Yay, It's Bill Barr's Super Cool Global Carmen-Sandiego-On-Bath-Salts Tour For Trump!
2016 will never end.
All these fuckers are fucked. Trump, the big man, is fucked. Rudy Giuliani is fucked. Mike Pompeo is fucked. And in this post, we'd like to talk about how Attorney General Bill Barr is fucked, and how . The main thing you need to know is that Barr has been collecting so many frequent flyer points in his service to Trump, traveling the globe to ask nicely/demand all kinds of countries help him "investigate the investigators" in order to rewrite the history of the 2016 election so it doesn't look like a hostile foreign power (Russia) stole an election and installed its chosen candidate (Trump).
But why? Well, for one thing, his world travels seem to be an effort to create a new anti-Mueller Report to take the place of the real Mueller Report, which is weird since Barr said the Mueller Report totally exonerated Trump. (Did not exonerate.)
Monday night, during the evening onslaught of breaking news, the Washington Post reported that Barr has just been everywhere and leaned on everyone inappropriately, in order that Dear Leader's wishes might be fulfilled:
Attorney General William P. Barr has held private meetings overseas with foreign intelligence officials seeking their help in a Justice Department inquiry that President Trump hopes will discredit U.S. intelligence agencies' examination of possible connections between Russia and members of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the matter.
Bill Barr ... is asking other countries ... to help Trump's Department of Justice ... take a living, breathing shit on the American intelligence community and its unanimous determination that Russia ratfucked the election for Trump, and also the conclusion in the Mueller Report that the Trump campaign's response to that was, "It's Shake 'N' Bake! And I helped!"
Remember when we were all like "WTF?" when Barr said back in April that he believes "spying did occur" in the 2016 election, because he believed (or pretended to) the conspiracy theories that Obama People had secretly and illegally spied on the Trump campaign? At the time, it was pretty clear that Barr wanted to do his own counter-investigation to the real investigation, which is why we wrote, "We look forward to the Barr report on exactly what it's like to 'explore' the fever dreams that live inside Devin Nunes's bowels, assuming Barr is able to complete the expedition without getting trampled by cows."
(Sometimes the punchlines of Wonkette jokes that feature Devin Nunes also feature cows. Sometimes. )
Point is, Barr wasn't kiddin'.
More from the Washington Post :
The direct involvement of the nation's top law enforcement official shows the priority Barr places on the investigation being conducted by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, who has been assigned the sensitive task of reviewing U.S. intelligence work surrounding the 2016 election and its aftermath.
Barr's reached out to the Brits, he went to Italy with Durham last week and hit them up for help, not the first time apparently , and oh yeah, they've been up Australia's ass too. All three countries have a thing in common, besides their lovely sea views, and it is that they all feature prominently in Underpants Gnome right-wing conspiracy theories about how ACTUALLY Hillary Clinton conspired with Russia and the Deep State to steal the election from herself so that they could ... (???) ... one day impeach Donald Trump for shits and LOLs? Or something!
In short, it's all about George Papadopoulos. Where did Pap barf secrets to the Australian diplomat Alexander Downer about how Russia had the goods on Hillary Clinton? London. And where did he meet with his mysterious perfesser/possible Russian cut-out Joseph Mifsud, who was telling him Russia had the shit on Hillary? Italy. Refer back to what we said about how Barr is literally investigating Devin Nunes's wet farts right now.
Anyway.
In a recent phone call, Trump urged Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to provide assistance to the ongoing Justice Department inquiry, the people said. Trump made the request at Barr's urging, they said.
"At Barr's urging."
Sometimes Trump starts the conversation during one of his secret phone calls, before the transcript goes in the secret codeword-level classified vault, which houses our nation's most closely guarded secrets and also apparently every single time Trump has committed treason on the phone with a foreign leader. Other times, Barr starts the conversation. Sometimes Trump tells the Ukrainian leader, "Hey my Ukrainian pal! I need you to do a bunch of favors in order to get the military aid that's already been approved. As part of that, Bill Barr is going to call you soon so you can all work together to make up batshit stories about how Hillary's secret server is buried in a rich guy's backyard in Ukraine and how Hillary and Ukraine was the REAL collusion in 2016." (THAT WAS A PARAPHRASE, EVERYONE RELAX.) And sometimes when a limited transcript of that phone call is released, the attorney general claims in response to know nothing about this "Ukraine" business, saying "Ukraine? More like YOU-kraine, am I right? I see what I did there!" (We don't know if Barr said that specifically, but we bet he felt it.)
The White House and the Department of Justice say this is all fine, and that they are investigating the investigators to try to clear Trump's name after the fact, and in the process take a metric fuckton of shits all over the American intelligence community, just like they admitted right out in public months ago:
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said: "I'm old enough to remember when Democrats actually wanted to find out what happened in the 2016 election. The Democrats clearly don't want the truth to come out anymore as it might hurt them politically, but this call relates to a DOJ inquiry publicly announced months ago to uncover exactly what happened. The DOJ simply requested the President provide introductions to facilitate that ongoing inquiry, and he did so, that's all."
Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said: "Mr. Durham is gathering information from numerous sources, including a number of foreign countries. At Attorney General Barr's request, the President has contacted other countries to ask them to introduce the Attorney General and Mr. Durham to appropriate officials."
"See, guys? A lot of times we just do fucked up crime-y shit out in the open."
(Related: GOP Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson just with straight faces wrote a letter to Barr demanding he investigate Hillary Clinton's obvious collusion with Ukraine to steal the election from herself. Not that he wasn't doing that already, allegedly!)
Because all of this is just batfucking crazy and it may be hard to keep up with who's doing what crime for Trump where, we should note here that there are two threads at play, which are related, but not exactly the same. There's what Trump is doing with regard to Ukraine helping him steal the 2020 election, and Rudy Giuliani appears to be the point guy on that. (Also, fucking Fox News lawyers Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing are participating, according to a breaking news scoop which they deny and which was reported ... by Fox News.)
Then there's the effort to rewrite the history of 2016, which involves Ukraine and also all these other countries. Barr is doing this with John Durham, the US attorney he deputized to lead the investigation into the investigators, largely because of Trump's ego and his wounded pride over being a big loser even when he "wins." And wingnuts are obsessed . That's why there are breathless articles in the Wall Street Journal 'seditorial news section right now about "John Durham's Ukrainian leads," written by former AG Michael Mukasey, who just happens to be Rudy Giuliani's former law partner and also the dad of a guy who's representing Trump right now. (We are sure the Journal just forgot to mention!)
And that wang of this -- Barr's wang! -- is related to other 2016-era wangs wingnuts are obsessed with, particularly the upcoming findings of Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who's doing an internal review Trump idiots hope will "prove" that the FBI faked the whole Russia investigation because of BIAAAASSSSSSSS , and also that the FBI acted improperly when it ordered surveillance FOR YEARS on Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page, because of how it had suspected Page of being a Russian intelligence asset FOR YEARS. Oh yeah, and did we mention the State Department is wasting time and taxpayer money investigating HER EMAILS? Yes we did, and here we are mentioning it again. It is fucking Groundhog Day up in here.
But there's probably another reason for this international Carmen Sandiego on Bath Salts escapade Barr is leading, which is Trump's ultimate effort to remove sanctions from Russia imposed by the Obama administration in retaliation for stealing the election and handing it to Trump on a little bitty silver platter small enough for Trump to hold in his mini-paws. Why? Because it is always all about sanctions, it will always all be about sanctions, and Donald Trump's tombstone may literally end up reading, "Still working on those sanctions, Daddy Vladdy, I promise!"
But we will explore how those are probably connected in another post. This post is finished now and ready for you to eat, ENJOY!
[ Washington Post ]
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Is it still really only Tuesday?
Colluding to disprove collusion, brilliant!