It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

Attorney General William Barr has been nearly invisible for the last month or so, except for a speech last week at Notre Dame in which he railed against "secularists" and all but promised that the Justice Department's top priority was to transform America into a white supremacist Christian Dominionist theocracy.

In a speech at University of Notre Dame’s law school Friday, Barr blamed “secularists” and “so-called progressives” for wreaking havoc on American society. Barr’s depiction of a war between the non-religious and people of faith shocked legal experts, who saw Barr’s defense of religious freedom as an assault on the First Amendment’s protection against the government’s establishment of any religion.

“This is not decay,” Barr said. “This is organized destruction. Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion & traditional values.” (Barr spent years profiting off of these same industries he is attacking. He served as general counsel at Verizon for eight years, held a had a paid position on the board of Time Warner for nine, and represented telecoms giant GTE in the 1990s.) 

In his address Friday, Barr thundered against what he described as a “moral upheaval.” “Virtually every measure of social pathology continues to gain ground,” he said. “Along with the wreckage of the family we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence and the deadly drug epidemic.” 

Barr pointed particularly to public schools, according to an account of the speech from the Indianapolis Star. “Ground zero for these attacks on religion are the schools,” Barr said. “To me this is the most serious challenge to religious liberty today.” There is decades of Supreme Court caselaw removing religion from public schools because the First Amendment bans the government from establishing or giving primacy to a religion.

It's terrifying enough for America's top legal officer to spout nonsense about religion in schools and declare separation of church and state to be all but dead.  But first, it seems his investigation into the Mueller probe is much further along than previously thought.

Federal prosecutors reviewing the origins of the Russia investigation have asked witnesses pointed questions about any anti-Trump bias among former F.B.I. officials who are frequent targets of President Trump and about the earliest steps they took in the Russia inquiry, according to former officials and other people familiar with the review.

The prosecutors, led by John H. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, have interviewed about two dozen former and current F.B.I. officials, the people said. Two former senior F.B.I. agents are assisting with the review, the people said.

The number of interviews shows that Mr. Durham’s review is further along than previously known. It has served as a political flash point since Attorney General William P. Barr revealed in the spring that he planned to scrutinize the beginnings of the Russia investigation, which Mr. Trump and his allies have attacked without evidence as a plot by law enforcement and intelligence officials to prevent him from winning the 2016 election.

Closely overseen by Mr. Barr, Mr. Durham and his investigators have sought help from governments in countries that figure into right-wing attacks and unfounded conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation, stirring criticism that they are trying to deliver Mr. Trump a political victory rather than conducting an independent review.

This is the wild card in any impeachment inquiry by the Democrats.  Barr's counter-attack is this move to undermine the Mueller probe and the impeachment inquiry in one fell swoop.  Certainly Republican partisans have visions of dozens of FBI, CIA, and State Department "deep state" agents led off in cuffs for a "huge conspiracy against Donald Trump", arrests that would include former Obama administration officials and "evidence" that would fatally taint the House and Senate investigations as well.

It's a race to see which side can present their case the best, I fear.  So far the arrests haven't come, and they may never will, Barr may be defeated well before his plan can come to fruition, or maybe he's waiting for the Senate acquittal of Trump to make his move.

But it's definitely in motion.  Of all the Trump regime, Barr is definitely the most dangerous.