Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘Bill Barr’

Has The Trump Raid Made Bill Barr Forget All About Deep-State Deceit?


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | SEPTEMBER 07, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/07/has-the-trump-raid-made-bill-barr-forget-all-about-deep-state-deceit/

Bill Barr

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

MORE ARTICLES

Bill Barr is wrong about the Mar-a-Lago raid for the same reason Barr’s critics were wrong about his decision to investigate the Russia-collusion hoax.

Barr’s opinion now and those of his adversaries when he served as Trump’s attorney general both rest on the assumed veracity of leaks, spin, and misleading narratives. The facts have since vindicated Barr’s decision to investigate the investigators who targeted Trump, and until the details surrounding the latest attack on Trump are proven, nothing said by the Biden administration or its partners in the press should be accepted as true.

On Friday and again on Tuesday, Barr appeared on Fox News to discuss the Mar-a-Lago raid and the Department of Justice’s investigation into former President Donald Trump. During both appearances, Barr repeated the storylines pushed by the D.C. media cartel since news first broke that the FBI had raided Trump’s Florida home.

In his appearance on “America Reports” on Friday, Barr told hosts Sandra Smith and John Roberts he personally thought that for the DOJ “to take things to the current point they probably have pretty good evidence.” Barr continued:

Now let me just say I think the driver on this from the beginning was loads of classified information sitting in Mar-a-Lago. People say this was also unprecedented but it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put it in a country club, OK. How long is the government going to try to get that? They jawbone for a year. They were deceived on the voluntary actions taken. They then went and got a subpoena. They were deceived on that, they feel. And the facts are starting to show they were being jerk around. And so how long do they wait?

While he caveated his comments as “speculation,” and noted that until we see the evidence, “it’s hard to say,” Barr’s conclusions flow from the assumption that the details made public by the DOJ and the leaks to the media represent the truth — and the whole truth.

But those very same leaks should make Barr leery. Special Counsel John Durham’s team is leak free. Similarly, the other men Barr trusted to handle the sensitive investigations into the Clinton Foundation, the inappropriate prosecution of Michael Flynn, and the evidence of the Biden family corruption coming from Ukraine, ensured their teams kept the investigations confidential. Conversely, the previous get-Trump plots all relied on media leaks to push falsehoods about the investigations, whether it was Crossfire Hurricane, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, or the impeachment efforts.

The evidence also indicates that the “driver” of the investigation was not the “loads of classified information sitting in Mar-a-Lago,” but Trump: He was the man; the government just needed a crime. 

As I detailed soon after the raid, the trail to Mar-a-Lago began at the White House long before the discovery of classified material in boxes returned to the National Archives. The now-retired head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), David Ferriero, recalled “watching the Trumps leave the White House and getting off in the helicopter that day, and someone carrying a white banker box, and saying to myself, ‘What the hell’s in that box?’” According to Ferriero, “that began a whole process of trying to determine whether any records had not been turned over to the Archives.”

NARA then made a criminal referral to the DOJ based not merely on the presence of classified materials but also suggesting Trump violated 18 U.S.C. § 2071 because the former president returned a document that he had previously torn up. NARA’s interactions with Trump contrast sharply with its handling of former President Barack Obama’s presidential documents and how it handled Hillary Clinton’s violations of federal law, as I’ve detailed extensively here, exposing the referral as a political hit.

Not only has Barr accepted the false narrative that the “driver” of the investigation was “loads of classified information sitting in Mar-a-Lago,” but during both yesterday and Friday’s interviews, the former attorney general repeated several of the storylines seeded by the leakers. While Barr made clear that the outcome of any charging decision depended on what the evidence showed and how clear it was, he has clearly internalized the leakers’ version of events.

“If they clearly have the president moving stuff around and hiding stuff in his desk and telling people to dissemble,” Barr noted at one point, the DOJ is more likely to charge the former president. “They were deceived on the voluntary actions taken. They then went and got a subpoena. They were deceived on that, they feel,” Barr remarked. Then yesterday, Barr told Fox News’s Martha MacCallum that there is “evidence to suggest they were deceived.” 

The evidence, though, consists of select documents released by the DOJ, including heavily redacted documents, and media leaks. In other words, it’s precisely what convinced half the country that Trump colluded with Russia. 

While it is possible that Trump deceived the DOJ or that he defied the grand jury subpoena, the entire Mar-a-Lago episode tracks the Russia-collusion-hoax playbook too closely to give credence to any of the accusations levied against the former president. And Barr is wrong to trust them.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

    Advertisement

    Category:

    Political

    Tagged with:

    Barr: Public Schools Are Now So Hostile to Christians, They’re Unconstitutional


    A MUST READ AND SHARE -Jerry Broussard

    REPORTED BY: JOY PULLMANN | JUNE 27, 2022

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/27/barr-public-schools-are-now-so-hostile-to-christians-theyre-unconstitutional/

    William Barr

    Religious devotion, the keystone of ordered liberty in the West, has been under systematic assault by anti-religious forces Barr called an ‘atheocracy.’

    Author Joy Pullmann profile

    JOY PULLMANN

    VISIT ON TWITTER@JOYPULLMANN

    MORE ARTICLES

    The West is facing its deepest civilizational crisis since Jesus Christ resurrected, and addressing the crisis requires removing militant secularists’ monopoly on education, former U.S. attorney general William Barr told a packed Christian conference in Chicago, Ill. on Saturday.

    “We are going through a fateful crisis in western civilization. This is the deepest crisis we’ve faced in my mind since Christ,” Barr said. “That’s because our whole civilization is based on the Judeo-Christian tradition and that tradition is under sustained attack by increasingly militant secular forces.”

    In a reprise of a 2019 speech at Notre Dame University that met massive corporate media backlash, Barr told the audience U.S. public schools have become hostile to traditional religion while wresting control of American children’s upbringing from their parents. This is a threat to the entire Western order, Barr said, because the unique American system of self-government cannot exist without a citizenry that is committed to traditional religion.

    That’s because there are only two ways to restrain people from following disordered passions, Barr said: internal restraints, which are largely provided by one’s beliefs; and external restraints, which are typically provided by government. So, in order to have a limited government, Barr noted in an explicit echo of the American Founders, citizens must practice self-restraint. Such self-restraint is primarily developed through religious devotion, he said. But religious observance, the keystone of ordered liberty in the West, has been under systematic assault by anti-religious forces Barr called an “atheocracy,” his amalgam of the words “atheist theocracy.” These anti-religious forces now control the minds of American kids due to their monopoly on U.S. education institutions.

    “The threat today is not that religious people are about to establish a theocracy in the United States, it is that militant secularists are trying to establish an atheocracy,” Barr said. Barr also spoke to The Federalist about the asymmetric justice being carried out under Joe Biden by the agency he has led twice, the U.S. Department of Justice.

    In a 2021 interview with the legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, Barr said anti-religion leftists have effectively turned public schools into “secular-progressive madrassas.” In his Chicago speech on Saturday, the nation’s former top lawyer told the audience this state of affairs is likely a violation of the Constitution’s ban on government establishment of one religion over others, as well as a violation of the Free Exercise Clause that forbids the government from interfering with Americans’ religious obligations.

    “What we’re living through is not a situation where religion is intruding into the government’s rightful arena, it’s exactly the opposite: It’s that government and politics is usurping the role of religion,” Barr said.

    Barr told the sold-out Chicago audience at the 2022 conference of the Christian radio show “Issues, Etc.” that American politics now aligns with religious beliefs. The dichotomy in American life is no longer about prudential issues but religious ones: whether one acknowledges an objective, external, unchanging reality ordered by a transcendent deity or whether one insists the material world is all there is, which makes one’s god the self.

    This anti-God materialism now maps onto and fuels political leftism, Barr said:

    When a purely materialist worldview takes hold in society, it’s drawn to a messianic utopianism. Its adherents become enthralled with the idea that the meaning of life, what gives them purpose and meaning, is to be found in the quest for a perfect earthly society. The manipulation of the material world to achieve some form of nirvana here on earth. And the means used is achieving political power.

    The main obstacle to this earthly paradise is the existing structure, conventions and superstitions like religion. Any obstacle to our earthly paradise has to be torn down.

    These ideas are represented by the progressive movement in the United States. It basically is an ersatz religion that gives them a sort of truncated version of the place filled by religion in people’s lives. It also explains the bitterness in our politics today. Because once you adopt this view, then your political opponents aren’t just disagreeing with you, they’re evil. They are standing in the way of the salvation of mankind.

    …Another part of this revolutionary era and the consequences we have been witnessing over the last couple of hundred years is a worldview that boils questions of morality solely down to an individual’s internal feelings. And their interior sense of pleasure and satisfaction. That’s how we gauge acts, whether people feel internally satisfied. And anything that advances that feeling is good, and anything that constrains or restricts that feeling is bad. This is a fundamental change in the worldview of the West.

    Because the U.S. Supreme Court and other American political institutions have turned public schools from essentially Christian schools into essentially anti-Christian schools, Barr said, the U.S. school system has been erasing the faith required to sustain limited government. Multiple studies provide evidence this is true.

    Banning Christianity from education created a moral vacuum that has ultimately been filled badly with political leftism. This has not only increasingly turned younger American generations against their own faith, families, and country, it has turned public schools into indoctrination camps.

    “Personal and civic moral systems don’t just sort of hover in the air,” Barr explained. “They have to rest on an explanatory foundation, a metaphysical foundation. When people tell you to do something, you ask ‘Why?’ Why is it necessary to be good and what is it that consists of being good? So, the extent to which an education seeks to contribute to a student’s moral formation, it necessarily invades the space of religion when explaining what the moral values are and how they should be inherited.”

    Thanks to the current Supreme Court’s adherence to the original Constitution as written, Barr said he thinks this is an opportune moment for both court and legislative work to address this existential national crisis.

    “Public education was established as a melting pot that would establish a common American identity. How are the public schools doing on that front?” Barr asked, at which the audience burst into laughter. He continued: “The curriculum is now attacking the fundamental legitimacy of our form of government and our founding documents. That’s no way to bring us together as a nation.”

    The most direct way to resolve this constitutional and existential crisis in American education is to end the government monopoly over the provision of education, Barr said, with full school choice. (The form of school choice that offers the fewest opportunities for hostile bureaucrats to interfere with parent choices, by the way, is education savings accounts.)

    “The variety of American beliefs now makes a monopoly on education untenable,” Barr said. “You can’t finesse it anymore. You can’t pretend what’s being taught in schools is compatible with traditional religion, nor can you pretend schools are neutral anymore.”

    Because anti-religious public schools hold a monopoly on public education funds, Barr noted, parents are forced to fight mostly ineffectively over what public schools teach, such as transgender ideology to kindergarteners and anti-white racism. Allowing parents to take their children’s public education dollars to institutions that match their beliefs will end such culture wars, he said, as well as help families more effectively pass their republic-sustaining faith on to their children.

    This alone can’t solve the entire existential crisis of the West, Barr conceded: “It’s not a panacea, but I cannot see a way out for us and the way for Christian citizens to live in peace in this republic until we address the educational system.”

    Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

    Category:

    Education, Political

    Tagged with:

    Ann Coulter Op-ed: They’ve Learned Nothing and Forgotten Nothing


    Commentary by Ann Coulter | Posted: Jun 22, 2022

    Read more at https://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2022/06/22/theyve-learned-nothing-and-forgotten-nothing—p–n2609172/

    The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, andWhatDidYouSay.org.

    They've Learned Nothing and Forgotten Nothing

    Source: Michael Reynolds/Pool via AP

    Bill Barr, two-time attorney general and one of approximately 2.5 members of the Trump administration to leave with his reputation intact, has also written one of only two books about that administration worth reading, “One Damn Thing After Another.” I’ve read ’em all. At least partially. Most did not merit more than a quick skim.

    [For those interested, the other book about the Trump administration worth reading is Michael Wolfe’s “Fire and Fury,” but judging by its sales, you probably already have this book.]

    I’ve been a fan of Barr’s since long before he worked for Trump, and was thrilled when he became Trump’s A.G. But when I got to Barr’s description of Trump’s appeal — which went on for pages and pages! — I wanted to throw the book out the window.

    You can probably guess where I’m headed.

    By Barr’s lights, none of Trump’s positives involved … immigration.

    They will not learn. No matter what we do, no matter how many times Americans tell pollsters they want less immigration, no matter how loudly we beg Washington to halt the endless flow of the third world into our country, the ruling class refuses to listen.

    If electing a cretinous flimflam artist to the presidency solely on the strength of his promise to be a hard-ass on immigration didn’t wake them up, nothing ever will.

    The first clue about the absolute thickheadedness of anyone living within 100 miles of our nation’s capital was this deeply concerning line from Barr’s book:

    “I had long planned on supporting Jeb Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.”

    Next, Barr turns to the political landscape that allowed such a preposterous creature as Trump to sail to victory. “The source of the problem, as I saw it,” he writes, “was the growing strength in the Democratic Party of a Far Left progressive ideology that aimed to tear down and remake American society.” Trump, Barr writes, was merely the result of “our embittered politics,” a bitterness “engendered not by Trump but by the increasing militance of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.”

    Yeah, OK, fine. He gets two points for accurately describing how loathsome Democrats have become. How about the elected Republicans we send to Washington to represent us? It’s you guys we really hate. If it were only progressive Democrats voters detested, why NOT Jeb-exclamation point? Why not John “My Father Was a Postman” Kasich?

    No one imagines that Democrats give a crap about the country. It’s Republicans who run for office, pretending to agree with the voters on immigration — then get into office and sell out to the Chamber of Commerce.

    Oh, you wanted a wall? Yes, absolutely, but first we have to pass these tax cuts, lavish billions of dollars on some foreign country and push through another Wall Street bailout.

    For 50 years, in poll after poll, a majority of Americans have said they want LESS immigration. Even the Cheap Labor Lobby at the Cato Institute produced a poll last year showing that 81% of Americans want less immigration than we have today. Sixty-one percent of respondents want to cut immigration by at least half. Nearly 10% of Americans want zero immigration.

    Unfortunately, everything Trump was ever going to accomplish was accomplished at 2:50 a.m. on election night 2016, when he announced his victory over Hillary Clinton. (Everything other than turning judicial selection over to the Federalist Society.) At that moment, the densest Republican had to realize that restricting immigration is so popular that even a lout like Trump could win the presidency on it.

    After 2016, how could any sentient mammal begin a sentence, as Barr does, “But the main reason Trump won the nomination — and later the general election — was …,” and not end it with: “IMMIGRATION!”? (I’ll accept a range of substitutes — the wall, illegals, Dreamers, “Press 1 for English,” wages lost to cheap labor immigrants, Kate Steinle, the 9/11 attack — did the media forget to tell you that was done by immigrants? — the drug epidemic, etc., etc.)

    Not Barr. He reels off the standard RNC suicide pact, prattling about the “economy,” “military power,” “pro-life” and school choice.

    Yes, Trump won in 2016 because of school choice.

    You could “Ctrl + F: immigration” through Barr’s entire book and get nary a hit, other than general references to “the Immigration and Naturalization Service” — and this:

    Before one of the 2016 presidential debates, Barr is careful to note that he contacted a friend on the candidate’s team to suggest that Trump say, “we welcome legal immigrants, and … Latin Americans who come here legally — people with a strong work ethic and family values — contribute enormously to the country.”

    And that’s how Jeb-exclamation point won the nomination and the general election!

    Just this week, Republican Sen. John Cornyn was spotted on the Senate floor, seeming to propose amnesty, collegially telling a Democrat, “First guns, now it’s immigration.”

    In Cornyn’s defense, he is massively stupid.

    But Barr? He’s a smart man. And yet he picked up nothing from the Shock-the-World 2016 election of Donald Trump — except tax cuts and a strong military?

    Referring to the monumental arrogance of the Bourbon kings, blithely assuming they could revert to the very behavior that had led to the explosion of the French Revolution in the first place, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand is supposed to have said, “They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.”

    The French nobility’s got nothing on the Republican Party.

    Category:

    Political

    Tagged with:

    Getting Caught up with A.F. Branco Politically INCORRECT Cartoons


    A.F. Branco Cartoon – Wake Up n’ Smell the Tyranny

    A.F. Branco on

    Social Media Banning Conservative – There’s an all-out assault on conservative free speech by social media giants Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google in America.

    Free Speech CafePolitical Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.

    A.F. Branco Cartoon – Sty-Gate

    A.F. Branco | on

    Because AG Barr is known for his integrity and is now set to investigate those on the left for spying on a political opponent, Nadler, and the Democrats seek to tarnish his reputation.

    Barr HearingsPolitical Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.

    A.F. Branco Cartoon – Israeli Trump Card

    A.F. Branco | on

    Obama and Kerry seemed to be more on the side of Hamas and the terrorists than they were for Israel, but it’s the exact opposite with Trump.

    Tump Fires HamasPolitical Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.

    A.F. Branco Cartoon – Raising the Barr

    A.F. Branco | on

    Because Barr won’t release the unredacted Mueller report, that would be illegal to release, Nadler is charging him with contempt for upholding the rule of law.

    Barr in Contempt of CongressPolitical Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.

    A.F. Branco Cartoon – Near Miss

    A.F. Branco | on

    Some say Nadler and the Democrats are creating a Constitutional Crisis in their effort to destroy President Trump and reverse the 2016 election.

    Constitutional CrisisPolitical Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.

    A.F. Branco Cartoon – No More Kowtow

    A.F. Branco | on

    Trump strikes back with big tariffs when China reneges on the original deal outline and talks ended. China has now retaliated with their own tariffs.

    China Trade DT 600Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.

    A.F. Branco Cartoon – Three Stooges

    A.F. Branco | on

    Brennan, Clapper, and Comey are beginning to pointing fingers at each other now that AG Barr has appointed US Attorney John Durham to investigate Spying on the Trump campaign.

    Deep State Turning on Each OtherPolitical Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.
    See more Legal Insurrection Branco cartoons, click here.

    An adult children’s Book for all ages APOCALI NOW! brilliantly lampoons the left order  HERE

    Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated –  $1.00 – $5.00 – $10 – $100 –  it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. – THANK YOU!

    take our poll – story continues below

    • Who are the happiest people?

    A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, the great El Rushbo, and has recently had his toons tweeted by President Trump.

    Category:

    Political

    Tagged with:

    Tag Cloud

    %d bloggers like this: