I am not a lawyer, but after viewing Judge Amy Berman Jackson's unredacted memo, I think it is pretty clear that Merrick Garland is not protecting Bill Barr.
The parts that I have highlighted here are the parts that were previously redacted; Garland agreed to unredact this.
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Unredacted: Jackson's clear opinion that Barr's DOJ was intentionally dishonest, concealing the content of the OLC memo and misrepresenting its purpose to the court.
Recurring theme here: Jackson exposed the OLC memo for what it was - part of a political PR strategy.
Unredacted: The memo was crafted - at Bill Barr's request - to "recommend" that Barr make a judgement call about Mueller's report.
Why? Because the underlying motivation behind the memo was, "getting a jump on public relations."
Unredacted [my own paraphrasing of the OLC memo]:
'Now that Mueller's hands are tied, and he can't do anything that might remotely be perceived as levying an accusation against POTUS, we "recommend" that you step in and tell the public what you want them to hear.'
Unredacted: Again, what they were trying to conceal here was that this was all about public relations - i.e. politically motivated.
(Even the redacted version of this section is extremely important; it showed that Barr, Rosenstein, and OLC worked together to deceive Congress):
Unredacted:
-"the agency [Barr's DOJ] was girding for a preemptive strike on the Mueller report"
-Section 1 of the DOJ memo didn't offer legal advice at all - it offered "strategic, political, and public relations," advice.
Unredacted (footnote):
The purpose of the DOJ memo "was to provide legal analysis to help shape the assessment of the Special Counsel’s report that the Attorney General was planning to announce for the reasons set forth in Section I of the memorandum"
i.e. help the PR effort.
Those are all of the redactions, so I will stop there.
As I said above, even the redacted version of this ruling/memo was damning, as it exposed DOJ & OLC coordination (collusion?) to mislead the public and Congress.
In addition to the above, Merrick Garland has agreed to release Section 1 of Barr's OLC memo. That is the section that Jackson took issue with, and is what we should want to see.
As someone who has long taken issue with "OLC memos" in general, I'm not clear about Section 2.
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Susan Collins’ PAC is under investigation for what the FBI calls a “massive scheme to illegally finance” her re-election bid.
The GOP uses her to pitch these things, because the media continues to allow her to pretend that she is a “moderate,” as if she is materially different.
Now, one important thing that Asha didn’t mention (probably for brevity), is that Barr didn’t act alone.
Tweet 4 in her thread leaves out a huge part of the story, which is what all of the Garland/DOJ/Court talk is about today.
Instead of “I’ll do it,” what Barr really did..
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Barr actually *conspired* with Rosenstein and the OLC (who is supposed to just provide legal counsel), to fabricate a memo that would *justify* his plan to mislead everyone about the Mueller report.
Judge A.B. Jackson realized this & ordered DOJ to release that memo.
If a candidate runs under a marijuana legalization party, and there is documented evidence that he had no interest in pursuing the party’s platform (was simply running to siphon votes), would voters have grounds to sue him for Honest Services Fraud?
In addition to that, if there were evidence of a nationally coordinated scheme to run fraudulent candidates in this way (rather than organic, individual choices by candidates) could that constitute racketeering?
Did the GOP use fraudulent candidates to control the Minnesota state Senate?
The Republican Party currently maintains a majority in the MN Senate by a single vote: 35-34.
It appears they leveraged the growing popularity of two marijuana parties to hold on to power.
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In 2018, two marijuana legalization parties broke the popularity barrier to achieve Major Party status under MN state law.
This allowed them to appear on statewide ballots without needing to collect signatures - but it also meant they lost control over who ran under their name.
Leading up to the 2020 election, as early as June, MN journalists were seeing a trend - candidates running for Senate under these two parties, who had no experience, weren’t even particularly active on the issue, and who appeared to be quite Republican.
“Money laundering is a crime that makes other crimes possible. It can accelerate economic inequality, drain public funds, undermine democracy, and destabilize nations — and the banks play a key role.”
“The Trump administration has made it even harder to hold executives personally accountable, under guidance by former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein that warned government agencies against “piling on.”
How to Actually Prosecute the Financial Crimes of the Very Rich
“I quit the DOJ because I no longer wanted to participate in a system this permissive.”
Paul E. Pelletier
Former federal financial-crimes prosecutor
Two days after Biden was inaugurated, I said that, as long as we can root out dark money and opaque funding sources in our political system, Dems would be in a great position to win in 2022.
I still believe this, which is why I have spent so much time bringing attention to it.
Dark money vehicles are also responsible for funding and coordinating most of the astroturf style propaganda operations that continue to divide us against each other and erode confidence in our government.