Rudy Investigaton: Does it Cover Barr and Trump?
'No-One is Above the Law.'
Bill Barr is still the Attorney General. His resignation does not take effect until December 23rd. Last week he published a puff-piece interview with one of his most embarrassing defenders, the terminally wrong Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal, and it was pitched exactly where you might expect: he resigned, he “upset both sides”, he was “impartial”, there was “one standard of justice”. Don’t be fooled; this is pure defensive chaff from Barr, who doesn’t want to be prosecuted. You can also put the ‘Russia did SolarWinds’ and ‘No Special Counsel on Hunter Biden / The Election’ straight into the “please don’t hurt me” basket.
Barr’s pronounements are also designed to deflect attention from the unhelpful comments made recently by, and about, Barr’s allies, which cast a light on future criminal liability for Bill Barr.
As I have reported before, Bill Barr undertook a breathtaking amount of obstruction of justice and attempts to expose classified information on behalf of his ultimate client, not Donald Trump, but Russia.
Last night, Rachel Maddow and NBC reported that the SDNY investigation into Rudy Giuliani was “very active” and “just ramping up”. No sh*t Sherlock, one might be tempted to say. But the actual reporting in their story points elsewhere than just Mr. Guiliani.
The Feds have already indicted three of Rudy’s best buddies, and declared the Ukrainian Andrii Derkach “an agent of the Russian Federation”. It’s safe to assume that there were warrants on all of these people, and of course, anything Giuliani may have said to them is admissible “incidental collection”, so in terms of Rudy’s collusion with Russia and financial criminality, it’s also pretty safe to assume that prosecutors already have more than enough to go after him.
The SDNY needs Washington's approval before its prosecutors can ask a judge to sign a search warrant for materials that may be protected by attorney-client privilege
Rudy’s clients, of course, include Donald Trump. And those emails, once prosecutors are able to look at them, are likely to include evidence of criminal obstruction and collusion by Bill Barr, too. Barr joined Guiliani’s meeting at Justice, and tried to cover it up. Furthermore, the meeting was hosted by Brian Benczowski, Barr’s former colleague who also worked for Alfa Bank. CNN reported:
The Giuliani meeting at the Justice Department in September became public months ago in the wake of the arrest of two Giuliani associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were working on Giuliani's Ukraine mission for the President.
Brian Benczkowski, assistant attorney general for the criminal division, issued a public statement at the time expressing regret for holding the meeting and saying he wouldn't have met with Trump's personal lawyer had he known about Giuliani's role in the ongoing investigation.
Barr visited SDNY the same day that Rudy’s goons Parnas and Fruman were arrested at the airport - almost certainly to lobby that they not be arrested. Just as when Barr tried to save Halkbank, he failed.
And Barr’s involvement with Guiliani’s Russian intelligence buddies aren’t everything. They are just one step in a very long story of Barr’s Russia-friendly actions under Trump. Let’s start with this humdinger of a twitter thread by Secretary of State and former Director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo:
Oh? News to you? In fact, Bill “Deep State” Barr’s secret squirrel time at the CIA was semi-revealed in May. Barr had served as a completely undiscosed ‘Advisory Board’ member to Pompeo, a man so untrusted by career agents at the FBI and CIA that they gave him the informal codename ‘Sunflower’ to discuss his criminality. It was said that it was ‘undisclosed’. Pompeo, during 2016, personally spread Russian propaganda from Wikileaks.
In April 2017, while Bill Barr was still a secret member of Pompeo’s advisory committee, he gave his first remarks as Director of the CIA on Wikileaks, which were completely misinterpreted by America’s somewhat useless-when-it-comes-to-Russia press corps:
This was reported by a breathless press, and fanned with fauxtrage from Assange, as if Mike Pompeo had been very critical of Wikileaks, or had said something tough or difficult. In fact, what Pompeo was doing was trying to make excuses for Russia. In calling Wikileaks a “non-state” hostile intelligence service, he was saying, probably at Bill Barr’s behest - Wikileaks is not Russia.
But Wikileaks, in fact, IS Russia, and Mueller has a case pending to that effect under seal in the Eastern District of Virginia (as I have exclusively reported).
Now let’s look a little more at what Pompeo says about Barr. Don’t let this get lost in the noise:
Pompeo, in the preceding tweet, said that he supported Barr to become AG. In this tweet, he pretty much admits that what he and Barr evidently cooked up at the CIA in April of 2017 was a plan to make sure that ‘colluding with Wikileaks’ wasn’t seen as ‘colluding with Russia’. But Mueller brought the case anyway, and the plan is going to fail.
Some part of this plan was on display in Barr’s notorious press conference, where he stated that Mueller had investigated collusion with Wikileaks but that this “wasn’t a crime”. Yet Barr’s own mouth condemned him. Clearly, Mueller thought it was a crime, or he would not have investigated it. And since it’s not a crime to collude with mere publishers, by definition, Mueller’s team thought that Wikileaks were much more than that.
Everywhere we look, we see evidence Bill Barr is directly colluding with the Russian state. And, if we look hard enough, we can also see hints he’s being investigated for it.