Today, outgoing AG Barr announced there will be no special counsel investigating Hunter Biden or the election:
Attorney General William Barr on Monday rejected several of President Donald Trump’s inflammatory and unfounded statements regarding the presidential election, saying at a news conference that he doesn’t plan to appoint a special counsel to investigate President-elect Joe Biden’s son Hunter or the election.
“If I thought a special counsel at this stage was a right tool and was appropriate, I would name one, but I haven’t and I’m not going to,” Barr said in response to a question on the presidential election. He said that widespread fraud wasn’t found in this election.
Barr also roundly rejected suggestions from the President’s supporters in recent days who’ve called for the US government to seize voting machines. …
On the Hunter Biden financial investigation — which the Biden transition acknowledged recently and Barr had kept quiet during the election season — the attorney general gave a similar answer that there is no need for him to take special steps to protect the investigation.
“To the extent there’s an investigation, I think it’s being handled responsibly and professionally currently within the department, and to this point, I have not seen a reason to appoint a special counsel, and I have no plan to do so before I leave,” Barr said when asked about Hunter Biden. Federal prosecutors and IRS investigations are conducting the probe, and Hunter Biden has not been charged with any crime. [CNN/Politics]
The Democrats – and anyone who cares for truth and its proper representation, including Robert Mueller – were outraged at Barr’s characterization of the Mueller Report as essentially exonerating Trump and his election campaign. The investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election resulted in multiple indictments, convictions, and identification of multiples cases of obstruction of justice, which could not be further pursued by Counsel Mueller. Barr’s assertion was preposterous.
Barr also interfered outrageously in ongoing investigations and prosecutions, leading to two unprecedented petitions from former DoJ employees requesting his resignation.
But since September 2020 onwards, he’s been a disappointment to Trump and the right, as he failed to find any mud to smear on the Biden family, any evidence of really anything at all. In some ways, it’s as if Barr had realized that the Evil of the Democrats might actually be the Evil of the Republicans.
But this announcement is a bit more important than it sounds, because it confuses the message Trump and the far-right would like to push on receptive voters in 2022 and beyond. It’s important to have a straight-forward message when it comes to politics: The Bidens are corrupt and The election was stolen. It keeps the base all stirred up and in training.
It’s harder to push those messages when AG Bill Barr, a man who had the potential to be the “greatest” AG ever, according to Trump, drops a brick on those messages.
We should still look for those messages being used as weapons by the right, but the Democrats should be ready to use Barr’s own words against them. Even if the Deputy AG initiates special counsel proceedings at Trump’s direction – and I expect that to happen, as Deputy AG Jeffery Rosen has a record of being led around by the nose – it’s not important. The investigations will lead nowhere, even as they’re seized upon as proof that … well … something happened!
Yeah. Trump bullied Rosen into initiating unjustified investigations for political purposes. That’s what happened.
