Thread by @JoshuaHol

Bill Barr has been portrayed as a veteran DOJ hand and a relatively straight-shooter. Is that image right? Or is he, as William Safire dubbed him way back in 1992, the "The Coverup-General"?

A thread.

Marcy Wheeler compared what we know from Roger Stone's case to Barr's summary, and writes that it offers "proof that Bill Barr’s memo spins the known contents of the Mueller Report to minimize the complicity of Trump’s flunkies."

emptywheel.net/2019/03/27/the…

That fits with a pattern that marks his entire career. Barr came to Washington in 1973, as a Republican presidency was being brought down by Congressional hearings into charges that he obstructed justice.

I can't say that experience shaped his worldview, but since then he has been "an advocate of sweeping executive authority, which would have major implications for oversight," according to the ACLU. aclu.org/blog/national-…

As an aside, Barr is also pretty wingnutty on social issues, according to Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

au.org/blogs/wall-of-…

(Big fan of Jeff Sessions: washingtonpost.com/opinions/jeff-…)

Sen. Ron Wyden: "Mr. Barr’s dangerous views on executive power have been consistent throughout his career, from his writings at DOJ in the late '80s to the present..." medium.com/@RonWyden/floo…

"...When the Patriot Act was being considered, "he laid out in public testimony his position that the president is not accountable to surveillance laws and that the president enjoys giant loopholes in the Fourth Amendment."

Makes sense; according to ACLU, "Barr was the godfather of the NSA’s bulk data collection program."

Barr would play a direct role in covering up "Iraqgate" as AG under Bush I. Bush had funneled covert CIA support for Saddam Hussein in his war with Iraq through the Atlanta branch of an Italian bank. nytimes.com/1992/10/18/wee…

When Bush was trying to assemble his coalition to fight Saddam, the story blew up. In '92, then-AG Barr, under pressure to appoint an Independent Counsel to investigate, would earn Safire's monicker by instead appointing a "special investigator," with limited time and resources.

The investigator, a retired judge, conducted a brief investigation and concluded that the administration--and the CIA--had done nothing wrong. The story has since been largely forgotten.

Around that same time, in 1991, the BCCI scandal broke. It WAS HUGE. BCCI was a shadowy int'l bank institution that basically laundered/hid money from regulators on behalf of intelligence agencies around the world. Kerry Commission found that the CIA had multiple BCCI accounts.

According to Jefferson Morley, Barr played some role in sitting on relevant documents until Senate Dems made him promise to let the investigations play out as a condition of his confirmation. salon.com/2019/01/17/wil…

And then there was Iran-Contra, perhaps the most widely known of Barr's coverups. A December, 1992 NYT headline reads, "THE PARDONS; BUSH PARDONS 6 IN IRAN AFFAIR, ABORTING A WEINBERGER TRIAL; PROSECUTOR ASSAILS 'COVER-UP'" nytimes.com/1992/12/25/us/…

Barr was one of Bush's advisors who had come up with a gameplan to manage the public fallout that would inevitably greet the pardons.

One final bit of history. In 1992, Barr, who had been working in CIA's Office of Legislative Counsel during the Church Committee Hearings on intelligence abuses in the 1970s, would go on to weaken the constraints on FBI surveillance of domestic actors...

...that had been put in place by AG Edward Levi in response to what the hearings revealed, and strengthened by subsequent Attorneys General. oig.justice.gov/special/0509/c…

So that's your Coverup-General's background.

Last year, he wrote a 19-page memo arguing that POTUS could not be guilty of criminal obstruction of justice in exercising his Constitutional powers, which he CCed to Trump's attorneys.

He got the job, and last week inserted himself into the process to conclude just what he'd argued in the memo.

Also, too:

https://twitter.com/girlsreallyrule/status/1110540487113523200