Posted on 05/08/2020 5:57:24 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
In an exclusive interview with CBS News senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge, Barr dismissed the notion from critics that he is doing the bidding of Mr. Trump.
Catherine Herridge: The last thing most Americans remember about General Flynn is that he was fired. And that he admitted lying to the FBI. Does the fact remain that he lied?
Attorney General William Barr: Well, you know, people sometimes plead to things that turn out not to be crimes. ... And the Department of Justice is not persuaded that this was material to any legitimate counterintelligence investigation. So it was not a crime.
When a special counsel report was released last year, you were accused by critics of putting your thumb on the scale in the president's favor. Are you doing the president's bidding in General Flynn's case?
No, I'm doing the law's bidding. I'm doing my duty under the law, as I see it.
You know you're going to take a lot of incoming ... for this decision. Are you prepared for that?
Yea, I'm prepared for that. I also think it's sad that nowadays these partisan feelings are so strong that people have lost any sense of justice.
What should Americans take away from your actions in the Flynn case today?
I was concerned people were feeling there were two standards of justice in this country. ... I wanted to make sure that we restore confidence in the system.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
The American public’s faith in justice will be restored when we see some arrests, convictions, & prosecutions of the guilty in this case & others. Some of this is long past due.
Barr better step up. Either he takes out some coupsters or they will take him out.
So is Mrs. Bill Clinton, who gave Secret and Top Secret memos to the Russians (and anybody else who wanted them).
I’m hitting the like button on your post.
Yes, I agree with that, but I don’t think my faith in the FBI can be restored.
The American KGB has to go.
In rejecting Flynn, I think Trump was attempting to show how honest and transparent he was, and that he would reject wrongdoing no matter who did it. For some reason Trump seems to trust the career bureaucrats of DC, as we have seen recently in his permitting two Federal medical bureaucracy hacks to dictate his actions as President. I thought he was getting less naive about this - and particularly about trusting anybody held over from Obama - but I guess not.
At least he seems to have awakened on the Flynn issue.
Flynn was set up by the FBI and prosecuted by the Special Counsel for a perjury trap.
What Barr fails to mention, and it is in the transcripts released yesterday, is that the DOJ and Intel community set him up with the Trump administration also.
Trump fired Flynn after these same bad actors came to the White House and said “Pence lied on a Sunday News show appearance” because your DNI said something different on a transcript (that was leaked). This was part of the set-up. “They” drove a wedge and Spicer unwittingly reinforced it and the media had it, DOJ told White House Counsel that Flynn was under investigation, and we had the first manufactured media scandal of the Trump administration.
Read the transcript of Sally Yates that was released yesterday. DOJ, FBI, and the intel community played a game of “gotcha” based on statements by Pence, used criminal leaks to push it all to the media, played the same game with Spicer, and the new administration and Chief of Staff were dealing with the first scandal. The acting AG comes to you and says your DNI contradicted your VP and Press Secretary on a call with the Russian Ambassador and by the way, he is under investigation.....
It was a new administration and they had no reason to suspect that the “professionals” would play the dirtiest trick in US history. They were caught flat-footed and it has been dirty games every since. It takes awhile for every administration to find their footing and speak with one voice, but they pushed a story of confusion within the Trump administration (Comey’s statement about disorganization make more sense now?) and put the credibility of Pence/Spicer against the credibility of Flynn who “wink wink, nod nod, was under investigation.”
Trump acted to protect his administration from this unexpected twist and the credibility of Pence. In hindsight, I bet he wishes he had not, but even he has admitted to being naive’ about how dirty the game in DC was.
Remember the note, “we prosecute him or get him fired.” They got him fired. The prosecution did not happen until the Special Counsel began their persecution.
Comey confirmed this. The FBI notes confirmed this. Sally Yates transcript confirms this. Yates went and set the hook for Flynn to be fired in the same fashion that Comey briefed the President about the dossier to create the hook for CNN/Buzzfeed to run with the leak in the news. The leak was already made that what Pence said contradicted Flynn and they reinforced it by asking Spicer a “gotcha” question to further the narrative.
Think about it and you will see it makes sense. They ran this playbook for the intended result.
Simply put, the FBI lied to Flynn in an attempt to get Flynn to lie to them.
Never ever speak to an FBI agent about anything.
Odious indeed. Courts have found that police at various levels can legally lie to those they deal with. That deference to their position that you note would make the servants greater than the masters.
Trump was on Fox and Friends this morning and admitted he had no idea how deep and evil the swamp was when he first got to Washington. In hindsight he appears to regret firing Flynn.
He also mentioned the rat Jeff Sessions, which he still seems to believe was his biggest mistake of all. If Sessions would have acted on the tipoff from the NSA’s Rogers that Trump was being spied on, instead of allowing a special counsel to be setup to investigate Trump, instead, non of this would have happened.
As Trump has said many other times, all Sessions would have had to have done is to announce “I was in the campaign so I know there was no collusion, but I will be investigating what my department has been up to” then all the “crossfire’ investigations would have been exposed way back then.
No one, including Barr, is saying Flynn didn't lie.
“I was concerned people were feeling there were two standards of justice in this country.”
Not to be critical, but the answer I would have preferred would have been the reason for dropping the charges.
And he could have expanded on “There were two standards of justice in this country”.
Excellent point. Despite all their best efforts Including all the witetaps, the testimony released yesterday revealed that all the coup plotters really had legally in their hand was a falsified 302 against Flynn. Once that was leveraged to get Flynn fired, blood was in the water and the media went into a frenzy. Sessions should have come in and taken control of the situation as the new AG the DOJ they all worked for.
Instead, Sessions succumbed to career DOJ officials, against Trump’s requests, that ended up in the special counsel appointment which was a bonafide of the ninth degree investigation with no limits of Trump, instead of the perpetrators. Was Sessions bribed, complicit, or simply ignorant is one of the last remaining stones to overturn.
I remember when it happened. I thought to myself, so what if he lied to Pence. What business is it of Yates. Now we know, she had no business..
Sessions was weak. He was so wrapped in his own “honor” and conditioned like the rest of the GOPe in the Senate to kowtowing to the media. He had no spine.
He came in and all the professionals below him told him he had to recuse himself because he met the Russian Ambassador. BS. Trump said it this morning on his phone call to Fox and Friends. Everyone had met the guy, had dinner with him, etc etc. There was no reason to recuse, but he did and the soft coup, leaks, and persecution continued with Rosenstein at the helm who selected Mueller because he did not like the President and the media told him when there was NO PREDICATE crime. Nothing.
In the end, of all the bad actors and despite all the games, Sessions might be the most responsible. Remember all his promises to investigate leaks? How did that turn out? Nothing other than a slap on the wrist for the Senate staffer.
Jeff Sessions remains the biggest disappointment of the Trump administration for me. He cost Trump 2 years of his administration for NOTHING. They had NOTHING.
Another great post, thanks. It all seems so ignorant and pathetic which is why the question of blackmail needs to be raised, again, as it was never answered. I just put up a new thread regarding Trump’s comments on FOX if you’re interested.
So then what was done TO him is a crime?
BS
Sanctimonious self righteous conservatives are the reason the conservative movement is not truly successful. America is more important than your trivial self esteem
You're absolutely right. Well said.
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