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'Fascist': Trump Threatens To Order Indictment Of Political Opponents

'Fascist': Trump Threatens To Order Indictment Of Political Opponents

Donald Trump on Thursday said he could order the Dept. of Justice to “indict” his opponents if he wins back the White House next year, leading critics to issue warnings.

“On Thursday, in an interview with Univision, Trump again made explicit what is often implicit in his vengeance-fuelled campaign: his willingness to use the justice system to go after his opponents if he is returned to the White House,”The New Yorker‘s Susan B. Glasser reports. “Any other prospective President would have denied with all possible force a recent Washington Post report that Trump has already demanded that his aides make plans to target some former advisers who have become public critics, including his former chief of staff John Kelly, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.”

“Instead, Trump all but confirmed the story when he told the Spanish-language network that he would use the courts against his political rivals. ‘If I happen to be President and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them,’ ‘ Trump told Univision. ‘They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election.’ ”

The Washington Post reports, “Trump says on Univision he could weaponize FBI, DOJ against his enemies,” while The New York Times’ Peter Baker called it: “A signal from Trump that did not get much attention.”

Others are using far-stronger language.

Despite Baker’s remarks, Trump literally told supporters at a rally this week he is planning to weaponize the DOJ against his opponents.

And as Glasser points out in The New Yorker, this isn’t new.

“There should be no surprise in this, of course. When Trump ran in 2016, he promised to jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and laughed and cheered and egged on his crowds when they chanted, ‘Lock her up! Lock her up!'”

Others, like The Washington Post’s Carol Leaning, point out that not only are Trump’s vows to weaponize DOJ against his opponents not new, he actually did it when he was president.

“It’s not just Donald Trump projecting possibly what we think he would like to do in a Justice Dept. in the future,” Leaning said on MSNBC on Tuesday. “It’s what he actually did when he was president."

Meanwhile, some critics are taking a deeper look at Trump, who Glasser calls, “a man who is running on an explicit platform of revenge, retribution, and Constitution-termination.” And, as she observes, the warnings are “getting louder.”

Focused on Trump’s promise to order DOJ indictments, former Tea Party Republican Congressman Joe Walsh, now a strong Trump critic who hosts “White Flag with Joe Walsh,” called it “fascism.”

“This is what a fascist dictator does. This is fascism. In his own words, he’s telling you how fascist he will be,” Walsh warned.

Max Boot, the Washington Post columnist, writes, “Don’t say you weren’t warned. Like many aspiring dictators, Trump makes no secret of his authoritarian agenda. But many people either don’t believe him or don’t care.”

Bloomberg columnist Matthew Yglesias adds, “Trump has been very clear that he intends to corrupt all the levers of the state in improper ways.”

Watch the video above or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

'Bombshell' Report: Durham Probed Trump Finances On Tip From Italian Authorities

'Bombshell' Report: Durham Probed Trump Finances On Tip From Italian Authorities

Special Counsel John Durham, appointed by then-Attorney General Bill Barr, uncovered possible financial crimes by Donald Trump but made no attempt to prosecute them, The New York Timesrevealed in a massive, bombshell report published Thursday after a months-long investigation.

“Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it,” the Times’ Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner report.

The “potentially explosive tip linking Mr. Trump to certain suspected financial crimes” came during a trip Barr and Durham, his special counsel, took together. They “decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore.”

But,“Mr. Durham never filed charges, and it remains unclear what level of an investigation it was, what steps he took, what he learned and whether anyone at the White House ever found out. The extraordinary fact that Mr. Durham opened a criminal investigation that included scrutinizing Mr. Trump has remained secret.”

That’s just one aspect of the Times’ extensive and disturbing report.

It also reveals that there was little justification for Barr to install Durham as a special counsel to investigate what Trump wrongly maintained was an unjustifiable investigation into his ties to Russia.

In fact, the Times “found that the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws — including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court — that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.”

In another shocking revelation, the Times reports Durham “used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media.”

The Times does not explain how Durham obtained the Russian disinformation.

“Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued.”

Attorneys on Durham’s team apparently had significant qualms with his actions, leading at least two to resign.

“There were deeper internal fractures on the Durham team than previously known,” the Times reports. “The publicly unexplained resignation in 2020 of his No. 2 and longtime aide, Nora R. Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics. A year later, two more prosecutors strongly objected to plans to indict a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign based on evidence they warned was too flimsy, and one left the team in protest of Mr. Durham’s decision to proceed anyway. (A jury swiftly acquitted the lawyer.)”

BARR THREATENED NSA

The Times also reports that Attorney General Barr bought into Trump’s false claims that there had been “no collusion” between the Trump camp and Russia.

Importantly, the Times states point-blank that the Mueller Report “detailed ‘numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,’ and it established both how Moscow had worked to help Mr. Trump win and how his campaign had expected to benefit from the foreign interference.”

According to the Times’ account, “soon after giving Mr. Durham his assignment,” in May of 2019, “Mr. Barr summoned the head of the National Security Agency, Paul M. Nakasone, to his office. In front of several aides, Mr. Barr demanded that the N.S.A. cooperate with the Durham inquiry.”

The NSA is a wholly separate entity from the Justice Department. It is an agency under the Defense Department and reports to the powerful Director of National Intelligence (DNI).

Barr apparently did not care, and, “repeating a sexual vulgarity, he warned that if the N.S.A. wronged him by not doing all it could to help Mr. Durham, Mr. Barr would do the same to the agency.”

“Mr. Durham’s team spent long hours combing the C.I.A.’s files but found no way to support the allegation” that the investigation into Trump and Russia was the result of some anti-Trump deep state operation.

Barr and Durham actually “traveled abroad together to press British and Italian officials to reveal everything their agencies had gleaned about the Trump campaign and relayed to the United States, but both allied governments denied they had done any such thing. Top British intelligence officials expressed indignation to their U.S. counterparts about the accusation, three former U.S. officials said.”

The Justice Department’s Inspector General’s investigation found there was, in fact, sufficient cause for the department to have opened the Trump-Russia investigation, contrary to Barr’s personal beliefs.

So he tried to have that finding removed from the final report.

The Times reports that “the broader findings contradicted Mr. Trump’s accusations and the rationale for Mr. Durham’s inquiry,” which should have shut down what ultimately became Durham’s four-year long investigation that netted almost nothing.

The DOJ Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, “found no evidence that F.B.I. actions were politically motivated. And he concluded that the investigation’s basis — an Australian diplomat’s tip that a Trump campaign adviser had seemed to disclose advance knowledge that Russia would release hacked Democratic emails — had been sufficient to lawfully open it.”

So Barr tried to discredit Horowitz’s report.

“Minutes before the inspector general’s report went online, Mr. Barr issued a statement contradicting Mr. Horowitz’s major finding, declaring that the F.B.I. opened the investigation “on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient.” He would later tell Fox News that the investigation began “without any basis,” as if the diplomat’s tip never happened.”

Read the entire Times report here.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Bill Barr Blasted After Telling ’Today’ He’d Vote For Trump In 2024

Bill Barr Blasted After Telling ’Today’ He’d Vote For Trump In 2024

Former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr is continuing what some are calling his “whitewashing” history and “reputation restoration” tour, this time with a Monday interview on NBC’s Today show. It’s not going well.

Perhaps it’s because of Barr telling NBC’s Savannah Guthrie that he will vote for Trump for president in 2024 if he’s the GOP nominee, even though as he wrote in his book, Trump “lied about the election” and “threatened democracy.”

Or perhaps it’s because he defended saying he would vote for Trump, by declaring “the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic party.”

“Is there anything in Bill Barr’s recent history as attorney general that might tell you as a journalist that he is not credible?” Matt Negrin, Senior Digital Producer of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” asked Guthrie and “TODAY.”

“Once again, normalization of a sociopath,” noted former Asst. U.S. Attorney Richard Signorelli.

“Sure, why not vote for a guy who’s been trying nonstop to overthrow a duly elected government?” asked former New York Times columnist Clyde Haberman.

Former U.S, Attorney Joyce Vance, now a law professor and an MSNBC and NBC News legal analyst:

Other social media users also blasted Barr and TODAY for giving him the platform.

“As a lawyer, and particularly as attorney general, if your attitude ‘sure he violated the Constitution, but I don’t like the politics of the other guys,’ you don’t understand your obligations as an officer of the court and under your oath of office,” wrote one Twitter user.

“Want to know how we got here? This. This is why we got Donald Trump. Republicans will support ANYTHING as long as it’s not a Democrat,” wrote another.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Bill Barr Recalls Trump’s Oval Office Meltdown When He Rejected Big Lie

Bill Barr Recalls Trump’s Oval Office Meltdown When He Rejected Big Lie

When Bill Barr was serving as U.S. attorney general in 2019 and 2020, his critics often lambasted him for being one of then-President Donald Trump’s most ardent defenders — and for claiming that the Mueller Report was more favorable to Trump than it actually was. But Trump’s relationship with Barr went sour in a big way following the 2020 presidential election when Barr refused to go along with the Big Lie and acknowledged that now-President Joe Biden had legitimately won.

Barr has kept a relatively low profile during Biden’s 13 months in the White House. But he discussed the 2020 election and the late 2020/early 2021 lame duck period during an interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt, which is schedule to air this Sunday night, March 6. Some highlights of the interview have already aired on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.”

“The sit-down with Holt is Barr's first televised interview since he stepped down as attorney general in late December 2020,” NBC News reporter Dareh Gregorian explains. “Barr is publishing a new book about his time in the Trump Administration, which has prompted criticism from some that he remained silent about the former president until he could profit from book sales.”

Many alumni of the U.S. Department of Justice, both Democrats and Republicans, were vehemently critical of Barr after the release of the Mueller Report — which detailed former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the United States’ 2016 presidential election. To Barr’s critics, his loyalty to Trump was his top priority, not the wellbeing of his country or the rule of law.

But when Trump tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and falsely claimed that the election was stolen from him, that was a line that Barr refused to cross. And Trump was furious with him for it.

The 71-year-old Barr, during the interview with Holt, recalled, “I told him that all this stuff was bullshit.... about election fraud. And, you know, it was wrong to be shoveling it out the way his team was.”

According to Barr, he told Trump, “I understand you're upset with me, and I'm perfectly happy to tender my resignation” — and Trump, slapping his desk in the White House Oval Office, angrily responded, “Accepted. Accepted…. Accepted. Go home. Don't go back to your office. Go home. You're done.'"

Barr formally submitted his resignation as U.S. attorney general on December 14, 2020.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet