Tuesday, September 1, 2020

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Attorney General Bill Barr continues to openly remove obstacles in his way towards a transition to Trump dictatorship, this time removing a 23-year Justice Department veteran overseeing the legality of counter-terrorism activities and replacing him with the numbnuts who is such an expert on legal policy and procedure that he leaked the Trump regime's charges against Julian Assange.

Current and former national security officials are raising concerns over Attorney General William Barr's recent decision to remove the head of a Justice Department office that helps ensure federal counterterrorism and counterintelligence activities are legal – and replace him with a political appointee with relatively limited experience.
"It's very alarming," said Katrina Mulligan, who worked for the Obama administration in several national security roles and then, after President Donald Trump's inauguration, joined the Office of Law and Policy in the Justice Department's National Security Division.

For much of the past decade, that little-known office has been led by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brad Wiegmann, a 23-year career public servant, not a political appointee. But two weeks ago, Wiegmann, 54, was told he is being reassigned and replaced with a political appointee, according to a Justice Department spokesman and sources familiar with the matter.

Mulligan and other sources told ABC News that the new head of the office is 36-year-old Kellen Dwyer, a cyber-crimes prosecutor who joined the federal government six years ago and made international headlines in November 2018 when he accidentally revealed that federal charges had been secretly filed against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Mulligan said that given Dwyer's limited time and experience handling national security matters, he is "a very odd" choice to replace Wiegmann, whom she described as "exceptional" at managing government bureaucracy and resolving "highly contentious matters across the government."

The timing of the personnel change – coming just two months before the U.S. presidential election, and in the midst of a battle against domestic terrorism and foreign interference in the election – has worried current and former members of the national security community.

Past chiefs of the office have served as political appointees, while others – like Wiegmann – served as career officials, so, "It would not have been that unusual early in an administration to place a political [appointee] in that policy role, but to do that now is very unusual," one current U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

None of this makes sense two months before an election unless you want a particular loyalist in the Justice Department's office of determining which of the Executive Branch's activities are legal and defensible, particularly in the name of counter-intelligence.

Because, you know, you're running amoral and illegal counter-intelligence operations on, say, political opponents.

Just saying. Barr knows exactly what he's doing.


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