Bill Barr Gonna Unmask The Obamagates For Trump, Because That's What Daddy Wants

Errand boy does errand.

Attorney General Please-Sir-May-I-Lick-Another strikes again!

Justice Department spokesperson Kerri Kupec announced Wednesday night on the Hannity TV show that Bill Barr has appointed yet another US attorney to do Donald Trump's dirty work, investigating the investigators who caught Trump and/or his associates redhanded, committing various crimes.

[Kupec] said the attorney general had tasked John Bash, the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Texas, to examine the practice of "unmasking," which many Republicans charge was abused by the previous administration to unfairly target people close to Trump.

"The attorney general determined that certain aspects of unmasking needed to be reviewed," Kupec said. "We know that unmasking inherently isn't wrong, but . . . can be problematic."

Sure, you betcha, we bet Bill Barr found something that is very problematic (for his boss, the man he serves as de facto personal and private lawyer).

 Politico:  

Bash will be "looking specifically at episodes both before and after the election," Kupec said. "The frequency, who was unmasking whom, all of these circumstances and events can shed light and give us a better understanding of what happened with respect to President Trump, his campaign and, of course, what happened after he was elected, as well," she added.

In other words, Bash will be investigating OBAMAGATE! which was the BIGGEST CRIME! and you know what it is, because it is OBAMAGATE!

We will always read that as OBAMAGATE SMELLS LIKE POTATOES!

Anyway, Bash is a Trump appointee, so you can just assume he knows what his real job is here.

As we have explained one-thousand fucking times, most recently right here, and going all the way back to 2017, the "unmasking" non-scandal is bullshit. Trumpers are just furious that confessed criminal Michael Flynn got caught whispering sweet nothings about sanctions relief to the Russian ambassador during the transition, then subsequently got caught lying to the FBI about it. "Unmasking," no matter how hard Devin Nunes has fucked that chicken in the past, is not an improper act.

It's really simple: When a foreign actor under American surveillance gets picked up talking to an American — in Flynn's case about sanctions relief for Russia, which President Obama was in the process of punishing right that very second for attacking our election — the White House has every right to ask "Hey, who is that American?" Of course, as Wonkette recently noted, of all the "unmaskings" where Flynn's name came up, the Russian ambassador stuff constituted only a small part, because, as we know, fucker was foreign-agenting   all over the damn place .

Was the Obama administration targeting Flynn , and thereby targeting Trump? No, because he had to be "unmasked," which means by definition the Obama administration didn't know who the fuck he was . It's not former national security advisor Susan Rice's fault if every other time she did a routine unmasking request, it turned out to be a Trump idiot conducting secret shadow foreign policy with an American adversary.

But that's the point of Barr's new bullshit investigation. They want to make a crime out of catching Trump and his associates committing crimes. It's very Kremlin-y!

By the way, a reminder of how often "unmasking" happens:

According to the DNI, NSA received these amounts of SIGINT "unmasking" requests per year: 2016: 9200 2017: 9500 20… https://t.co/85wIxpK3st

— John Schindler (@John Schindler) 1589292217.0 

They do this THOUSANDS OF TIMES per year, and most of the time, it's no big deal. (By the by, it looks like the Trump administration did it a lot more than usual in 2018, and almost twice as much as Obama in 2016. Wonder why! )

And remember, unmasking is not the same as leaking, no matter how much Republicans want you to conflate the two in your mind. Unmasking only tells the government official asking for the information which American was involved in whichever foreign fuckery they're looking at that day, which is very different from leaking that intel to a reporter.

Let's step back quickly and remember the context in which all of this is happening.

Bill Barr has been appointing US attorneys pretty much every time he takes a shit, to find new ways to investigate the investigators who have this pesky habit of catching Trump people in flagrante delicto . To review:

1. There is the Durham investigation, AKA "the biggest bullshit of them all," where John Durham, US attorney for Connecticut, is on some sort of Carmen Sandiego-on-bath-salts adventure with Bill Barr, traversing the globe to find the REAL Deep State killers who started the Russia WITCH HUNT! Barr recently said Durham probably won't investigate Barack Obama or Joe Biden personally, probably , as if it's even normal for him to suggest something like that, even if just to deny it.

2. There is the thing where Barr asked Jeffrey Jensen, US attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, to please drop everything and check for the millionth time to see if MICHAEL FLYNN WUZ FRAMEDDDEDED!1111!!GHAZI! And surprise, the Justice Department decided he TOTALLY WUZ! (You know, because a man who's held a clearance as long as Flynn is too stupid to know we have the Russian ambassador under surveillance, and that lying to the FBI is bad.)

3. There is the Pittsburgh Thingie, where Scott Brady, US attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, was given the very important task of handling "Ukraine evidence" on the Bidens provided by "public" (Rudy Giuliani). Of course, everything "public" (Rudy Giuliani) has to share about the Bidens in Ukraine is a conspiracy theory, some of it from the Kremlin, and has been roundly debunked. But sure, OK!

4. And then, the thing where Bill Barr cut off the dick of the Southern District of New York (SDNY), by HEREBY DECLARING that Richard Donoghue, US attorney for the Eastern District of New York (EDNY), was the only one allowed to investigate real crimes involving Ukraine. You know, all that shit SDNY was reportedly investigating Giuliani for. Haven't heard much about that, have you? Maybe it's because Barr shoved it all across the river to the EDNY, for the purpose of burying it and shielding Trump, Giuliani, and their associates from scrutiny.

And now this new guy will try to rustle up some uNmAsKinG cRiMEssssZzsSSzghAZI!

This is also happening as Congress is having just a bizarre amount of trouble reauthorizing the FISA foreign spying program, because of how Donald Trump keeps sticking his Mario Kart dick in the middle of the situation and blowing up the bill his own Justice Department negotiated.

Oh, and in case you hadn't heard, as he was walking out the door, Ric Grenell, who served as the (acting) director of national intelligence for a few terrible minutes, declassified transcripts of the conversations between former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Michael Flynn, handing the hot potato turd of deciding whether to release them to newly confirmed DNI John Ratcliffe. It was unclear why they hid all that for so long, but maybe this new Bash investigation is Barr's way of softening the blow, whenever the transcripts come out and we see how awful they really are.

So what does all this mean? It means Bill Barr is still a low-rent, empty Funyuns bag broken truck stop condom dispenser version of Roy Cohn for Donald Trump, and he always will be.

[ Washington Post / Politico ]

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