The real reason behind Donald Trump’s surreal choice of William Barr for Attorney General
Four weeks after Donald Trump illegally appointed corrupt buffoon Matthew Whitaker as Acting Attorney General, it appears Trump is already looking past the failed experiment. Trump is now floating William Barr as his nominee for permanent Attorney General. If you’re trying to place the name, he was previously the Attorney General for the late President George H.W. Bush. Wait, what?
Not only is Donald Trump making the surreal move of choosing a conventional nominee for once, he’s also picking a guy who used to be Robert Mueller’s boss. This seems like the worst move Trump could make when it comes to derailing Mueller – and it is. So why is Trump doing it? All you need to look at are Barr’s recent public remarks about how Hillary Clinton should be criminally investigated for the imaginary “Uranium One” scandal.
That’s right, even now that Donald Trump is stuck somewhere in limbo between the Oval Office and prison, he’s not picking a guy who’s going to come in and try to drop the hammer on Robert Mueller. Instead, he’s picking a guy whose stated agenda is to bring false charges against Trump’s political opponents. This move seems stupid even for Trump, right? But you have to consider who’s making this pick on Trump’s behalf.
Lindsey Graham, who is set to become Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has already stated that he plans to abuse his position to hold sham investigations into Hillary Clinton and other designated bogeymen. Not surprisingly, Graham is the one who’s been cheerleading the William Barr nomination the most loudly today.
Donald Trump is now so weak and vulnerable, he’s at the mercy of Republican Senators. If twenty of them decide to help the Democrats oust him, the math will be there to impeach and remove him. Because Trump’s Attorney General nominee also has to be confirmed by the GOP Senate, it means they get to choose his nominee, not him. The GOP is picking the AG that they want for the next two years, not someone who is going to try to save Trump. Graham has clearly decided he wants an AG who will help with his sham investigations, and he’s managed to talk a pliable Trump into going along with it.
So there’s good and bad news here for the Resistance. The good news is that Donald Trump’s new plan to stop Robert Mueller is to force Mueller to start answering to a guy he has a decades-long and apparently positive history with. In other words, Mueller should be able to keep doing what he needs to, and Trump should start wondering if orange prison stripes will fully match his orange hair.
The bad news is that the Republican Senate really is deranged enough to try to bring false criminal charges against people like Hillary Clinton – even though there is zero chance of any such charges sticking – in the hope of keeping its far right base fired up by these antics while Donald Trump circles the drain.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report