{"id":176855,"date":"2020-03-05T20:05:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-06T01:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/03\/05\/oh-snap-4\/"},"modified":"2020-03-05T20:05:00","modified_gmt":"2020-03-06T01:05:00","slug":"oh-snap-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/03\/05\/oh-snap-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Oh Snap!"},"content":{"rendered":"

It looks like a federal judge, a George W. Bush appointee and former head of the FISA court, no less, is calling out Attorney General William Barr’s dishonest handling of the Mueller report<\/a>, and he is demanding an unredacted copy for him to review.<\/p>\n

It is not often that you find a judge using words like “distorted” and “misleading” to describe the behavior of the Attorney General of the United States of America:<\/p>\n

A federal judge on Thursday sharply criticized Attorney General William P. Barr\u2019s handling of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, saying that Mr. Barr put forward a \u201cdistorted\u201d and \u201cmisleading\u201d account of its findings and lacked credibility on the topic.<\/span>

<\/span>Mr. Barr could not be trusted, Judge Reggie B. Walton said, citing \u201cinconsistencies\u201d between the attorney general\u2019s statements about the report when it was secret and its actual contents that turned out to be more damaging to President Trump. Mr. Barr\u2019s \u201clack of candor\u201d called into question his \u201ccredibility and, in turn, the department\u2019s\u201d assurances to the court, Judge Walton said.<\/span>

<\/span>The judge ordered the Justice Department to privately show him the portions of the report that were censored in the publicly released version so he could independently verify the justifications for those redactions. The ruling came in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking a full-text version of the report.<\/span>

<\/span>The differences between the report and Mr. Barr\u2019s description of it \u201ccause the court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller report to the contrary,\u201d wrote Judge Walton, an appointee of President George W. Bush.<\/span>

<\/span>Mr. Barr\u2019s public rollout of the Mueller report has been widely criticized. Still, it was striking to see a Republican-appointed federal judge scathingly dissect Mr. Barr\u2019s conduct in a formal judicial ruling and declare that the sitting attorney general had so deceived the American people that he could not trust assertions made by a Justice Department under Mr. Barr\u2019s control.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

William Barr’s behavior is consistent with his behavior over the past 30 years, but, at least until recently, he was consider a respectable member of Washington society.<\/p>\n

We really need to burn the whole of Washington society down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It looks like a federal judge, a George W. Bush appointee and former head of the FISA court, no less, is calling out Attorney General William Barr’s dishonest handling of the Mueller report, and he is demanding an unredacted copy for him to review. It is not often that you find a judge using words …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[368,573,364,387,407,374],"class_list":["post-176855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-corruption","tag-donald-trump","tag-evil","tag-hypocrisy","tag-justice","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176855"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176855\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}