So I do think we can put in safeguards that will enable us to go forward with this important tool. I think it’s very sad, and the people who abused FISA have a lot to answer for. Because this was an important tool to protect the American people, they abused it, they undercut public confidence in FISA but also the FBI as an institution. And we have to rebuild that.
[End]
So, there you have it. You can interpret it any way you want, and I know most of you will. But in doing so, you should think about why Barr felt the need to give this particular interview at this particular time? He isn’t under any real scrutiny from the corrupt news media right now, or under any cloud of controversy.
Thus, the timing of this interview is quite interesting, as well as the content. It indicates to me that Barr wanted to use this interview to send some very specific messages to some very specific people, including John Brennan. Otherwise, what reason would there have been to do it?
Think about it.
That is all.
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