Donald Trump wanted a Roy Cohn attorney in his attorney general. The only problem with that is the attorney general is not supposed to work for him. He or she is the people’s attorney. POTUS wailed at times “Where is my Roy Cohn?” Well, the answer is here.
Certainly, Trump felt that, with the Fox News darling who came calling with his 19-page audition memo trailing ahead of him, his Roy Cohn had indeed arrived. Now though, Attorney General William Barr is tethered only by the president’s strong desire for revenge.
Roy Cohn was Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel in the Army-McCarthy hearings in the mid-1950s. He worked on McCarthy’s investigations trying to root imaginary communists and served as a head political fixer. Later, he became Trump’s personal lawyer, that is before he lost his license to practice law.
That gave people a general idea of how Barr would operate, and he has not failed Trump’s belief that he had been cleared from what he considered persecution. These were the House impeachment hearings and the former Special Counsel Robert Mueller III’s investigation into Russian cyberattacks on America’s presidential elections. That meant there will be revenge for those he considered his enemies.
The very day that Trump was acquitted from the Democratically-led impeachment hearings, Barr issued a new restriction. Politically sensitive investigations by the FBI into the 2020 presidential campaigns will now require a sign-off by the AG.
When former FBI Director James Comey dropped the line on the investigation into Hillary Clinton and took it out of the water a time of two, it threw the election closer to Trump. Yet, that was not what the president meant.
A Republican looking for background information on Donald Trump hired a former MI6 Russian expert spy to dig up the dirt. Then, when Trump took over the Republican primaries, the Clinton campaign bought what became the infamous dossier.
It included what the expert found: information on POTUS’ relationship with Russians. Trump was incensed. Ergo, one of his first acts was to squelch investigations into his upcoming reelection campaign.
The New York Times obtained a memo written by Barr after an inspector general showed that the FBI falsified information and did not follow protocols during the investigation into Carter Page. The man was a friend of the campaign, closely linked as a Russian expert.
AG Barr’s memo indicated that the Department of Justice had a duty to make certain elections were “free from improper activity or influences.” was issued on the same day that
The memo said that the FBI and all other divisions under the DOJ investigating any of the 2020 presidential candidates needed Barr’s signature. The AGÂ wrote, according to the New York Times:
‘In certain cases, the existence of a federal criminal or counterintelligence investigation, if it becomes known to the public, may have unintended effects on our elections.’
The Department of Justice (DOJ) will respond “swiftly and decisively” to actual threats to the presidential election:
‘We also must be sensitive to safeguarding the department’s reputation for fairness, neutrality and nonpartisanship.’
Barr’s memo set up a set of series of requirements over whether investigators would even be able to investigate anyone affiliated with a presidential campaign.
The Mueller Report Adventures: In Bite-Sizes on this Facebook page. These quick, two-minute reads interpret the report in normal English for busy people. Mueller Bite-Sizes uncovers what is essentially a compelling spy mystery. Interestingly enough, Mueller Bite-Sizes can be read in any order.
