Bill Barr has a whole new problem
Yesterday we all finally learned the general parameters of why Donald Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr was holed up in Italy: he was looking to meet with foreign governments in the hope of getting help in promoting Trump’s most deranged conspiracy theories. Now we’re getting specifics, and the whole thing is even more deranged than we thought.
It turns out Bill Barr didn’t just go on a garden variety fishing expedition while he was Italy. He went there specifically to listen to a tape from Joseph Mifsud, who acted as a go-between for the Trump campaign and the Kremlin during the 2016 election cycle, according to the Daily Beast. Supposedly this tape somehow proves that the U.S. intel community was trying to frame Trump from the start.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, it’s not possible that any such tape from Mifsud does any such thing. Bill Barr surely knows this, too. He’s only pursuing this nonsense because an increasingly mentally incompetent Donald Trump is insisting that Barr chase down any ridiculous lead that might somehow prove that Trump was popular enough to win the 2016 election without Russia’s help. Why is Barr doing this? Presumably to keep Trump happy, considering that Barr has now committed so many felonies at Trump’s behest, he’ll never get out of prison unless he can keep Trump happy and somehow earn a magic pardon.
Bill Barr has another problem, beyond the fact that it’s looking more and more like there are no magic pardons coming. This same Daily Beast report reveals that U.S. Attorney John Durham, who has been tasked with investigating the origins of the Mueller probe, was also with Barr during this asinine exercise. Former Assistant FBI Director and current MSNBC analyst Frank Figliuzzi said on-air this evening that this is a problem for Barr, because Durham is a straight shooter, and is more likely to shoot this nonsense down than play along with it.
This comes even as Donald Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has embarked on an ever so conveniently timed state visit to Italy, which we’re supposed to believe is somehow coincidental to the fact that Bill Barr has been using Italy to investigate Trump’s lunatic conspiracy theories this week. Trump and his people are more desperate than ever, and they’re using up their last bits of proverbial oxygen on complete nonsense.
