JAMES CAMPION’S REALITY CHECK

William Barr’s criminal syndicate is illustrative of systemic anarchy in what are likely the final days of Trump.


The Justice Department is a sinkhole of criminal activity and another miserable stain on this throwaway presidency. In a long line of Attorney’s General that have crawled the gutters of Washington’s most rancid sewers, William Barr has become its Lizard King. The President and his bag man don’t even care anymore–if they ever did– who knows it. The bell is tolling for El Douche and he chooses to go out by running this country like some half-assed mafia, and there isn’t a fucking thing this toothless Congress will do about it. And they know it. “Fuck America,” Barr says in the darkness of his office, his shirt opened to his sweating, bulbous stomach, hiding the grip he holds on his bottle of cheap mezcal. “This is Trump Enterprises,” he burps. “And I have the platinum card.”

Donald Trump’s AG has always been a cheap hack and a backroom sneak–Barr infamously prompted George H. W. Bush’s pardon of Ronald Reagan’s convicted criminals in the sordid Iran-Contra affair and continued his deep state career working back channels to meliorate sentences or disrupt investigations against the most heinous anti-American thugs in the annals of this nation as a matter of course. Barr is thick with Washington D.C. shit, making him the perfect ally for this bleating troll of a president, who has openly turned the rule law into blood sport to better feed his insatiable vanities.

In the past year, Barr has flouted the very foundation of law because in the certain circles Barr and Trump are the law. There is no other explanation for the bizarre behavior coming from the DOJ, which this week was yanked further into the open as Aaron Zelinsky, an assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland formerly detailed to the Russia investigation by special prosecutor Robert Mueller, told the House Judiciary Committee that prosecutors involved in the criminal trial of Trump’s aide and political bottom-feeder, Roger Stone, experienced “heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice” to give Stone “a break” by requesting a lighter sentence. U.S. attorney general Michael B. Mukasey and former deputy attorney general Donald Ayer followed Zelinsky by stating under oath that several questionable orders from the attorney general has led him to conclude that Barr “poses the greatest threat in my lifetime to our rule of law.”

While the Stone case was being debated in Congress, a divided federal appeals court ordered the dismissal of the case against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about illegally negotiating with Russia before Trump was even sworn in. Barr undermined the case his own department was making against an admitted guilty defendant in the same clumsy way he had injected the DOJ into the Stone case, which was only a cause célèbre because he was Trump’s buddy. No competent lawyer in the country could fathom any other reason why the Attorney General of the United States would deign to be involved in a case being brought forth by local jurisdiction or intervene in a federal one against a defendant his own boss initially watched spin in the wind.

A poignant image posted this week by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon on Instagram

This banana republic behavior began in 2017, after Trump fired the FBI director to stunt the investigation into his campaign’s myriad of weird connections to several Russians after they had infiltrated the U.S. presidential election. After denying this ever happened, despite intelligence evidence to the contrary, the president was known to bray, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” to anyone who would listen when his then attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from any role in the Justice Department Russia investigation. Unbeknownst to our game show president, but not a lifelong politician like Sessions, the FBI is part of the Justice Department not the legal counsel for him.

For narrative clarification, Roy Cohn is generally accepted as one of the worst human beings to ever infect this planet–a treasonous murderer, among other sundry hobbies–long before he became Trump’s mentor in 1970s New York. A disgraced lawyer, Cohn was an aging homophobic queen jacked up on so much cocaine he could barely form sentences when he met Trump, but his hate and rage turned The Donald on. This made sense. Cohn had a lot of Trump’s daddy in him–a vengeful racist, anti-Semitic, paranoiac, whose hatred was outweighed only by an acute self-loathing. This is what Trump wanted for an attorney general, and so he turned to Bill Barr when Sessions was relentlessly ridiculed and sent packing into the gory afterbirth of history. Like all of Trump’s dismissals, when Cohn died ravaged by AIDS in 1986, the future president ignored his calls and publicly denied even knowing him.

 
Bully. Coward. Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn, a new documentary from HBO, analyzes life and times of the controversial New York attorney and mentor to Donald Trump.