Attorney General Bill Barr absolutely gave the game away today on Fox News as to what is coming. Donald Trump wants Democrats in jail for the Mueller probe, and Bill Barr is all but promising to deliver indictments. Greg Sargent:
Barr confirmed, as he has before, that he is currently investigating the investigators -- that is, taking another look at the genesis of the investigation into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election, and the Trump campaign’s possible complicity with it. This is, of course, exactly what Trump has demanded for years.
“I’ve been trying to get answers to the questions and I’ve found that a lot of the answers have been inadequate and some of the explanations I’ve gotten don’t hang together,” Barr said, stressing how important it is to know “whether government officials abused their power and put their thumb on the scale.”
This is more than just a declaration that the FBI launched an investigation of a foreign attack on our political system and possible coordination with it by Americans. It also subtly bolsters the idea that the FBI did this in a way that was designed to harm the Trump campaign.
Indeed, Barr openly validated Trump’s longtime claim that the whole FBI probe was a “witch hunt.”
“I think if I had been falsely accused I would be comfortable saying it was a witch hunt,” Barr said.
This echoes Barr’s extraordinary press conference just before releasing the Mueller report, at which he appealed to us to understand how victimized Trump felt by the Mueller investigation when considering his efforts to obstruct it.
Now Barr has gone all the way and validated the phrase “witch hunt.”
Perhaps most strikingly, Barr hinted darkly that Democrats should be worried about the outcome of his investigation of the investigators. Asked about Democratic charges that he’d previously misled Congress, Barr said:
“It’s a laughable charge, and I think it’s largely being made to try to discredit me, partly because they may be concerned about the outcome of a review of what happened during the election.”
Really? The attorney general of the United States is telegraphing that the conclusion of an unfinished investigation should be feared by one of two major political parties?
“I don’t think it’s appropriate for the attorney general to be casting DOJ actions in terms of whether they’re good or bad for one political party," Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told us. “He’s implying that what’s going on behind the scenes at DOJ will be good for Republicans and bad for Democrats.”
The fix is in, fellas. And when Trump's political enemies start going to jail, what then?
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