21 Feb It’s Not About Trump Needing Bill Barr; It’s About America Needing the Truth
The WSJ’s Daniel Henninger did his best to sound the alarm over what he views as the catastrophic implications of AG Bill Barr resigning over Trump’s tweets. Among the implications: “the effort to establish what happened from 2015 onward will be washed out to sea” and “mass, moralized fanaticism [will become] the primary instrument of opposition in U.S. politics.”
Henninger sounds a lot like the voice of a ruling class elitist, insisting that all that matters—in the absence of the indispensable ruling class member Barr to navigate this labyrinth of political intrigue—is which spin of ‘moral fanaticism’ holds up long enough to wear out the others.
No. Truth exists, it is knowable, and it matters….and it matters in America, maybe more than any other country on earth. And it matters as to ‘what happened from 2015 onward’, perhaps more than any other period in American history.
We’re not yet an advocate for Barr’s resignation; we’d much rather he and John Durham step up soon and deliver justice in the greatest scandal in American history. But if Barr does resign over the tweets, he’s not the man America—never mind Trump—needs at this moment in history.
Americans aren’t really in need of a formal effort to ‘establish’ what happened from 2015 onward. They know what happened. What they are increasingly angry about is that the current FBI and DOJ seem to be maintaining the pretense of still not knowing what happened as a means of deferring action to impose real accountability on the perpetrators and enablers and collaborators.
We understand that Americans don’t really ‘know what happened’ in the fastidious, legal sense of nailing down every detail of every action and every motive of every participant in this scandal—from the early un-maskings of NSA data in 2015 (or earlier), to the Obama holdovers in the DOJ acting just last week in deliberate defiance of AG Barr and DOJ internal procedure in the Stone sentencing recommendation (to Judge Jackson pronouncing on Thursday a 3+ year sentence on Roger Stone).
But the contours of ‘what happened’ have been clear for years: Obama and his administration (and his administration’s holdovers after he was out of office) politicized and weaponized every government agency they needed to maintain power, undermine political opposition, attempt to control an election outcome—and when that failed, attempt to execute multiple coup plots against the duly elected President.
Conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States is as serious as crime gets; that it was done by sitting government officials against their domestic political opponents is monumentally significant to the future of the republic.
Justice demands that there be serious, visible, thorough accountability for what happened.
For those who would characterize these last few paragraphs as over-certain as to what happened— examples of ‘moral fanaticism’?–presumably on the grounds that there is still some thin reed of possibility that all of these DOJ and FBI officials just made an innocent misreading of Russian disinformation and fell for it because of their honest desire to protect America from the grave implications of Trump even possibly being a Russian agent, there are two answers: Hillary Clinton and Seth Rich.
For all the talk about investigating the UK and Australia and Italy to get at the ‘predicate’ for spying on the Trump campaign, the real predicate or ‘tell’ for the whole scandal was DOJ/FBI behavior in handling Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, followed and confirmed by the DOJ/FBI behavior in investigating the alleged Russian ‘hack’ of the DNC server.
Hillary Clinton willfully committed felonies in the handling of confidential information of the US government, and the DOJ/FBI engineered her exoneration in defiance of established investigatory procedures and of the plain language of a statute. That’s not open to argument, and Americans are not in need of an effort to establish whether it happened. They watched it happen. The public words and actions of James Comey are enough by themselves.
The DOJ/FBI did not act with honesty and integrity in exonerating Hillary Clinton. It’s not moral fanaticism to say so; it’s a ‘duh’. No matter how much the MSM tries to make the starting point of the scandal be about the investigation of Trump, Americans don’t forget where the agenda of the Deep State first outed itself—which is foundational to ‘what happened’.
As to the alleged Russian ‘hack’ of the DNC server, the DOJ/FBI to this day (1) never has taken possession of the DNC servers to independently examine and verify forensically what took place; (2) never has questioned Julian Assange, who in turn has never wavered in his assertion that the DNC emails did not come from a Russian source but from a DNC insider (who he implied to be Seth Rich); (3) never has spoken with former Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who did speak with Assange, and (4) refuses to release unredacted Strzok/Page texts and other internal DOJ communications relating to the murder of Seth Rich.
If Seth Rich provided the DNC emails to Wikileaks, “the Russians hacked the DNC server” linchpin spin/rationale for investigating Trump/Russia collusion goes out the window, and so does any pretension that any of the resulting DOJ/FBI spying on the Trump was even remotely legitimate. (And justice demands accountability for the murder of Seth Rich.)
Do the four items above ‘prove’ Seth Rich and not the Russians provided DNC emails to Wikileaks? Well, again—in the fastidious legal sense of proof, no. But they are proof of a DOJ/FBI willfully uninterested in (and hiding) the truth, which means a DOJ/FBI unwilling and unable to deliver justice.
But that is what Americans need: a DOJ/FBI that they are confident is determined to out the truth and to deliver justice in relation to that truth.
AG Bill Barr hasn’t delivered, yet. We still hope he will. But if he resigns, it will not be the end of Trump or of civilization as we know it. The truth will still be out there, and will set America free from the dark cloud of a corrupted DOJ and FBI. America will just need a stronger AG to expose it.
What may very well be the end of American civilization as we know it is a failure of the American system of government to out the truth and deliver justice in the greatest scandal in American history.
Eric Georgatos