Hey Jim Jordan, We Got Your Weaponized FBI Right Here, His Name Is Bill Barr

You know, if you have time between pretending Merrick Garland is throwing antivaxxers in a gulag and telling lies about Twitter and the First Amendment.

The crazy caucus squeezed Kevin McCarthy's balls pretty hard during the hostage negotiation over the House speaker's gavel. (Hey, man, whatever you're into!) And one of the things that popped out during their 15 rounds of light bondage was a Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

By which they do not mean the routine brutalization of Black Americans by law enforcement officers.

What they mean is every fool theory about the Deep State vomited out on Telegram and amplified by Tucker Carlson for the MAGA masses. They want to rehash the stupid shit Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss have been sock puppeting out with Elon Musk's hands up their asses. They want to pretend it was scandalous for the Justice Department to treat threats to teachers and schools by anti-vaxx terrorists as actual terrorism. They want to lie that the Capitol Riot was instigated by FBI plants, and that the insurrectionists in jail for trying to overthrow the government are actually brave patriots, or tourists, or First Amendment political prisoners. In short, they want to pretend that white Christian conservatives are being victimized by a government which has done nothing but privilege their interests for 250 years, and they just extorted McCarthy to secure staff, funding, and subpoena power on par with the January 6 Select Committee to do it.

Which is ironic, because we just spent four years watching Trump and his cronies weaponize the FBI to target his enemies and help his friends, and the GOP doesn't seem to give a rat's ass about it.

We saw Attorney General Bill Barr sic riot police on racial justice protestors based on blatant lies about Antifa supersoldiers flying around the country in uniform to wreak havoc. We saw him break longstanding DOJ protocol and authorize investigations of non-existent election fraud before the 2020 results had been certified — after spending months pretending that mail-in ballots were rife with fraud. We saw him lie about the Mueller Report. We saw him attempt to ratfuck the Roger Stone prosecution, successfully ratfuck the Mike Flynn prosecution, and do his damnedest to blow up the Michael Cohen plea deal. We saw him go to the mat to try to prosecute former FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe for the crime of being mean to Donald Trump. We saw him try to Saturday Night Massacre the US Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York to protect Trump and his pals. FFS, this asshole only closed the Clinton email investigation in October of 2019, more than six years after Hillary Clinton left the State Department.

And that was before last week's New York Times story about all the ways Bill Barr and Special Counsel John Durham tried to frame the FBI, Hillary Clinton, and — when everything else failed — George Soros for the supposed crime of investigating Donald Trump's ties to a Russian effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Rep. Jim Jordan wants to talk about weaponization of the Justice Department? Here it is, asshole.

Barr announced publicly that there was something untoward about the origins of the Russia investigation before he even opened the Special Counsel inquiry. When the Justice Department Inspector General found the opposite, Barr and Durham leaned on him to change his conclusions, then put out statements undercutting his report.

When Barr and Durham failed to find any evidence of their public accusations, they shifted to the rightwing conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton somehow tricked the FBI into investigating Trump. This required them to pretend that the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane probe, which was opened in July of 2016 after coffee boy dipshit George Papadopoulos bragged to an Australian diplomat that Russian state actors were going to start releasing hacked information to harm Hillary Clinton's campaign, was actually based on DNC lawyer Michael Sussmann's September report to the FBI about the mysterious pings between Trump Tower and a sanctioned Russian bank. But denying linear time is no problem for this dynamic duo!

Durham was able to secure a guilty plea from one low level line attorney for falsifying an email, but his vaunted prosecutions of Sussmann and Russia analyst Igor Danchenko went down in flames. But in the meantime, Durham relied on an extremely dubious Russian memo which cited supposedly hacked communications between Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and an employee at the Open Society Foundation (which is funded by Soros) regarding a supposed promise by then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch promising that the investigation of Clinton's emails wouldn't get out of hand. When Durham couldn't get a warrant because his evidence was so shaky, he just used a grand jury subpoena to extort the communications — which showed that he was once again going down a blind alley because none of that shit ever happened. 

Let us all take a moment to appreciate the irony of Durham and Barr trying to pretend that the FBI was too nice to Clinton about her emails (or literally anything else), at a time when it was also investigating the Trump campaign and managed not to hold press conferences about it every other week. And while we're conjuring Alanis, note that Durham and Barr accidentally kicked loose some dirt on Trump when they were traveling around England and Italy, shouting at our allies to confess to trying to screw the Trump campaign. Of course, they failed to disclose that one, too.

In short, the Justice Department has indeed been weaponized against the president's political enemies, but we're pretty sure that Jim Jordan won't be looking into any of that, although, as the Post 's Greg Sargent points out , the Senate Judiciary Committee might do it. But over in the House, Ol' Rasslin' Jim is going to pretend to work himself into a lather about nonsense. Of course, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries isn't going to cede the field to Republicans, so we'll be on the spot to factcheck in real time. Because unlike Kevin McCarthy, the Democratic leader is not a weak-kneed idiot. So, there's that, anyway.

[ WaPo / NYT ]

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