Donald Trump’s not the only Federal authority who’s gaslighting the country, though he’s the most powerful one. Now Bill Barr’s getting in the act, too, in order to bolster trump’s “law and order” offensive. Two articles over the past few days document blatant instances of Barr manipulating facts or outright lying about them.
First up — Bill Barr’s Playbook: His False Claims About Prior Military Force on U.S. Soil at Just Security:
As we’ve recently discussed, Attorney General Barr has been developing a playbook for using federal forces without state consent for decades. But his authority for doing so not only relies on questionable legal doctrine (which we discussed before) but also relies on a distortion of the historical record. This distorted history centers on a key event in 1989: the deployment of federal troops to the Virgin Islands after Hurricane Hugo. In an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation last month, Barr rewrote what happened in 1989–falsely portraying the episode as though it provided a precedent for such aggressive military action. But the true record of the 1989 case stands, in much larger measure, for the opposite conclusion. And Barr should know better. He was there at the time.
In the 1989 case, President George H.W. Bush invoked the Insurrection Act to quell domestic unrest in the Virgin Islands. In interviews with the Miller Center years ago, Barr explained that he played a lead role inside the Bush administration on the legal basis for the president’s deployment of the military. That’s all the more reason for him to be aware that the administration at the time strenuously made the case that the governor of the Virgin Islands requested the deployment of the US military. It served the Bush administration well to stake out that position. Barr now tries to say the opposite happened. It would serve the Trump administration well for him to do so.
Based on interviews we conducted with U.S. officials who served with Barr at the time and the historical materials from those days’ events, Barr is plainly misleading the country now in his portrayal of the episode. And he appears to be doing so to legitimize President Trump’s threatening or exercising such powers without governors’ consent.
That’s the Attorney General of the United States, who’s supposedly the nation’s top law enforcement officer, gaslighting the public in order to advance trump’s authoritarian agenda. There’s much more at the link; I recommend reading the whole piece (unless your outrage meter is already pegged at 13).
The second piece from the Kansas City Star had its oranges origins in Barr says feds arrested 200 people in Operation Legend. KC officials can’t confirm it:
Attorney General William Barr said Wednesday that 200 arrests had been made in a new federal operation launched in Kansas City.
“Just to give you an idea of what’s possible, the FBI went in very strong into Kansas City and within two weeks we’ve had 200 arrests,” Barr said of the operation, which is sending more than 200 federal agents into the metro area.
But the announcement came just two days after the first charge was announced in connection with Operation Legend, billed as a federal law enforcement effort against violent crime. And officials in Kansas City said they had no knowledge of any number arrests close to Barr’s figure.
The article describes the single known arrest of someone who, according to the criminal complaint, was charged in federal court with being an unlawful drug user in possession of firearms. In addition, Don Ledford, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Kansas City, was asked if more arrests had been made and replied “No, not that I’m aware of.”
The Star followed up on that piece with this one: Barr claimed feds in KC made 200 arrests in two weeks. That’s not even close to true.
A senior Department of Justice official on Wednesday corrected comments by Attorney General William Barr, who minutes earlier had said 200 arrests had been made within two weeks in Kansas City as part of Operation Legend, a federal anti-crime effort.
[…] Speaking with McClatchy after the Wednesday event, the senior Justice Department official clarified that the 200 figure included arrests dating back to December 2019.
It also included, the official said, both state and FBI arrests in joint operations.
One of Barr’s underlings had to walk back his fabricated claim that “within two weeks we’ve had 200 arrests” when the actual number of federal arrests during that timeframe is ONE. (Said underling steps down to spend more time with family in 3… 2… 1…)
What can be done about this? Theoretically, the House could launch impeachment investigations, but between the coronavirus emergency and the impending election (all House members are up for reelection in November), that’s highly unlikely. But I think that of all of Barr’s documented transgressions, outright gaslighting by the country’s top cop seems like it should be actionable by someone somehow. The media sets its own priorities and this story probably isn’t click-worthy because right now, most voters aren’t going to care if the Attorney General is conspiring with the president to gaslight the country during a pandemic in an election year. It’s the most dangerous combo to our democracy imaginable and we’re powerless to stop it. As Steve Benen at the Maddowblog notes:
The same article quoted former U.S. Attorney Stephen Hill Jr., who prosecuted cases in western Missouri, saying, “At a time when confidence and trust in the Department of Justice and federal law enforcement is at a low point, the last thing you want is to have someone suggest you are padding your numbers to make a political point or that the Attorney General is unaware of the situation on the ground in Kansas City. Either one hurts the effort and the public confidence it needs to be successful.”
I highly doubt that Barr was “unaware of the situation on the ground in Kansas City.” Barr’s on record saying stuff he knows to be untrue in order to advance his and trump’s police state agenda. He was deliberately padding the number to make it sound like hundreds of peaceful protestors were engaged in federal offenses in order to instigate fear in suburban voters whose support for Black Lives Matter is increasing.
Greg Sargent at the Plum Line posits that this propaganda was intended more for seniors than for suburbanites:
Here’s President Trump’s new reelection strategy, in a nutshell: Convince vulnerable seniors who rightly fear getting killed by the pandemic that Trump let rampage out of control that they should instead fear getting killed by criminals who would supposedly rampage out of control in a future post-police dystopia that is entirely invented.
[…] You can see this in Trump’s campaign ads. He is running a new spot that depicts an elderly woman calling the police in terror as a marauder circles her house like a vulture, only to find that in “Joe Biden’s America,” the police are no longer there.
In recent weeks, Trump’s campaign has spent $20 million on the ad and others like it. But that ad is based on a lie: It falsely claims Biden would defund the police. Tellingly, if you listen closely, you’ll note that the person who voices this lie is Trump’s chief propagandist, Sean Hannity.
How can we get voters to worry enough about Barr that “Reelecting trump means reelecting Barr” becomes a real incentive for swing voters to cast their ballots and vote for Biden?