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By Mark Sumner, Daily Kos Staff
To be absolutely clear: Bill Barr is a terrible attorney general who has used his position to grossly distort the whole purpose of the Justice Department. He auditioned for the role with a letter claiming the Russia investigation was illegal, substituted his own "summary" for the findings of the actual Mueller report, and personally signaled for his prison guard shock troops to begin a violent attack on unarmed protesters. Barr has spent most of the last two years trying to fulfill Donald Trump's every conspiracy theory dream by appointing special investigators, providing an endless stream of disinformation to right-wing media, and traveling the world in an attempt to find an ally willing to roast U.S. intelligence agencies. And all of that is on top of Barr's previous star turn in which he played a central role in dismissing charges resulting from Iran-Contra. He's a bad attorney general, a bad American, and simply a bad man.
But just because Barr is determinedly malevolent, and saved Trump from what should have been an impeachment over the plain fact that his campaign engaged in every form of cooperation with the Russian government in order to subvert the outcome of a U.S. election, it doesn't mean that Trump is always going to be happy with him. And now, in the twilight of both their careers, Trump is increasingly treating Barr as an enemy.
In Trump's mind, there are only two possible roles anyone can serve: Completely subservient bootlicker, or infuriating opponent. There is no in-between.
So the fact that Barr didn't wholeheartedly join in with Rudy Giuliani and his parade of Hunter Biden laptops as confirmed by blind shop owners before the election had already made Barr suspect. Trump repeatedly tweeted a mixture of disdain and distaste for Barr in the weeks before the election as it became clear that, unlike 2016, there was not going to be some last-minute statement from the DOJ or FBI to provide Trump a last-minute vote infusion. And now a story from The Wall Street Journalhas Trump hammering away at Barr again, while Trump supporters are calling Barr a traitor and Republican senators are demanding yet another very special counsel.
The claims from the WSJ began with a story in which Hunter Biden admitted that his federal income taxes are under investigation. Of course, Donald Trump has claimed that he could not reveal his tax returns for the last ever because he's perennially under audit. It's also widely known that Trump's taxes are the subject of investigations by the State of New York. However, what's routine for Trump is apparently supposed to be scandalous for Joe Biden's surviving son -- a son who will have no role in the upcoming administration. The investigation into Hunter Biden's taxes apparently predates both Barr and Trump's phone call to Ukraine but is said to be restricted to tax issues and "doesn't implicate other members of his family or the president-elect."
But what has the whole right wing in an uproar is the idea that ... Barr knew. Barr knew, and he didn't make a statement that Trump could use before the election. For Trump, this isn't just an excuse to attack Barr for failing to come through the clinch, but also to claim that Biden's term is going to be "so plagued by scandal" that the Supreme Court just might as well hand the election to Trump and save everyone some time and embarrassment.
And of course, Barr did know. He knew that while Hunter Biden's taxes were being investigated by an office of the department he controlled. Barr also knew that no crime has been alleged, no one has been indicted, and that nothing appeared to be connected to the actual candidate for office. A fuming Trump supporter inside the DOJ also complained that Barr knew about another investigation involving Hunter Biden, an investigation that the WSJ was quick to highlight ... before reaching the point where it admits that its sources indicate Hunter was "never a specific target for criminal prosecution." Connected to the first investigation, this appears to be more a matter of looking at a bank that may have made some shady deals rather than anything specifically done by Hunter Biden.
So what Barr knew was that Hunter Biden's taxes were being examined in one investigation, and Biden was not the target of a second investigation. Still, Barr's failure to jump up and down and scream about a family of criminals is apparently all that was required to toss him from the good graces of Trump and his supporters.
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