Kimberly Strassel: AG Barr gets attacked because his probe endangers powerful people

The only thing uglier than an angry Washington is a fearful Washington. And fear is what’s driving this week’s blitzkrieg of Attorney General William Barr.
Mr. Barr tolerantly sat through hours of Democratic insults at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday. His reward for his patience was to be labeled, in the space of a news cycle, a lawbreaking, dishonest, obstructing hack. Speaker Nancy Pelosi publicly accused Mr. Barr of lying to Congress, which, she added, is “considered a crime.” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said he will move to hold Mr. Barr in contempt unless the attorney general acquiesces to the unprecedented demand that he submit to cross-examination by committee staff attorneys. James Comey, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, lamented that Donald Trump had “eaten” Mr. Barr’s “soul.” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren demands the attorney general resign. California Rep. Eric Swalwell wants him impeached.
These attacks aren’t about special counsel Robert Mueller, his report or even the surreal debate over Mr. Barr’s first letter describing the report. The attorney general delivered the transparency Democrats demanded: He quickly released a lightly redacted report, which portrayed the president in a negative light. What do Democrats have to object to?
Some of this is frustration. Democrats foolishly invested two years of political capital in the idea that Mr. Mueller would prove President Trump had colluded with Russia, and Mr. Mueller left them empty-handed. Some of it is personal. Democrats resent that Mr. Barr won’t cower or apologize for doing his job. Some is bitterness that Mr. Barr is performing like a real attorney general, making the call against obstruction-of-justice charges rather than sitting back and letting Democrats have their fun with Mr. Mueller’s obstruction innuendo.
But most of it is likely fear. Mr. Barr made real news in that Senate hearing, and while the press didn’t notice, Democrats did. The attorney general said he’d already assigned people at the Justice Department to assist his investigation of the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. He said his review would be far-reaching – that he was obtaining details from congressional investigations, from the ongoing probe by the department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, and even from Mr. Mueller’s work. Mr. Barr said the investigation wouldn’t focus only on the fall 2016 justifications for secret surveillance warrants against Trump team members but would go back months earlier.
He also said he’d focus on the infamous “dossier” concocted by opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and British former spy Christopher Steele, on which the FBI relied so heavily in its probe. Mr. Barr acknowledged his concern that the dossier itself could be Russian disinformation, a possibility he described as not “entirely speculative.” He also revealed that the department has “multiple criminal leak investigations under way” into the disclosure of classified details about the Trump-Russia investigation.

Loser Democrat Cartoons

California high-speed rail project’s estimated cost rises to $79B, report says

Critics of California’s plan to link the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas by high-speed rail have cited the estimated cost of the project – and now that cost is projected to increase by about $2 billion, according to a report.
The state’s High-Speed Rail Authority now estimates that the plan will cost about $79 billion – with the price of the Central Valley segment already under construction rising from $10.6 billion to $12.4 billion, Bloomberg reported.
The revised cost estimates were attributed to changes in the scope of the project and planning for contingencies, the report said.
In February, President Trump blasted the project’s leaders for “having spent and wasted many billions of dollars.” He added that the federal government planned to recoup federal dollars spent on the project.
“Whole project is a “green” disaster!” Trump wrote.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who has frequently clashed with Trump, expressed his own reservations about the plan in February, announcing his preference to focus only on the Central Valley portion in the short term, saying the full project “would cost too much and take too long,” Bloomberg reported.
In March, the head of the state’s rail authority fired back against Trump’s effort to block more federal dollars from going to the California project.
At that point, the Federal Railroad Administration had given California $2.5 billion to construct a Los Angeles-to-San Francisco link, with another $929 million pledged. But federal authorities – and the president – claimed the terms of the federal grant had not been met and threatened to withhold any future payments while demanding repayment for the funds already doled out to California.
The project, long championed by Newsom's predecessor, Jerry Brown, is years behind schedule with the latest estimate for completion set for 2033.
Trump and Newsom have also clashed over federal funding to help California recover from deadly wildfires. Trump has blamed the wildfires on a lack of “proper Forest Management”  – and again has threatened to reconsider federal funding.
Fox News’ Andrew O’Reilly and Lukas Mikelionis contributed to this story.

Mike Huckabee says Dems have 'got nothing' on Barr, were 'rude and disrespectful'

Democrats have "got nothing” in trying to discredit Attorney General William Barr on the Mueller report, former Republican presidential candidate and Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said Wednesday.
“They are like people who show up at the barbecue restaurant at closing time and all the meat is gone," Huckabee said on Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle."
"So, what they are left to do is just lick the bones, gnaw on them a little bit and suck the barbecue sauce out of the bottle. They have nothing else to do,” Huckabee told host Laura Ingraham.
Barr testified Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he addressed his decision not to pursue an obstruction case against President Trump and the delay in the release of the redacted version of Mueller's report on his Russia investigation.
During the hearing, several Democrats called on Barr to resign, including Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif. Harris is seeking her party's 2020 presidential nomination.
Huckabee described the Democrats' treatment of Barr as “rude and disrespectful.”
“And I think in a way, I almost felt sorry watching them. But then I didn't because [they were] so rude and disrespectful of the attorney general. And how he maintained his composure and didn't crawl across the table and go after a few of them as a testament to diplomacy, grace and being a gentleman,” Huckabee said.
Huckabee also reacted to a New York Times op-ed by former FBI Director James Comey.
In a piece titled “How Trump Co-Opts Leaders Like Bill Barr,” Comey wrote, “Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites."
Huckabee disagreed with Comey and warned that the former FBI director may soon face troubles of his own.
“First of all, he’s dead wrong about Donald Trump. Donald Trump does not eat people's soul in small bites," Huckabee said. "He takes it in one great big chomp and it’s over and he’s done with it. It is one of the reasons he's president because he does know how to take on an adversary. Jim Comey has a lot of explaining to do."

Leaked Mueller letter leads to Barr grilling in hyperpartisan hearing

It was a leak clearly designed to make William Barr's day on Capitol Hill far more unpleasant.
The source or sources who showed The Washington Post a letter of complaint that Bob Mueller had written Barr created a media explosion that reverberated all day yesterday, when the attorney general had been slated to testify before a Senate committee. Even before he took the hot seat, some Democrats were calling on Barr to resign — which has virtually no chance of happening.
Once the Judiciary Committee hearing got underway, it was so utterly partisan that it seemed Republicans and Democrats were operating in parallel universes — and that tended to muffle the uproar over the once-secret Mueller letter.
Still, the letter hurts Barr's reputation, no question about it. The missive provides ammunition to the AG's critics, who say he acted like a Trump partisan in spinning and perhaps minimizing the Mueller report's findings.
But let's face it: the special counsel's letter would have been far more damaging had it emerged before the report was made public, when the debate over Barr's conduct was at its peak. Now that we've all had the 448-page report for a couple of weeks, this has the feel of relitigating a process question that's been overtaken by events.
"The letter and a subsequent phone call between the two men reveal the degree to which the longtime colleagues and friends disagreed as they handled the legally and politically fraught task of investigating the president," the Post says.
The paper quotes the Mueller note as dissing Barr's famous four-page summary before the report was out:
"The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office's work and conclusions. There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations."
Mueller asked that his own executive summaries be quickly released, but Barr declined.
One reason the leaked letter landed with considerable force is that we never hear Mueller express opinions in his own voice, rather than in legal filings or the rare statements from his office. He is the offstage presence, the opposite of a grandstander, even with the report having been made published. The public will finally hear Mueller speak in House testimony this month, according to an agreement announced yesterday.
But clearly one of his allies — whether it was with Mueller's acquiescence or not, we don't know — wanted to turn up the heat before Barr's testimony.
The GOP side, led by Lindsey Graham, mainly wanted to talk about Hillary Clinton's emails and Trump-sliming emails from the FBI's Peter Strzok and Lisa Page (complete with an F-word that the senator read on live television). The Democratic side, led by Dianne Feinstein, read damaging passages from the report and pressed Barr about his disagreements with Mueller and why he didn't see many of the findings as obstruction of justice.
What was most noteworthy was Barr admitting he was surprised when Mueller declined to reach a conclusion on obstruction allegations and saying he could not get a clear explanation while meeting with him. The implication was that Mueller, given his independence, should have made the call, and instead made the report what Barr called "my baby."
The attorney general insisted that Mueller "was very clear with me that he was not suggesting that we had misrepresented his report." In a shot at the media, Barr said Mueller told him that "the press reporting had been inaccurate and that the press was reading too much into it."
Oddly enough, Barr also said Mueller declined his offer to review the four-page summary in advance.
Feinstein pressed the AG about the finding that Trump told his White House counsel, Don McGahn, to have Mueller fired, and that McGahn refused and threatened to resign.
This was not an attempt to obstruct the probe, Barr said, because "there is a distinction between saying to someone, 'Go fire him, go fire Mueller,' and saying, 'Have him removed based on conflict.'" But there was no obstruction, Barr said, because "presumably" someone else would have been named to replace Mueller. (McGahn regarded the conflict questions as "silly.")
Things turned absurdly partisan when Sen. Mazie Hirono demanded that Barr resign, saying he had sacrificed his "once-decent reputation for the grifter and liar who sits in the Oval Office." Graham shot back, "Listen, you slandered this man!" And the three presidential candidates on the panel — Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker — all got their licks in. Harris and Booker also demanded the AG's resignation.
In the end, the spat between Barr and Mueller will be a historical footnote. But it provides more fodder for the Democrats and Trump's media critics to try to keep the investigation alive.

Clinton 'imagines' scenario where 2020 Dem hopeful asks China to get Trump's tax returns

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday criticized the Mueller Report and imagined a scenario where a Democratic presidential hopeful called on China to "get" President Trump's tax returns.
The eyebrow-raising theory came during an interview on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show." The conversation was largely dedicated to Maddow and Clinton comparing problems they found with Attorney General Bill Barr's hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier in the day.
Clinton ripped Senate Republicans for not passing bipartisan legislation that was meant to take action against foreign interference in elections in the future "under orders from the White House." The two-time presidential candidate-- in an apparent effort to show the preposterousness of it all-- then offered a hypothetical situation where a Democrat running in 2020 blatantly makes an appeal to a foreign country to help with the election.
"Imagine, Rachel, that you had one of the Democratic nominees for 2020 on your show and that person said, 'You know, the only other adversary of ours who's anywhere near as good as the Russians is China. So why should Russia have all the fun? And since Russia is clearly backing Republicans, why don't we ask China to back us?... And not only that, China, if you're listening, why don't you get Trump's tax returns. I'm sure our media would richly reward you," she theorized.
Clinton said-- according to the Mueller report-- that it would not be a conspiracy because it is done openly. She theorized that the IRS offices would be bombarded with cyber attacks and a new Wikileaks would emerge that could release the information.
"Nothing wrong with that," Clinton sarcastically said.

Nicolas Maduro Cartoons

Portland anarchists flood lawyer's office with water as 'warning' for representing ICE union

During the protesters' month-long occupation of ICE facilities, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler announced his support for them and refused to have police intervene. Now, the National ICE council has sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding that their right to police protection be preserved. #Tucker

Anarchists in Portland, Oreg., flooded the office of a local lawyer representing officers of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in an effort to intimidate him.
The city has long been the epicenter of the so-called “Occupy ICE” movement and other anarchist activities, culminating last year in a clash between ICE officers and the protesters who then managed to shut down an ICE facility.
ICE UNION WANTS PORTLAND MAYOR TO FACE CRIMINAL PROBE OVER ACTIONS DURING OCCUPY ICE PROTESTS
A mob of anarchists continued their reign in the city last weekend, pushing a garden hose through the mail slot at the law office of Sean Riddell and flooding the building’s floor and basement, Willamette Week reported.
The water was not discovered until days later, resulting in damage to the property, including its wooden floors, carpet and the ceiling in the basement. The lawyer said the act of vandalism will cost him thousands of dollars to repair, though the cost is likely to be covered by insurance.
Riddell has been representing the National ICE Council, the union for federal immigration officers. Last year the union grabbed headlines after sending letters to officials, asking them to conduct a criminal investigation of Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler over his handling of the 38-day Occupy ICE protests in the city last summer.
The group also filed claims that the city’s police declined to intervene and disperse the protesters who were besieging an ICE facility.
PORTLAND ICE FACILITY PROTEST CAMP BROKEN UP BY FEDS AS CROWDS SHOUT 'NO RACIST POLICE!'
The anonymous anarchists claimed responsibility for the water damage in an email to Willamette Week on Monday, admitting that they did it because of Riddell's work with the federal immigration agency.
“We decided to congratulate him on his new building by unraveling his garden hose, pushing it through his mail slot, and turning on the water,” the anonymous email read.
It added that Riddell’s office was the target as he bought it with the money he received from representing the ICE union and claimed that this is a warning to other lawyers who are working or are planning to work with the agency.
“Our goal was to cause maximum economic damage, that should serve as a warning to all individuals and businesses that profit off the human misery perpetrated by ICE,” the email added.

“Our goal was to cause maximum economic damage, that should serve as a warning to all individuals and businesses that profit off the human misery perpetrated by ICE.”
— Anonymous email from supposed anarchists

Riddell slammed the vandals, telling the Willamette Week that at least he doesn’t hide behind the cloak of anonymity. “When I make a political statement, or when I make a political statement on behalf of a client. I sign my name,” he said.
“I'm not a victim,” he said. “I'm just doing my job.”