Guiliani, Barr and Pompeo are Trump's three stooges in crime

For the past week or so, new “bombshells”  have landed and exploded on a daily basis involving what can accurately be described as “collusion” with foreign governments by the Trump administration—clearly at Donald Trump’s direction—in order to harm political opponents and attempt to discredit investigations into administration wrongdoing, something that “founding father” Alexander Hamilton had warned was a danger to American democracy. Administration officials and its defenders have alternately lied, obfuscated, pled “executive privilege” even to questions concerning their own previous statements, engaged in “whataboutism,” and have insisted that they have a “right” to falsely testify to the media and Congress. The problem with that, of course, is that when you are in front of the cameras, you are also lying to the American public, and if Trump administration officials claim that is their “right,” then that is a doubly troubling issue.

Rudolph Giuliani, William Barr and Mike Pompeo have all now been revealed to be neck-deep in the foreign collusion angle, after Trump and his allies have long and loudly claimed that there was “no collusion” between Trump surrogates and the Russians—and this coming on the heels of revelations that Trump may have lied to Mueller investigators about his knowledge of upcoming Wikileak dumps of DNC files. The activities of these men truly “rises” to the level of major scandal, and their absolute contempt for lawful, ethical and moral—let alone Constitutional—principles is beyond question.

The other day we saw Fox News’ Chris Wallace repeatedly demand Stephen Miller answer his questions about the propriety of the Trump administration acting in secret rather than going through official government channels for foreign contacts if they were “perfectly” legal and ethical, only to have Miller respond in apparent “shock’ that a Fox News host would have the gall to question him in an “adversarial” way. Giuliani, on the other hand, has been engaging in self-parody for years, and despite a habit of making incomprehensible statements, he occasionally lays a golden egg for the media to digest. Stupid is as stupid does, but one suspects that his “value” to Trump is that he can verbally mangle his explanations for wrongdoing in such a way it comes out as somehow “OK.”

Giuliani has become a clown who has no apparent sense of right and wrong, but Pompeo and Barr are a different matter, since they hold official government positions of authority, and are not just rogue operators. Let’s not forget who Pompeo is; previously he was a failed businessman who was elected to Congress thanks to the bankroll heft of the Koch Brothers. He became known as a conspiracy theorist, climate change-denier and other extreme right positions. Trump’s principle attraction to him was that he was like Jeff Sessions an early supporter of Trump. Not only is Pompeo clearly unfit temperamentally to be the nation’s top diplomat, he has no real qualification for the position of Secretary of State. He proved his unfitness again when he was exposed as a liar after having arrogantly and derisively denied on national television—meaning to the American public—that he had any knowledge of Trump’s infamous Ukrainian phone call (at least the one we know about). In fact it is now reported that Pompeo was actually there listening in on the conversation. 

In response to Congressional demands that State Department officials appear for depositions to explain their involvement in Ukrainian collusion, Pompeo issued an undiplomatic letter that again used contemptuous and derisive language in refusing to comply, instead “chastising” the Democrats for not issuing  official subpoenas in order to give his people time to get their stories (or non-stories) straight. Pompeo happens to be leaving town for few days so he doesn’t have to answer questions about his latest lies for the time being; Trump’s “beautiful” letter-writing pal Kim Jong-Un just gave the president a ring (or was it the other way around?). Isn’t “coincidental” that Kim wants another round of talks just at the moment that Trump is at his weakest politically, just as the Chinese do? Would anyone really be surprised to learn that it was Trump who gave Kim a “ring” to ask for another “favor” to get people’s minds off his current troubles—and what exactly would Kim, who has been launching missiles and shows no signs of nuclear disarming, offer a politically-weakened Trump?

And then there is Barr, who has come under scrutiny for engaging in his own foreign collusion angle, this time attempting to enlist Australian officials in an effort to undermine the Mueller report; that’s right, Barr claims that Russian collusion was a “witch hunt,” and he is engaging in foreign collusion to disprove collusion. Are these people really this idiotic, or do they believe that it is only illegal if it harms them politically? And why has Barr, who hasn’t served in government since the last time he was Attorney General in 1992, suddenly appear out of the shadows in 2018? Could it be he has particularly “talents” that Trump could find useful? Hell yes! 

Barr has always been a relative extremist ideologically, as well as on racial issues. His infamous report The Case For More Incarceration, was widely criticized for its deceptive slanting of statistics, yet it was used as the basis for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which was defended by Hillary Clinton as targeting just “super-predators,” when in fact the law—which included the Violence Against Women Act, which purposely ignores intimate partner violence perpetrated by women—led to the “super” increase in the incarceration of minorities for mostly nonviolent crimes (like, say, marijuana possession), even for life under the “three strikes” rule. Republicans frequently claim that Democrats “approve” of illegal immigration because Hispanics are more likely to vote Democrat; Republicans would rather have minorities in jail (especially on felony charges), so that they can’t vote.

But Barr’s real value to Trump is his “experience” in covering-up scandal. The prosecution of the  Iran-Contra scandal—in which Reagan administration officials engaged in an illegal shadow operation arming Nicaraguan “freedom-fighters,” who were nothing more than armed thugs, through the proceeds from the sale of weapons to Iran—had been going on for years when Barr became George H.W. Bush’s Attorney General in 1991. Barr had one job, and one job only: to create cover for Bush against the potential that he would be implicated as a major “player” in the scandal as Vice President, as indeed he was. In a diary that independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh had demanded that Bush turn over as evidence but was refused, Bush would admit among many other incriminating details that in regard to Iran-Contra, “I’m one of the few people that knows fully the details….It is not a subject we can talk about.” Secretary of State George Schultz was aware of Bush’s close involvement in the scandal, and later observed that Bush’s constant public lying about  knowing anything might come back to haunt him. The upcoming trial of former Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger for obstruction and lying to Congress threatened to reveal the extent of Bush’s involvement in illegal activities.

That is when Barr stepped in; anything else was a sidebar. Barr, a Reagan devotee, loudly denounced the Iran-Contra prosecution as a “witch hunt,” despite the fact that it had been initiated by Attorney General Schultz just before news of the scandal broke. Barr ignored the advice of the Justice Department pardon office against recommending pardons for those convicted or charged in the scandal. It has been suggested that Bush would not have issued the pardons, save that he was angered that Walsh’s indictment of Weinberger days before the 1992 election cost him the election. Bush was sufficiently aware of the gravity of the crimes committed that he was unsure of the effect of the pardons on his legacy. It was Barr with his own tortured “logic” who convinced him that there would be no long term blowback from the public if he pardoned Weinberger and five others. Walsh, of course, had a different opinion, denouncing the pardons as a bald-faced effort to obstruct justice and shield Bush from the consequences of his own involvement in the scandal.

That is what Trump wants Barr to do for him, and Barr seems quite willing to please him in that regard. Barr’s ongoing efforts to discredit the findings of the Mueller report is clearly politically motivated, not by any desire to uncover the “truth.” But the truth is out there and undeniable; all the Trump administration is seeking to do is to throw dirt on the truth-tellers. Giuliani, Pompeo and Barr are all an integral part of that effort, and all deserve the judgment of history for their crimes.