The Perverse Servility of Bill Barr & William Barr is unfit to be attorney general 11&12DEZ19

SOME DOGS EAT SHIT. Some eat their own shit, some eat other dog's shit, some eat all shit. NO matter what you try, you just can't break some dogs of this disgusting habbit. bill barr is one of those shit eating dogs that can not be broken of his disgusting habbit, his nose is a heat seeking missile for drumpf's/trump's fat ass and barr relishes getting his face in there lapping up as much shit as he can. Quite a disgusting image isn't it? Still not nearly as disgusting as the dereliction  of bill barr's duty to the American people, his refusal to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States and his determination to protect drumpf/trump, pence and the cabal that is his administration from being held responsible for their illegal and immoral activities. From MSN / The New York Times and The Washington Post......

Frank Bruni

The Perverse Servility of Bill Barr
© Doug Mills/The New York Times Attorney General William Barr with President Trump at the White House in November.

Donald Trump famously said that he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not “lose any voters.” I don’t know about that. But I’m confident that he wouldn’t lose Bill Barr.

Execution privilege, Barr would probably call it. He’d release a statement or hold a news conference to say that Trump had a spastic trigger finger or was triggered by Adam Schiff or was set up by those dastardly Ukrainians, who are never up to any good. Such is the magnitude of Barr’s servility, the doggedness of his deference. He’s the president’s moral launderer. Trump does evil, and Barr washes him clean.

As attorney general, he’s supposed to be the nation’s lawyer. But he has bought into the autocratic delusion that Trump equals America, that national interest and presidential prerogative are inextricably intertwined. So he’s Trump’s advocate, come hell or high crimes, as surely as Pat Cipollone or Rudy Giuliani is.

On Monday, showing fresh contempt for the people who work under him in the Justice Department, Barr renounced a determination by the department’s inspector general that the F.B.I.’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia was legitimate and that anti-Trump bias was not its animating force. He did this instantly.

And then, on Tuesday, did it again, with even less subtlety and more sanctimony. “It was a travesty,” he said of the investigation, and he was speaking not just of the sloppiness and haste of some of the F.B.I.’s actions, with which the inspector general also took issue. He was dismissing the whole effort as rotten.

It was an eerie echo of his efforts last spring, when he sought to neuter Robert Mueller’s findings about the Trump campaign’s openness to Russian help and the president’s attempts to obstruct justice. Give Barr points for consistency. He has bought fully into the idea that the zeal of Trump’s detractors matters more than the presidents’ abuses of power.

But what of the Constitution? What of common decency? Barr isn’t concerning himself with those. To do so would call into question the honor of serving in this administration, the compliment of holding the job that Trump gave him. And he wants that compliment. That pedestal. He prefers to see himself as a holy warrior than as an unholy dupe.

To appreciate his perspective, you must travel back two months, to the University of Notre Dame, where he delivered a speech that garnered some headlines but not nearly enough of them.

You should read it. You should savor its grandiosity — it has references to the dawn of homo sapiens, the twilight of the Judeo-Christian order, Edmund Burke, James Madison — so that you can understand his current overreach, born of his certainty that he knows better than the rest of the body politic and is called to heal us.

You should note his remarks’ obsession with morality and you should try not to laugh, the same way you stifle chuckles when you’re reminded that Mike Pompeo is a putatively worshipful Christian and you try to square that with how he abetted the persecution of Marie Yovanovitch, leaves his State Department charges twisting in the wind and genuflects before a false prophet. In Trump he trusts.

You should dwell on the part of Barr’s jeremiad where he says that “men are subject to powerful passions and appetites and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbors and the community.” Ruthless? Roughshod? That’s Trump in an alliterative nutshell, but Barr seemed to be perversely oblivious to that. He was making a case for Trump’s presidency.

The wonder of this wretched moment has never been the existence and stench of a bad egg in the Oval Office. That’s hardly strange, given how ably shamelessness serves ambition. The wonder is how many other bad eggs the current president has assembled or hatched. The wonder is this fluffy, funky omelet of unscrupulousness.

All these supposedly godly men — Barr, Pompeo, Mike Pence, Ben Carson, Rick Perry and more — cluster around such a demonstrably godless one. They rationalize that Trump’s indulgence of certain religious factions absolves him of his sins. Barr is the principal agent of that absolution.

He’s also a paragon of hypocrisy, telling Pete Williams of NBC News that the F.B.I. investigation of Trump’s campaign was an ominous abuse of government power for partisan aims. That description better suits the conduct for which Trump is about to be impeached. I don’t know how Barr kept a straight face.

Actually, I do. Since betrothing himself to Trump, he has had ample practice. In the Notre Dame speech, without any palpable sense of irony, he urged a “moral renaissance” and delivered this priceless line: “No society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity.” I agree.

In our society, impeachment is one of those means. The law is another. And if Barr could dig out his conscience from under all those layers of ego, he’d see that the rapacious individual in direst need of restraint is the one he’s letting roam free.

Opinions | Eric Holder: William Barr is unfit to be attorney general

Eric Holder

Eric H. Holder Jr., a Democrat, was U.S. attorney general from 2009 to 2015.

As a former U.S. attorney general, I am reluctant to publicly criticize my successors. I respect the office and understand just how tough the job can be.

But recently, Attorney General William P. Barr has made a series of public statements and taken actions that are so plainly ideological, so nakedly partisan and so deeply inappropriate for America’s chief law enforcement official that they demand a response from someone who held the same office.

Last month, at a Federalist Society event, the attorney general delivered an ode to essentially unbridled executive power, dismissing the authority of the legislative and judicial branches — and the checks and balances at the heart of America’s constitutional order. As others have pointed out, Barr’s argument rests on a flawed view of U.S. history. To me, his attempts to vilify the president’s critics sounded more like the tactics of an unscrupulous criminal defense lawyer than a U.S. attorney general.

When, in the same speech, Barr accused “the other side” of “the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law,” he exposed himself as a partisan actor, not an impartial law enforcement official. Even more troubling — and telling — was a later (and little-noticed) section of his remarks, in which Barr made the outlandish suggestion that Congress cannot entrust anyone but the president himself to execute the law.

In Barr’s view, sharing executive power with anyone “beyond the control of the president” (emphasis mine), presumably including a semi-independent Cabinet member, “contravenes the Framers’ clear intent to vest that power in a single person.” This is a stunning declaration not merely of ideology but of loyalty: to the president and his interests. It is also revealing of Barr’s own intent: to serve not at a careful remove from politics, as his office demands, but as an instrument of politics — under the direct “control” of President Trump.

Not long after Barr made that speech, he issued what seemed to be a bizarre threat to anyone who expresses insufficient respect for law enforcement, suggesting that “if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.” No one who understands — let alone truly respects — the impartial administration of justice or the role of law enforcement could ever say such a thing. It is antithetical to the most basic tenets of equality and justice, and it undermines the need for understanding between law enforcement and certain communities and flies in the face of everything the Justice Department stands for.

It’s also particularly ironic in light of the attorney general’s comments this week, in which he attacked the FBI and the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General — two vital components of his own department. Having spent the majority of my career in public service, I found it extraordinary to watch the nation’s chief law enforcement official claim — without offering any evidence — that the FBI acted in “bad faith” when it opened an inquiry into then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign. As a former line prosecutor, U.S. attorney and judge, I found it alarming to hear Barr comment on an ongoing investigation, led by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, into the origins of the Russia probe. And as someone who spent six years in the office Barr now occupies, it was infuriating to watch him publicly undermine an independent inspector general report — based on an exhaustive review of the FBI’s conduct — using partisan talking points bearing no resemblance to the facts his own department has uncovered.

When appropriate and justified, it is the attorney general’s duty to support Justice Department components, ensure their integrity and insulate them from political pressures. His or her ultimate loyalty is not to the president personally, nor even to the executive branch, but to the people — and the Constitution — of the United States.

Career public servants at every level of the Justice Department understand this — as do leaders such as FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Their fidelity to the law and their conduct under pressure are a credit to them and the institutions they serve.

Others, like Durham, are being tested by this moment. I’ve been proud to know John for at least a decade, but I was troubled by his unusual statement disputing the inspector general’s findings. Good reputations are hard-won in the legal profession, but they are fragile; anyone in Durham’s shoes would do well to remember that, in dealing with this administration, many reputations have been irrevocably lost.

This is certainly true of Barr, who was until recently a widely respected lawyer. I and many other Justice veterans were hopeful that he would serve as a responsible steward of the department and a protector of the rule of law.

Virtually since the moment he took office, though, Barr’s words and actions have been fundamentally inconsistent with his duty to the Constitution. Which is why I now fear that his conduct — running political interference for an increasingly lawless president — will wreak lasting damage.

The American people deserve an attorney general who serves their interests, leads the Justice Department with integrity and can be entrusted to pursue the facts and the law, even — and especially — when they are politically inconvenient and inconsistent with the personal interests of the president who appointed him. William Barr has proved he is incapable of serving as such an attorney general. He is unfit to lead the Justice Department.

Read more:

Greg Sargent: William Barr’s deceptions are more dangerous than you think. Here’s the latest.

Max Boot: How do the victims of Trump’s lies get their reputations back?

Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent: The inspector general report just blew up Trump’s lies. So Barr is rushing to the rescue.