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Anyone else remember Attorney General Bill Barr’s exchange with Senator Kamala Harris? Aaron Rupar sure does! Let’s take a trip down memory lane…
.@SenKamalaHarris: Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested you open an investigation into anyone?
BARR: ….. ah …..
HARRIS: Seems like something you should be able to answer
BARR: I don't know ……. pic.twitter.com/8FIqrGzSrm
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 1, 2019
That certainly seems like a big ol’ oopsie-daisy, doesn’t it?
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, the Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.”
Rupar has quite a few juicy memories, including this gem, where Barr has to pause before “acknowledging that presidential campaigns that are offered dirt from hostile foreign governments should probably contact the FBI.”
I think Bill Barr has some explaining to do. In fact, I think quite a lot of people have some explaining to do because, as Talking Points Memo observes Pence was in on the scheme. And probably quite a few other people too.
This new episode suggests that the President can personally commit the most egregious wrongdoing, clearly impeachable offenses, in full view of his most senior advisors, and we hear nothing about it. We only know about this because of this whistleblower, who is him or herself now being attacked publicly as a Deep State partisan. Could Trump have made financial demands of Gulf monarchies to help his private businesses? Could he have asked Vladimir Putin for election assistance in 2020? Given that the demand on Ukraine was considered acceptable and is now being affirmatively defended, there’s no reason to think that these actions wouldn’t have been deemed acceptable and within the President’s purview as well.
Marshall concludes, “[t]his new development suggests he probably has [engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors], that his top advisors know about those bad acts and decided it was okay.” That is almost certainly the fact of the matter, and they all have to go out with the rest of the trash.