As attorney general, William Barr was only too willing to do Donald Trump’s bidding, including distorting the findings of the Mueller investigation into the former president’s collusion with Russia in the 2016 campaign.
A few days ago the Justice Department released the full text of a secret 2019 memo that Barr used as justification for not charging Trump with obstructing the Mueller investigation, even though special counsel Robert Mueller found numerous instances of obstruction.
But Trump’s baseless claims of widespread election fraud and efforts to overturn the results were too much even for Barr who stepped down as attorney general in December 2020. And Barr testified before the House Jan. 6 select committee, declaring in videotaped testimony that Trump’s election fraud claims were “bullsh-t,” “complete nonsense” and “a disservice to the country.”
Barr’s real concern was that Trump’s actions were potentially damaging the Republican Party and the conservative movement — which he also defended as attorney general during the Iran-Contra investigation in President George H. W. Bush’s administration.
So Barr went out and attacked Trump and his supporters for questioning the legitimacy of the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago.
The Huffington Post reported that Barr was interviewed Thursday on journalist Bari Weiss’ podcast Honestly.
Barr said:
“Something I’m pretty tired of from the right is the constant pandering to outrage and people’s frustrations. And picking and picking and picking at that sore without trying to channel those feelings in a constructive direction.”
Barr said it’s “premature” to reach a conclusion about the Aug. 8 FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, but he admitted that it’s “hard to explain” why Trump would have held on to official documents that should have been turned over to the National Archives under the Presidential Records Act at the end of Trump’s term..
And Barr criticized the attacks orchestrated by Trump on FBI Director Christopher Wray, He said that Wray, a Trump appointee, is not going to “wake up and say, you know, ’How do I throw the FBI’s weight around to interfere in the political process? Just the opposite. I think he’s very cautious about that.”
But what Barr said particularly “irritated” him about the “whole episode” is that it “strengthens [President Joe] Biden and hurts the Republican Party going into the midterms because the focus once again returns to President Trump and his persona and his modus operandi rather than the pocketbook issues.”
“The problem with Trump is that it’s all about running just the base election, whip up your base, get your base all upset, get them outraged and turn them out at the polls,” Barr said. “That’s a prescription for continued hostility within the country, and demoralization of the country and an impasse in the country.” Of course, he also had to blame Democrats for doing the same.
Barr also said that Trump was hurting the Republican Party by turning it into a personality cult.
“This pursuit of a personal agenda and personal power is weakening the Republican Party,” Barr said. “You don’t make America great again by making people madder and madder and madder.”
Meanwhile, Karl Rove (aka “Bush’s brain”) appeared Friday on Fox News to comment on the DOJ’s release of the redacted affidavit used to justify the FBI’s search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, The Daily Beast reported.
Despite the release of the affidavit, the Fox News anchors were still wondering why the DOJ felt it necessary to execute an unprecedented search warrant on the home of a former president, suggesting that the DOJ should have just issued another subpoena or used some other means to get Trump to cooperate.
Rove pushed back. He ;said the federal government had given Trump ample opportunity to comply, while one his lawyers made the misleading claim that Trump had turned over all of the classified material.
The former strategist to President George W. Bush said it was quite possible that a witness, perhaps a Secret Service agent, had tipped off the FBI that they had “been misled” by the Trump team, either via a “deliberate lie or a lie based in ignorance,” prompting the search warrant request.
Rove said:
“The Presidential Records Act is clear. A president does not have the right to leave the White House and pick and choose what documents he wants to take with him. He can ask for copies, but those are the property of the American people and since 1978, no president has left with sort of picking and choosing their own documents.”
Rove then dismissed the Fox anchors’ spin about Trump’s willingness to cooperate, saying the affidavit indicated that the DOJ had asked multiple times for the documents.
Rove said:
“Well, my sense is they were asking for a year and a half, and why he was holding on to these materials when he had no legal authority to do so under the Presidential Records Act is beyond me.”
And finally, we turn to Florida to see Trumpism in its full glory. Laura Loomer, a far-right extremists and “proud Islamaphobe,” is encouraging her supporters not to vote for the GOP nominee after she lost the Republican primary to incumbent Rep. Daniel Webster in C.D. 11 on Tuesday.
Loomer, 29, is perhaps even more unhinged than Marjorie Taylor Greene as hard as that is to believe. And according to the last pre-election fundraising reports, Loomer actually raised $763,009 to Webster’s $595,280.
This right-wing nut job actually came close to an upset, receiving 44% of the vote and losing to the 73-year-old Webster by about 5,000 votes.
So Loomer — taking her cue from her favorite former president — refused to accept her loss. On election night she declared, "I'm not conceding, because I'm a winner!" And then she made baseless claims that there was voter fraud.
She obviously didn’t take her loss well. as indicated by this clip from Info Wars.
And then she urged her supporters not to support Webster in the November election and called on him to resign “because his health is worse than Joe Biden’s.” She also condemned “the corrupt ESTABLISHMENT RNC and Big Tech voter fraud machine that is propping his feeble body up.”
In recent elections, Webster won his district in north central Florida by a 2-1 margin. After redistricting, the 11th C.D. is rated by the Cook Political report as a “solid” Republican district. Cook predicts it as +8 Republican.
Shante Munns, a high school track and field coach and small business owner, was unopposed in the Democratic primary. But her campaign seems to consist of little more than a bare bones website. So even if some Loomer supporters do sit out the election, it’s unlikely that Democrats will flip the seat.
But MSNBC opinion columnist Dean Obeidallah did express hope that other losing MAGA candidates will lash out against GOP nominees and the Republican establishment.
He wrote:
There was a time when many of us hoped that Republican leaders would excise the MAGA extremists from their party. Clearly that is never going to happen. As we can see from Loomer’s fundraising haul that eclipsed a veteran GOP member of Congress, a significant amount of energy in the Republican base is with the MAGA extremists.
At this point, our best hope is that an increasing number of MAGA bigots and conspiracy theorists help Democrats win by turning on the GOP establishment. Maybe then the GOP will rise up from the ashes and become a mainstream political party again and not a white nationalist, anti-democratic movement. But even if that doesn’t happen, a divided GOP is far easier for Democrats to defeat than a united one.
(This is the second diary I’ve written linking together various reports about dissension within GOP ranks. Here is a
link to the first diary.