The Justice Department gave Trump nearly everything he wanted
Trump wanted Barr to hold a press conference to say Trump didn do nuthin.
President Donald Trump asked Attorney General William Barr to hold a news conference clearing him of legal wrongdoing with regard to his phone call pressuring the Ukrainian President to investigate Democrats, a person familiar with the matter tells CNN.
Trump has raised the idea in conversations surrounding the ongoing impeachment inquiry over recent weeks, and has said he thought the idea could help project the message that he hadn’t done anything wrong, the person familiar with the matter said.
Right, because that’s how that works – big honcho guy gets up and says Nobody did nuthin, and that’s the end of it.
In Trump’s dreamworld at least. We’re not quite there yet. The Washington Post says Barr refused.
Trump has brought up Barr’s refusal to aides over the past few weeks and how he wishes the attorney general had held the news conference, Trump advisers told the Post.
Sound familiar?
Even without a news conference from the attorney general, the Justice Department gave the President nearly everything he wanted. In an orchestrated rollout alongside the release of a transcript of Trump’s Ukraine call, the department publicly announced that criminal division prosecutors had found no wrongdoing by the President, at least as it relates to campaign finance law.
The department also released a legal memo on why the intelligence community’s inspector general was not required to turn over a whistleblower complaint to Congress.
Despite efforts to publicly declare the matter as case closed, it is clear that the Ukraine interactions and the role of Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal lawyer, are still at the heart of an investigation led by federal prosecutors in New York.
Because we don’t yet have a complete autocracy.
Very easy not to see the mess under the sofa if you only look under the bed.
The Central Park Five can just get its own Justice Department.
Well, it sort of worked with the Mueller Report. Barr released his bullshit summary, which tinged the coverage from the outside, and then when the actual report was couched in careful, restrained, lawyerly language instead of “HOLY FUCKING SHIT THIS GUY’S A CRIMINAL,” the general public just shrugged. Democrats took another swing at it by trying to get Mueller to say in testimony what he wouldn’t write in his report, and when that predictably failed, they gave up.