Holding William Barr in contempt

[Rvaughn]

[Sandy]

https://www.vox.com/2019/5/8/18536874/c ... lliam-barr

I'm having trouble gathering sympathy for Mr. Barr in accordance with what The Hill piece is trying to spin. He was ordered by subpoena to appear before Congress. He skipped out. They also ordered the full unredacted report and didn't get that. I'm sure that's what they're after, especially since Trump is also trying to stop that by asserting executive privilege. Articles of impeachment were drafted on Nixon for the same thing and he wound up resigning just a few days later.

Without the full, unredacted report, there is no way to know whether Barr lied in his summation of it, or not. There is obviously something in it that Trump does not want known. You don't go to the lengths that the white house has undertaken to try and manipulate the investigation and keep the information out of the public eye if you've behaved and done nothing wrong. And Mueller did not say there wasn't enough evidence on obstruction to charge Trump, he noted that he did not believe a sitting President could be indicted. That Trump obstructed justice is obvious, beginning with the firing of James Comey. If you believe his lies about that, then I'm running a sale for you on oceanfront property in Arizona.

[Rvaughn]

I lean toward the assessment of a law professor whom Congress has called on to testify before it as an expert witness on a number of occasions, over a reporter for Vox. It is not a matter of gathering sympathy for Barr. It is a matter of choosing one's battles.

[KeithE]

[Sandy]

I think the effort that the house committees are making now is leading to a coordinated move to answer the questions left open by the Mueller report and all of these guys will have to show up and testify. What is clear is that Trump and his cronies are pretty sure that if an investigation continues based on what Mueller found, which was exactly the whole point of the investigation, they are going to find out everything they've done. Judging by their stonewalling, the obfuscation of the results of the report to get ahead of it on public opinion by Barr and who they are running around trying to stop from appearing before Congress, it must be pretty bad. I'm sure they have already put it together, they've got the pile of evidence from the Manafort raid and Cohen's office and the redacted report shows a lot more than Barr has alluded to. The only thing the Trump campaign's effort tells me is that the investigation was exactly on the right track and they don't want it to continue because they know where it will go and what it will find.