William Barr undercuts Donald Trump on election and Hunter Biden inquiries
Undercutting President Donald Trump on multiple fronts, Attorney General William Barr said Monday he saw no reason to appoint a special counsel to look into the president’s claims about the 2020 election or to name one for the tax investigation of President-elect Joe Biden’s son. Barr, in his final public appearance as a member of Trump’s Cabinet, also reinforced the belief of federal officials that Russia was behind a massive hack of U.S. government agencies, not China as the president has suggested. Barr is leaving the Justice Department this week, having morphed from one of Trump’s most loyal allies to one of the few members of the Cabinet willing to contradict the president openly. That’s been particularly true since the election, with Barr declaring in an interview with The AP that he had seen no evidence of widespread voting fraud, even as Trump continued to make false claims about the integrity of the contest. The president has also grown particularly angry that Barr didn’t announce the existence of a two-year-old investigation of Hunter Biden before the election. On Monday, Barr said that investigation was “being handled responsibly and professionally.” “I have not seen a reason to appoint a special counsel and I have no plan to do so before I leave,” he said, adding that there was also no need for a special counsel to investigate the election. A special counsel would make it more difficult for Biden and his yet-to-be-named attorney general to close investigations begun under Trump. Such an appointment could also add a false legitimacy to baseless claims, particularly to the throngs of Trump supporters who believe the election was stolen because Trump keeps wrongly claiming it was. Barr’s comments came at a press conference to announce additional criminal charges in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 190 Americans, an issue he had worked on in his previous stint as attorney general in the early 1990s. He’ll step down on Wednesday and be replaced by acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. Barr’s statements on the special counsel may make it easier for Rosen to resist pressure from the White House to open any special counsel investigation. In his 2019 confirmation hearing for deputy attorney general, Rosen said he was willing to rebuff political pressure from the White House if necessary. He told legislators that criminal investigations should “proceed on the facts and the law” and prosecutions should be “free of improper political influences.” “If the appropriate answer is to say no to somebody, then I will say no,” he said at the time. Trump and his allies have filed roughly 50 lawsuits challenging election results and nearly all have been dismissed or dropped. He’s also lost twice at the U.S. Supreme Court. With no further tenable legal recourse, Trump has been fuming and peppering allies for options as he refuses to accept his loss. Among those allies is Rudy Giuliani, who during a meeting Friday pushed Trump to seize voting machines in his hunt for evidence of fraud. The Homeland Security Department made clear, however, that it had no authority to do so. It is also unclear what that would accomplish. For his part, Barr said he saw no reason to seize them. Earlier this month, Barr also told AP that the Justice Department and Homeland Security had looked into the claims “that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results” and ultimately concluded that “we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.” Trump has consulted on special counsels with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, White House counsel Pat Cipollone and outside allies, according to several Trump administration officials and Republicans close to the White House who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly. Trump was interested both in a counsel to investigate the younger Biden’s tax dealings and a second to look into election fraud. He even floated the idea of naming attorney Sidney Powell as the counsel — though Powell was booted from Trump’s legal team after she made a series of increasingly wild conspiratorial claims about the election. Federal law requires that an attorney general appoint any special counsels. Barr also said Monday the hack of U.S. government agencies “certainly appears to be the Russians.” In implicating the Russians, Barr was siding with the widely held belief within the U.S. government and the cybersecurity community that Russian hackers were responsible for breaches at multiple government agencies, including the Treasury and Commerce departments. Hours after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a radio interview that Russia was “pretty clearly” behind the hacks, Trump sought to undercut that message and play down the severity of the attack. He tweeted that the “Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality.” He also said China could be responsible even though no credible evidence has emerged to suggest anyone other than Russia might be to blame. Monday was also the 32nd anniversary of the Pan Am explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 259 people in the air and 11 on the ground. The Justice Department announced its case against the accused bombmaker, Abu Agela Masud Kheir Al-Marimi, who admitted in an interview with Libyan officials several years ago that he had built the bomb and worked with two other defendants to carry out the attack, Barr said. Calling the news conference to announce the charges underscored Barr’s attachment to that case. He had announced an earlier set of charges against two other Libyan intelligence officials in his capacity as acting attorney general nearly 30 years ago, vowing the investigation would continue. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
Donald Trump says William Barr resigning, will leave before Christmas
Attorney General William Barr, one of President Donald Trump’s staunchest allies, is departing amid lingering tension over the president’s baseless claims of election fraud and the investigation into President-elect Joe Biden’s son. Barr went Monday to the White House, where Trump said the attorney general submitted his letter of resignation. “As per letter, Bill will be leaving just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family,” Trump tweeted. Trump has publicly expressed his anger about Barr’s statement to The Associated Press earlier this month that the Justice Department had found no widespread fraud that would change the outcome of the election. Trump has also been angry that the Justice Department did not publicly announce it was investigating Hunter Biden ahead of the election, despite department policy against such a pronouncement. Barr told the AP that U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they’ve received, but “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” Barr’s resignation leaves Trump without a critical ally as he winds down his final weeks in office, and it throws into question open Justice Department investigations, especially the probe into Hunter Biden’s taxes. In his resignation letter, Barr said he updated Trump Monday on the department’s “review of voter fraud allegations in the 2020 election and how these allegations will continue to be pursued.” He added that his last day on the job would be Dec. 23. Trump said Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen, whom he labeled “an outstanding person,” will become acting attorney general. As the current second in command at the Justice Department, Rosen’s appointment is not likely to change much in the final weeks before the administration departs. Trump spent much of the day watching the Electoral College tally and calling allies but broke away to meet with Barr. His tweet about the Attorney General’s exit was a sober message from a president who is notoriously cold to his departing staff and quick to name-call and deride them once they say they are leaving. Trump has also previously claimed he fired staffers who resigned to make himself appear more powerful, and others, like former attorney general Jeff Sessions, were mocked by the president for weeks before they left office. But despite Trump’s obvious disdain for those who publicly disagree with him, Barr had generally remained in the president’s good graces and has been one of the president’s most ardent allies. Before the election, he had repeatedly raised the notion that mail-in voting could be especially vulnerable to fraud during the coronavirus pandemic as Americans feared going to polls. But Trump has a low tolerance for criticism, especially public criticism, from his allies and often fires back in kind. The two had been at odds in the past few months and Barr was said to have been frustrated by Trump’s tweeting. Trump said on Fox News over the weekend that he was disappointed that the Hunter Biden investigation had not been disclosed. Hunter Biden himself announced it last week. “Bill Barr should have stepped up,” Trump said. One senior administration official not authorized to speak publicly and speaking to The AP on condition of anonymity said Barr had resigned of his own accord and described the meeting as amicable. Barr, who was serving in his second stint as attorney general, sought to paint himself as an independent leader who would not bow to political pressure. But Democrats have repeatedly accused Barr of acting more like the president’s personal attorney than the attorney general, and Barr had proved to be a largely reliable Trump ally and defender of presidential power. Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Republican leader of the judiciary committee, told reporters at the Capitol he was surprised by the news. “I think he did an incredibly good job trying to repair damage done to the Department of Justice, trying to be fair and faithful to the law. I think he’s got a lot to be proud of,” Graham said. “He fought for the president where he could, as every attorney general and administration should, but he also didn’t cross lines that he shouldn’t have crossed.” He said he was referring to disclosing the Biden investigation. Before releasing special counsel Robert Mueller’s full report on the Russia investigation last year, Barr framed the results in a manner favorable to Trump even though Mueller pointedly said he couldn’t exonerate the president of obstruction of justice. He also appointed as special counsel the U.S. attorney who is conducting a criminal investigation into the origins of the FBI’s probe of the 2016 election that morphed into Mueller’s investigation of possible Trump-Russia cooperation, following Trump’s repeated calls to “investigate the investigators.” Barr also ordered Justice Department prosecutors to review the handling of the federal investigation into Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn and then sought to dismiss the criminal charges against Flynn, who had twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Trump later pardoned Flynn. Barr’s break from Trump over election fraud wasn’t the first. Earlier this year, Barr told ABC News that the president’s tweets about Justice Department cases “make it impossible for me to do my job,” and tensions flared just a few months ago when the two were increasingly at odds over the pace of the Durham investigation. Trump had been increasingly critical about a lack of arrests and Barr was privately telling people he was frustrated by Trump’s public pronouncements about the case. Trump was also said to blame Barr for comments from FBI Director Chris Wray on election fraud and mail-in voting that didn’t jibe with the president’s alarmist rhetoric. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
Jim Zeigler: Presidential race is turning around
The campaign for President has turned around in the last few weeks, particularly this past week. Not only can I FEEL it turning, but I can also see and explain the indicators. Even some strong Donald Trump supporters and workers had become worried, fearing he was losing. Much of the national media fed this narrative, pronouncing Trump politically dead. Not so fast. Am I the only political observer who has noticed similarities with the 1948 re-election campaign of President Harry Truman? The national media and polls had pronounced President Truman defeated, including that infamous election night headline of the Chicago Daily Tribune, ‘DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” It was not to be. It turned around at the end. Truman organized a whistle stop tour, rallying thousands at train stations across the heartland. Trump organized rallies in stadiums and other large venues, drawing tens of thousands to each. And he reaches millions with Twitter. But more important than the process were the issues. Does the Trump strong rhetoric remind you of “Give ‘em hell, Harry”? The Democrats’ mishandling of the confirmation process of Judge Amy Coney Barrett turned off many undecided voters. Joe Biden’s refusal to say he would not push to increase the size of the U.S. Supreme Court frightened many. It remains a serious risk that Biden would attempt court packing, which failed miserably for popular President Franklin Roosevelt. The final debate was a turnaround – positive for Trump, negative for Biden. The discovery of incriminating evidence in the Hunter Biden laptop demonstrated a serious risk that Joe Biden is compromised. Joe Biden’s multiple statements against the oil industry paint an unacceptable picture of the near future under a Biden Green New Deal. Gas prices in the $5-$10 range a gallon. No gas vehicles sold. Limited and expensive air flight. Doubled bills for electricity. We would be “transitioning” away from oil. Is that a word? Joe Biden has, at last, had to make longer speeches. The more he talks, the more incompetent and unacceptable he sounds. Let him talk. Biden is Trump’s best campaigner. In 2016 at this point, most national media and polls had declared Trump the loser, and by a healthy margin. They were wrong. Political pundits are just beginning to figure out that a certain number of Trump supporters do not trust the national media and polls. Some refuse to answer polls. Others mess with the pollsters and give incorrect answers. Still others do not want anyone to know who they support. Thus, the polls can be off, under-polling Trump by 3% to 10%. That is enough of a differential to sway any state that is in play. The national media that is against President Trump has overdone it. They have been so obviously biased and unfair that it has turned off a growing number of independent and undecided voters. If Biden is the best campaigner for Trump, the biased national media are close behind. Ever wonder why Trump openly insults and goads his critics in the national media? He is baiting a trap. The anti-Trump media take the bait and hit him hard – too hard. False “facts” and unfair coverage can be overdone and backfire. What hurt Trump earlier has started turning around. Jim Zeigler is the state Auditor of Alabama. ReplyForward
Face to face: Donald Trump and Joe Biden to meet for final debate
President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, are set to square off in their final debate Thursday, one of the last high-profile opportunities for the trailing incumbent to change the trajectory of an increasingly contentious campaign. Worried about losing the White House, some advisers are urging Trump to trade his aggressive demeanor from the first debate for a lower-key style that puts Biden more squarely in the spotlight. But it’s unclear whether the president will listen. Biden, who has stepped off the campaign trail in favor of debate prep, expects Trump to get intensely personal. The former vice president and his inner circle see the president’s approach chiefly as an effort to distract from the coronavirus, its economic fallout, and other crises. With less than two weeks until Election Day, Biden is leading most national polls and has a narrower advantage in the battleground states that could decide the race. More than 42 million people have already cast their ballots. The debate, moderated by NBC’s Kristen Welker, is a final chance for both men to make their case to a television audience of tens of millions of voters. “The rule is that last debates before the election have a big impact,” said presidential historian Michael Beschloss, who made clear the legacy of the candidates’ first faceoff: “That was the most out-of-control presidential debate we have seen.” Trump, who staged a remarkable comeback in the closing days of the 2016 campaign, believes he can do it again by using the power of the presidency to attack his rival. Trump on Tuesday called on Attorney General William Barr to immediately launch an investigation into unverified claims about Biden and his son Hunter Biden, effectively demanding that the Justice Department muddy his political opponent and abandon its historic resistance to getting involved in elections. The president has promoted an unconfirmed New York Post report published last week that cites an email in which an official from Ukrainian gas company Burisma thanked Hunter Biden, who served on the company’s board, for arranging for him to meet Joe Biden during a 2015 visit to Washington. The Biden campaign has rejected Trump’s assertion of wrongdoing and noted that Biden’s schedule did not show a meeting with the Burisma official. Some former national security officials and other experts said the episode raised multiple red flags of a possible foreign disinformation effort, especially given the involvement of Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, and Giuliani’s active role in promoting an anti-Biden narrative on Ukraine. But John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, dismissed that disinformation theory. And the FBI appeared to endorse Ratcliffe’s position in a letter to a Senate committee that had requested information on a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden. Trump’s attacks on the Biden family have been relentless, including his efforts to get Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, which led to Trump’s impeachment. It’s part of a determined, yet so-far-unsuccessful effort to drive up his opponent’s negatives, as he did with Hillary Clinton four years ago. Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said, “Trump is still the political outsider, while Biden is the ultimate insider. We now know that Biden allowed his son to sell access to him while he was vice president.” While Biden will defend his own record and his son, aides have said, he hopes to focus on making the case that Trump is unfit for office and let the nation down during a confluence of crises. “He knows that people want to hear about how we’re going to help working families get through the end of the month and pay the rent,” his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, said Wednesday in North Carolina. “That’s what people care about, and one of the things I love about Joe Biden — he doesn’t take on or talk about other people’s kids.” The one-two punch of the first debate and the president’s three-day hospital stint after contracting COVID-19 rattled his base of support and triggered alarm among Republicans who fear the White House and Senate could be slipping away. The initial debate was the most tumultuous in modern history, with a belligerent tone that was persistent and somehow fitting for what has been an extraordinarily ugly campaign. Amid heated clashes over the pandemic, the Supreme Court, and the integrity of the election itself, Trump refused to condemn white supremacists who have supported him, telling one such group known as the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” The two men frequently talked over each other with Trump interrupting, nearly shouting, so often that Biden eventually snapped at him, “Will you shut up, man?” Aides have urged Trump, who has skipped debate prep, to show some restraint this time, allowing Biden to speak more and get himself in trouble with verbal gaffes and lapses. But the president has made no promises. “Some people think, ‘Let him talk,’ because he loses his train (of thought), he just loses it and he doesn’t speak the train of thought,” Trump said in a town hall discussion taped at the White House Rose Garden and aired by Sinclair Broadcast Group on Wednesday evening. “But we’ll see what happens. I mean, you will have to be there.” It was two days after the first debate in Cleveland when Trump tested positive for the coronavirus. The White House has refused to reveal when the president had last tested negative before the debate, raising questions as to whether he was already infected when he took the stage. After the diagnosis, the Commission on Presidential Debates ruled that the second debate, which was to have been held last week, be virtual. Trump balked, leading to the cancellation of the debate and the two men holding dueling town halls instead, speaking at the same time more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) apart. On the debate stage Wednesday, two large plexiglass shields had been put in place in front of the candidates’ lecterns. On Thursday night, in an effort to curtail interruptions, Trump and Biden will each have
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White House officials to kick off big Donald Trump impeachment week
Two top national security aides who listened to President Donald Trump’s July call with Ukraine’s president are preparing to testify Tuesday at House impeachment hearings as the inquiry reaches deeper into the White House. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, an Army officer at the National Security Council, and Jennifer Williams, his counterpart at Vice President Mike Pence’s office, say they had concerns as Trump spoke on July 25 with the newly elected Ukraine president about political investigations into Joe Biden. After they appear Tuesday morning, the House will hear in the afternoon from former NSC official Timothy Morrison and Kurt Volker, the former Ukraine special envoy. In all, nine current and former U.S. officials are testifying as the House’s impeachment inquiry accelerates. Democrats say Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate his Democratic rivals as he withheld U.S. military aid Ukraine needed to resist Russian aggression may be grounds for removing the 45th president. Trump says he did no such thing and the Democrats just want him gone. Vindman and the other witnesses have testified in earlier, closed-door sessions. Their depositions have been publicly released, and they’ll face direction questions from lawmakers on Tuesday. “I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen,” said Vindman, a decorated Iraq War veteran. He said there was “no doubt” what Trump wanted from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. It wasn’t the first time Vindman, a 20-year military officer, was alarmed over the administration’s push to have Ukraine investigate Democrats, he testified. Earlier, during an unsettling July 10 meeting at the White House, Ambassador Gordon Sondland told visiting Ukraine officials that they would need to “deliver” before next steps, which was a meeting Zelenskiy wanted with Trump, the officer testified. “He was talking about the 2016 elections and an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma,” Vindman testified, referring to the gas company in Ukraine where Hunter Biden served on the board. “The Ukrainians would have to deliver an investigation into the Bidens,” he said. “There was no ambiguity.” On both occasions, Vindman said, he took his concerns about the shifting Ukraine policy to the lead counsel at the NSC, John Eisenberg. Williams, a longtime State Department official who is detailed to Pence’s national security team, said she too had concerns during the phone call, which the aides monitored as is standard practice. When the White House produced a rough transcript later that day, she put it in the vice president’s briefing materials. “I just don’t know if he read it,” Williams testified in a closed-door House interview. Pence’s role throughout the impeachment inquiry has been unclear, and the vice president’s aide is sure to be questioned by lawmakers looking for answers. Trump has already attacked Williams, associating her with “Never Trumpers,” even though there is no indication the career State Department official has shown any partisanship. The president wants to see a robust defense by his GOP allies on Capitol Hill, but so far so far Republicans have offered a changing strategy as the fast-moving probe spills into public view. They’re expected to mount a more aggressive attack on the witnesses as they try to protect Trump. In particular, Republicans are expected to try to undercut Vindman, suggesting he reported his concerns outside his chain of command, which would have been Morrison, not the NSC lawyer. Under earlier questioning, Republicans wanted Vindman to disclose who else he may have spoken to about his concerns, as the GOP inch closer to publicly naming the still anonymous whistleblower whose report sparked the inquiry. GOP Sen. Ron Johnson, who was deeply involved in other White House meetings about Ukraine, offered a sneak preview of this strategy late Monday when he compared Vindman, a Purple Heart veteran, to the “bureaucrats” who “never accepted Trump as legitimate.” “They react by leaking to the press and participating in the ongoing effort to sabotage his policies and, if possible, remove him from office.” It is entirely possible that Vindman fits this profile, said Johnson, Republican-Wisconsin. The White House has instructed officials not to appear, and most have received congressional subpoenas to compel their testimony. The witnesses are testifying under penalty of perjury, and Sondland already has had to amend his earlier account amid contradicting testimony from other current and former U.S. officials. Sondland, the wealthy donor whose routine boasting about his proximity to Trump has brought the investigation to the president’s doorstep, is set to testify Wednesday. Others have testified that he was part of a shadow diplomatic effort with the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, outside of official channels that raised alarms. Morrison has referred to Burisma as a “bucket of issues” — the Bidens, Democrats, investigations — he had tried to “stay away” from. Sondland met with a Zelenskiy aide on the sidelines of a Sept. 1 gathering in Warsaw, and Morrison, who was watching the encounter from across the room, testified that the ambassador told him moments later he pushed the Ukrainian for the Burisma investigation as a way for Ukraine to gain access to the military funds. Volker provided investigators with a package of text messages with Sondland and another diplomat, William Taylor, the charge d’affaires in Ukraine, who grew alarmed at the linkage of the investigations to the aid. Taylor, who testified publicly last week, called that “crazy.” A wealthy hotelier who donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, Sondland is the only person interviewed to date who had direct conversations with the president about the Ukraine situation. Morrison said Sondland and Trump had spoken about five times between July 15 and Sept. 11 — the weeks that $391 million in U.S. assistance was withheld from Ukraine before it was released. Trump has said he barely knows Sondland. The committee will also hear on Wednesday from Laura Cooper, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, and David Hale, a State Department official. On Thursday, David Holmes, a State Department official in Kyiv, and Fiona Hill, a former top NSC staff member for Europe and Russia, will
