[Editor’s Note: Learn the interesting back story on how nincompoop Dan Quayle became vice president and William Barr’s role in the insurance policy for H.W. Bush. Lots of troubling history here. — Mark L. Taylor]
The Thom Hartman Show (4/5/19)
William Barr, Donald Trump’s attorney general has recently hidden the Mueller Report resulting in widespread criticism. But it turns out Republican Attorney Generals, like Bill Barr, have a long history of covering up republican crimes, from Nixon to Trump.
Historian Lamar Waldron joins the program to expose the history of corrupt Republican politicians, conspiracies and cover-ups.
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William Barr: Trump’s Insurance Policy
At each stage in the process, Barr has narrowed the range of information that he says he will allow the public to see.
By Jeffrey Toobin
The New Yorker
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the intellectual polymath who represented New York in the United States Senate for twenty-four years, developed a well-founded skepticism toward government secrecy. Bureaucrats and others, Moynihan knew, could always conjure reasons to keep information under wraps, and the ratchet of secrecy generally worked in only one direction. Secrets begat more demands for secrecy, at ever greater peril to the public’s right to know what was happening in its name. Secrecy, Moynihan wrote in his 1998 book of that title, thus became “a hidden, humongous, metastasizing mass within government itself.”
Senator Moynihan was educated not only in the halls of academe but in the streets of New York, and he might well have reached an earthy conclusion about this Attorney General and his President: the fix is in.
That swelling mass may yet envelop the Mueller report. When President Trump nominated William P. Barr to be Attorney General, late last year, it was clear that one of his principal responsibilities would be to determine how much of the forthcoming report from Robert Mueller, the Special Counsel, would be disclosed to the public. At each stage in the process, Barr has narrowed the range of information that he says he will allow the public to see. At his confirmation hearing, in January, he pledged that he would be guided by a commitment to “transparency.” Last month, though, after Barr received Mueller’s four-hundred-or-so-page report about possible ties between President Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian interests, and the President’s attempts to cover them up, the Attorney General, on his own initiative, created a series of roadblocks to public disclosure.
Under the Department of Justice regulation that sets the rules for the release of a Special Counsel’s report, the Attorney General is supposed to consider the “interests of the public in being informed of and understanding the reasons for the actions of the Special Counsel.” But Barr erected a quasi-legal structure that gives him enormous leeway to censor much of the Mueller report. According to a letter he sent to congressional leaders, Barr established four categories that were off limits for public disclosure. …