Bill Barr’s Detachment From Reality - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Bill Barr’s Detachment From Reality
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As the Stalinesque carnival that is the corrupt January 6 Committee unfolds, former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr said this to the Committee, bold print for emphasis supplied:

I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bulls—,” Barr said of his conversations with Trump. “And, you know, I didn’t want to be a part of it. And that’s one of the reasons that went into me deciding to leave when I did.

“I was somewhat demoralized because I thought, ‘Boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has lost contact with, he’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,'” he continued. “And on the other hand, you know, when I went into this and would you know, tell him how crazy some of these allegations were, there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”

Hmmm. In light of all the evidence out there — that would be “actual facts” — about the corruption of the 2020 elections, it would in fact appear that it is the former attorney general who was “detached from reality” about the 2020 election.

Mr. Barr would do himself and his credibility on this subject a world of good if he would simply take the time to read author and Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway’s bestseller on the 2020 election: Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. Mollie, a superb investigative reporter, uses exhaustive detail to document that “there are abundant reasons to suspect the election was rigged at every step.”

Those “abundant reasons to suspect the election was rigged at every step” include the following 2020 events just from my home state of Pennsylvania alone:

  • The Trump campaign in Philadelphia, per a Commonwealth Court judge, was deprived of its “statutory right to have poll watchers present at places where electors cast and submit votes in person” and in “unparalleled” numbers.
  • Ballot harvesting is not allowed in Pennsylvania. Yet Philadelphia allowed it. The notoriously partisan Democrat Attorney General Josh Shapiro — now the Democrats’ nominee for governor in the 2022 election — said that objecting to ballot harvesting was now suddenly “illegal voter intimidation.”
  • The Democrat Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled the “Democrats in Philadelphia did not have to allow the Trump campaign any observation of the vote counting.”
  • “The Trump campaign had a legal right to observers within a reasonable distance from the counting,” Mollie writes. “Why did election officials in overwhelmingly Democratic Philadelphia go out of their way to deprive the campaign of that right?”

On and on goes her decidedly detailed production of the myriad ways the 2020 election was rigged, producing facts that the former attorney general simply chose to ignore.

Not to mention that Mr. Barr simply ignores Pennsylvania’s repeated history of voter fraud in its elections, fraud which I have earlier documented, as here. In fact, only last week the Department of Justice headlined this:

Former U.S. Congressman and Philadelphia Political Operative Pleads Guilty to Election Fraud Charges

But there’s more to this refusal by Mr. Barr to recognize the corruption in 2020 — not to mention Pennsylvania’s dismal history — than his actions, or lack thereof, alone. In truth, it touches exactly on the battle between the Washington political establishment and the American people.

Recall this headline in the Washington Post on January 31, 2017 — a mere 11 days into Trump’s presidency:

Resistance from within: Federal workers push back against Trump

The story said this:

Less than two weeks into Trump’s administration, federal workers are in regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees about what they can do to push back against the new president’s initiatives. Some federal employees have set up social media accounts to anonymously leak word of changes that Trump appointees are trying to make.

As history now records, this was but the beginning of a major effort by the Washington Establishment — and the Establishment around the country — to deliberately sabotage the Trump presidency. Of all places where the former attorney general should have seen this pushing-back-by-career-bureaucrats operation in action, it was inside the very department that he headed — the Department of Justice.

The FBI was thoroughly corrupt. As Mollie notes:

The Russia collusion hoax had been invented by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, fed to compliant reporters, and weaponized by Obama’s Department of Justice….

To keep the Trump administration from finding out what the Department of Justice had done during the [2016] campaign, several key figures needed to be sidelined before they got access to the information about the operation.

That sidelining would start with then-incoming Trump National Security Advisor Gen. Mike Flynn.

In the Washington Post, just this week, is the tale of the behind-the-scenes drama as the Washington Establishment — as personified in the Department of Justice — fought the effort to get an honest accounting of electoral votes from various states, Pennsylvania included.

Reports the Post of a dramatic Oval Office meeting on January 3, Jeffrey Clark, assistant attorney general for the environment and natural resources division, was trying to persuade President Trump to appoint him acting attorney general. The story says:

[Clark] had outlined a plan in a letter he wanted to send to the leaders of key states Joe Biden won. It said that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” about the vote and that the states should consider sending “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump” for Congress to approve.

Like clockwork, a vigorous objection emerged from career prosecutor Richard Donoghue, who had now emerged as the deputy to then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. Revealingly, Donoghue said this to the president of the United States, per the Post:

Donoghue urged Trump not to put Clark in charge, calling him “not competent” and warning of “mass resignations” by Justice Department officials if he became the nation’s top law enforcement official, according to Donoghue’s account.

“What happens if, within 48 hours, we have hundreds of resignations from your Justice Department because of your actions?” Donoghue said he asked Trump. “What does that say about your leadership?”

Which is to say, just as with that January 2017 Post story describing a Washington Establishment bureaucracy plotting and scheming how to rebel against the duly elected new president, at the end of that administration there was a career Justice Department official literally threatening the very same elected president by saying:

What happens if, within 48 hours, we have hundreds of resignations from your Justice Department because of your actions?….What does that say about your leadership?

Clearly, Donoghue was clueless that what those potential “hundreds of mass resignations” would mean if they happened was an all-too-vivid confirmation that Washington bureaucrats have zero regard for the elected president of the United States, not to mention the American people. In the style of authoritarians everywhere, those DOJ bureaucrats saw themselves as the repository of ultimate power in America. And any attempt to investigate the kind of election corruption listed in detail in Mollie Hemingway’s book would be fiercely opposed.

In the closing of her book, Mollie Hemingway sums up exactly the real problem symbolized by the corrupt handling of the 2020 election:

The left’s path to future victory requires it to cow its opposition into silence, to throw its political opponents in jail, and to censor any discussion that threatens its one-party state. The left’s vision is fundamentally anti-American, and its increasingly brazen activities aimed at crushing dissent will only alienate it from the American people.

A growing number of Americans are outraged by the way the left seizes and deploys power. They are sick of the lies, manipulation, and distortion that a corrupt ruling class spins on a regular basis. Those courageous citizens, not the decaying establishment, will determine the fate of the nation. Their efforts will ensure that we pass on our beloved republic to future generations.

In the fights to come, those men and women will have the best weapon — truth — on their side. The only question is whether their leaders will have the courage to use it.

Bingo.

Jeffrey Lord
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Jeffrey Lord, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is a former aide to Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. An author and former CNN commentator, he writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com. His new book, Swamp Wars: Donald Trump and The New American Populism vs. The Old Order, is now out from Bombardier Books.
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