Barr Opens Criminal Inquiry Into Russia Probe
Barr Opens Criminal Inquiry Into Russia Probe
October 24, 2019 at 8:35 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard 58 Comments
https://politicalwire.com/2019/10/24/barr-opens-criminal-inquiry-into-russia-probe/
"SNIP.....
New York Times: “Justice Department officials have shifted an administrative review of the Russia investigation closely overseen by Attorney General William Barr to a criminal inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter. The move gives the prosecutor running it, John Durham, the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to impanel a grand jury and to file criminal charges.”
“The opening of a criminal investigation is likely to raise alarms that Mr. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies. Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director under whose watch agents opened the Russia inquiry, and has long assailed other top former law enforcement and intelligence officials as partisans who sought to block his election.”
.....SNIP"
= new reply since forum marked as read
Bill Barr: The "Cover-Up General"
"At the center of the criticism is the chief articulator of Bush's imperial presidency," we reported in 1992, "the man who wrote the legal rationale for the Gulf War, the Panama invasion, and the officially sanctioned kidnapping of foreign nationals abroad"
by FRANK SNEPP
The Village Voice, APRIL 18, 2019 / The Village Voice, October 27, 1992
“Attorney General William Barr is the Best Reason to Vote for Clinton”
Excerpt....
SON OF THE CIA
It was 21 years ago, in 1971, that I first encountered William Barr. Both of us were working for the CIA at the time, he as a novice China analyst, I as a member of the agency’s Vietnam task force. Jovial and unassuming, he took his cues easily from an overly politicized office chief. It was a token of things to come.
Three years before, we had brushed shoulders unknowingly on Columbia University’s roiling campus. Both of us were on the other side of the barricades as antiwar demonstrations there blasted our generation into a decade of rage. Barr, a conservative student spokesman, preached toughness to the university administration, of which his father, then dean of the engineering faculty, was a leading light. Years later, this same damn-the-torpedoes zeal would commend Barr to his ultimate father figure, George Bush. When Cuban refugees penned up at an Alabama prison rioted and took hostages in the summer of 1991, deputy attorney general Barr ordered the place stormed. Soon afterward, Bush tapped him for the attorney general slot itself.
Barr first met Bush in the CIA. In 1976, having shifted to the agency’s legislative office, he helped write the pap sheets that director Bush used to fend off the Pike and Church committees, the first real embodiments of Congressional oversight of the CIA. Intimates say the experience was formative for Barr, turning him into an implacable enemy of congressional intrusions on executive prerogative.
“The most radical period I had probably was when I was sort of a moderate Republican,” he later acknowledged. Sure enough, Barr stayed safe within conservative clutches even after leaving the agency in 1977. Armed with a night-school law diploma, he asked for — and got — Bush’s backing for a clerkship appointment to Malcolm Wilkey of the Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. Years later, as attorney general, Barr would name Wilkey to investigate the House Banking scandal. Wilkey repayed the favor with a wrenchingly partisan inquiry. Feeding the press overheated charges of wrongdoing, he scored points off the Democratic Congress just as the administration itself was being pilloried for its failed economics.
Source...
https://www.villagevoice.com/2019/04/18/attorney-general-william-barr-is-the-best-reason-to-vote-for-clinton/
Feelings. Nothing more than feelings.
Blaming Obama again, what total BS. 
Barr is total BS. Trying to Russia off the hook. Such BS.
1 is the obvious abuse of power ala Nixon trying to get the IRS to go after his "enemies list" Trump is using the DOJ to intimidate agencies who wouldn't play ball an exonerate him.
2 Trump and Barr can't be stupid enough to think that they will find anything substantive from the FBI's investigation. They would be WAY more likely to uncover just how deep the rot is in the Trump sham organization and administration. They will likely lie and try to plant information to make the investigation into his real and obvious criminality seem dirty.
I am not a fan of the FBI and CIA throughout the history of the US. They have done some really shady things. In this case I don't think that Trump and Barr understand what they are getting themselves into. Neither the FBI nor the CIA will allow themselves to be dragged through the mud.
Should be interesting. 
