Thread by @SethAbramson

I'm a bit amazed that people are unclear on why Bill Barr is acting as he is and saying what he's saying.

I would ask you to hold in your mind two distinct possible futures:

1️⃣ What happens in Barr's life if Trump wins
2️⃣ What happens in Barr's life if Biden wins

There you go.

PS/ BTW, it can't be said that this is the typical calculus for government employees. Most government employees are just fine with moving on to other work at the end of their term, and do not fear that there will be significant repercussions for them for what they did on the job.

PS2/ As I discuss in Proof of Corruption, Barr has been accused by a man now under federal indictment as one of Trump's top clandestine co-conspirators. The facts of the case—which are harrowing—are sufficient to let Barr know he'll face tough questioning under a post-Trump DOJ.

PS3/ Unfortunately, a quirk of today's Republican voters is that they always reward criminals or sociopaths who—because they are either career criminals or lifelong sociopaths—are able to keep their cool when they have committed crimes or acted like a sociopath.

Thus, Bill Barr.

PS4/ You or I, facing the credible allegations of historic misconduct that Barr is facing, wouldn't be giving media interviews; would quit our job; would retire from public life; and would try to find ways to maintain our equanimity as we faced possible ruin. Bill Barr? He DGAF.

PS5/ Again, knowing the evidence against Barr in Proof of Corruption and seeing him respond with such equanimity would cause most observers to say there's something profoundly wrong with him or else he has a longer history of misconduct than we realize. GOP voters simply love it.

PS6/ At least 3 Trump lawyers sold access to Barr as part of a criminal conspiracy to illegally solicit pro-Trump foreign election interference for the second presidential election in a row. Not only is there an eyewitness to all of this, but Barr's public conduct is inculpatory.

PS7/ Any person facing corroborated allegations of being a player on Trump's "BLT Prime Team" (the cadre of actors—whose roster is known—that engaged in illegal pre-election foreign collusion) would stay the hell out of the limelight. Barr clearly feels he must ensure Trump wins.

PS8/ I understand we live in cynical times. No matter how long I've been an author for, and for how long I've been politically active, people will think I wrote the Proof books for a reason other than the reason I did. But here's the key reason—above all others—I wrote the books:

PS9/ I wanted to use metajournalism to arm *full-time conventional journalists* with the full scope of major media–reported evidence of foreign collusion by Trump and his aides, allies, associates, agents, and advisors. I wanted Wolf Blitzer to be prepared for the Barr interview.

PS10/ I learned a lot of things about how nonfiction publishing works in the last two years that underscore to me that it is not as easy to get urgent metajournalism to fulltime conventional journalists as I had optimistically thought that it might be. But I've had to try anyway.

PS11/ Anyone who's read the Proof series would conduct interviews with certain newsmakers in a wholly different way than what we've seen. Barr has questions he needs to answer that are very specific and have to do with criminal conduct. He still hasn't been asked those questions.

PS12/ I represented over 2,000 accused criminals in three jurisdictions. I know that one thing neither a criminal defense attorney nor an *accurately* accused defendant wants is a massive, well-curated accounting of every piece of evidence against them. That applies to Barr, too.

PS13/ The hope someone like Barr has when interviewed by CNN is that the media will only be focusing on the big story of the day or the one or two newsworthy tidbits in the latest bestseller. They do not want to be confronted with someone who possesses the full range of evidence.

PS14/ Barr needs to be asked why three friends of his who are Trump attorneys and who helped him get his job have been running around the world selling access to him as part of a criminal conspiracy to steal the 2020 election—and why he helped them.

He *still* hasn't been asked.

PS15/ The closest we came to a real confrontation was when Bolton revealed that he'd discussed Trump's collusion with China and Turkey directly with Barr and Barr had acknowledged it. When confronted with the story in a non-live setting, Barr just lied and said Bolton was a liar.

PS16/ What should've happened, of course, is Bolton and Barr should've been brought live on-air together to air their incompatible stories about whether the President of the United States is compromised by multiple foreign powers. Then you would've seen Barr—to put it mildly—GAF.

PS17/ In cross-examinations you can gauge how well you're doing in part by how comfortable your witness is. If journalists were open to learn from fellow journalists who are also lawyers, they'd learn Barr being cool as a cucumber in interviews means they're not doing their jobs.

PS18/ Barr sat down with CNN knowing that there would only be two types of questions coming his way—questions seeking to have him throw Trump under the bus and questions about his past policy decisions. He knew no questions about his clandestine actions would arise. He was right.

PS19/ Barr is smart, but that's not enough for him: he genuinely thinks he's far smarter than anyone. The way you beat someone like that is you confront them with evidence they didn't know you had—or curate lines of inquiry they didn't think anyone would connect or had connected.

PS20/ Barr, Trump, and the rest of the malafactors in Trump's milieu will keep winning until professionals who've spent a lifetime getting lauded for using conventional processes learn to adapt, evolve and improve their processes for new contexts—which is what professionalism is.