Sorry To Interrupt Your Pumpkin Spice Latte, But The Attorney General Has LOST HIS DAMN MIND – Above the Law

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

When did Bill Barr turn into Alex Jones, screaming and swearing about cabals of evil Democrats threatening to overthrow the government? Wasnt he supposed to be a starchy institutionalist whod been in DC forever and would be a steady hand on the tiller at the Justice Department?

Apparently not! Hes threatening to jail protestors, spouting nutball conspiracy theories about Democrats trying to steal the election with mail-in ballots, and all but shouting I AM THE LAW!

Okay, lets run this one down Top 6 listicle style, because thats what weve been reduced to in the hellscape that is 2020.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Barr told prosecutors on a conference call last week to prepare for protests to increase in size and intensity in the lead-up to the election.

And how should they prepare for the exercise of First Amendment-protected speech by American citizens?

By readying to file federal charges in the rare instance when protestors get violent, even when state charges might apply. Charges up to and including sedition, because throwing a Molotov cocktail at a federal courthouse is apparently the same as plotting to overthrow the government these days.

On the same call, Barr wondered if there were some way the DOJ could charge Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, who has come in for a raft of abuse from the president, for allowing a police-autonomous zone this summer. Totally normal!

Take it away, Bill Barr:

Just think about the way we vote now. You have a precinct, your name is on a list, you go in and say who you are, you go behind a curtain, no one is allowed to go in there to influence you, and no one can tell how you voted. All of that is gone with mail-in voting. Theres no secret vote. You have to associate the envelope in the mailing and the name of whos sending it in, with the ballot.

Theres no more secret vote with mail-in vote. A secret vote prevents selling and buying votes. So now were back in the business of selling and buying votes. Capricious distribution of ballots means (ballot) harvesting, undue influence, outright coercion, paying off a postman, heres a few hundred dollars, give me some of your ballots.

Literally none of this nonsense he spewed to the Chicago Tribune ever happened. Its pure fiction (Ed. Note: Indeed it is, as we discussed with Professor Rick Hasen here).

The president just spent the entire morning tweeting that theres no way he could lose unless the election is rigged, and the Assistant Health and Human Services Secretary for Public Affairs was fired yesterday for telling his supporters to buy guns and ammunition in a lunatic rant about Democratic hit squads.

There are Trump supporters telling reporters that theyll commit suicide if Biden wins in November, with one believer in the rampant pedophilia conspiracies flogged in the Trump wingnuttosphere telling Time, I would honestly try to leave the country. And if that wasnt an option, I would probably take my children and sit in the garage and turn my car on and it would be over.

But Bill Barr hasnt heard anything at all about that.

You know liberals project. All this bullshit about how the president is going to stay in office and seize power? Ive never heard of any of that crap. I mean, Im the attorney general. I would think I would have heard about it. They are projecting. They are creating an incendiary situation where there will be loss of confidence in the vote.

Someone will say the president just won Nevada. Oh, wait a minute! We just discovered 100,000 ballots! Every vote will be counted! Yeah, but we dont know where these freaking votes came from.

Bill Barr cannot abide a loss of confidence in the vote! But if the absentee ballots dont reflect the same-day vote totals, how will you know where those freaking votes come from?

Remember when Attorney General Loretta Lynch chatted with Bill Clinton for 15 minutes on an airplane tarmac, and then had to recuse herself from an entire federal investigation because the political impropriety was a major scandal?

Well, apparently, the rules are different now. Bill Barr has every right to exert political influence on prosecutions affecting the president or his friend, and anyone who suggests that an equal justice system relies on a separation of politics from law enforcement is just a whiny baby.

Name one successful organization or institution where the lowest level employees decisions are deemed sacrosanct, there arent. There arent any letting the most junior members set the agenda, Barr said during a speech yesterday at Hillsdale College. It might be a good philosophy for a Montessori preschool, but it is no way to run a federal agency.

Barr went on to defend his absolute right to direct federal prosecutors to employ one standard for the presidents political allies, and one for everyone else.

These people are agents of the attorney general. As I say, FBI agents, whose agent do you think you are? And I say, What exactly am I interfering with? When you boil it right down, its the will of the most junior member of the organization who has some idea he wants to do something. What makes that sacrosanct?

In fact, Barr went so far as to say that political interference in the administration of justice isgood and proper, deriding career prosecutors whodo not have the political legitimacy to be the public face for tough decisions and they lack the political buy-in necessary to publicly defend those decisions.

Political buy-in? What the hell happened to balls and strikes?

In short, the attorney general, senior DOJ officials, and US attorneys are indeed political. But they are political in a good and necessary sense, Barr continued, doing his best Eva Peron impression.

Oh, yes, he did.

You know, putting a national lockdown, stay at home orders, is like house arrest. Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history.

Fred Korematsu might like a word, sir!

Almost 200,000 Americans are dead, and every day we watch other countries who buckled down and did the work returning to something like normal life. Meanwhile, the highest law enforcement officer in the land is likening routine public health measures to slavery.

Since Bill Barr is trotting out his favorite excuse for police brutality again, lets just flag it here.

Theyre not interested in Black lives, Barr said of the protestors. Theyre interested in props, a small number of Blacks who are killed by police during conflicts with police usually less than a dozen a year who they can use as props to achieve a much broader political agenda.

In point of fact, upwards of 200 Black people are shot and killed by American police every year, not less than a dozen, and African Americans are more than 2.8 times as likely to be shot by police as white people.

But Barr only counts the police shootings where the victim was unarmed. He said it in June to NPR:

Well, there are 8,000 Blacks who are killed every year. Eighty-five percent of them are killed by gunshots. Virtually all of those are Blacks on Blacks. I think that there are a number of the statistics on police shootings of unarmed, unarmed individuals are not skewed toward the African American. There are many whites who are shot unarmed by police.

And he said it again in September to CNN:

I think the narrative that the police are on some, you know, epidemic of shooting unarmed Black men is simply a false narrative and also the narrative that thats based on race. The fact of the matter is very rare for an unarmed African American to be shot by a white police officer.

If the Second Amendment guarantees Americans the right to possess automatic weapons, then why does the mere presence of a knife in the possession of a Black person justify his execution by the police?

Yeah, hes off the rails. Bugf*ck insane. Were fast approaching rubber room territory. Its a problem.

Barr Tells Prosecutors to Consider Charging Violent Protesters With Sedition [WSJ]Column: AG Bill Barr says federal corruption hunters never at a loss for work in Chicago [Chicago Tribune]Remarks by Attorney General William P. Barr at Hillsdale College Constitution Day Event [DOJ]

Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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Sorry To Interrupt Your Pumpkin Spice Latte, But The Attorney General Has LOST HIS DAMN MIND - Above the Law