Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

The fuck he was. He's been a bag man for the GOP going way back. Read his shit lately, another wannabe theocrat.

Investigations of Dems? You forgot your Benghaziazims and Fast & Furious? NO indictments.

How about that birth certificate bullshit. ALL GOPERS ever have are conspiracy theory fueled wet dreams. Barr's having another one.

As for Barr? WOW, he was great before he became attorney general with the Trump Administration.

William Barr Supported Pardons In An Earlier D.C. 'Witch Hunt': Iran-Contra


January 14, 2019·5:01 AM ET

Heard on Morning Edition

This won't be the first time that William Barr, President Trump's nominee to become attorney general, will be involved with what's been called a "witch hunt."

Barr, who is scheduled to go before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday for his confirmation hearings, ran the Justice Department once before, under President George H.W. Bush.

Back then, the all-consuming, years-long scandal was called Iran-Contra. On Dec. 24, 1992, it ended when Bush pardoned six people who had been caught up in it.

"The Constitution is quite clear on the powers of the president and sometimes the president has to make a very difficult call," Bush said then. "That's what I've done."

Lawrence Walsh, Who Investigated Iran-Contra Scandal, Dies At 102

Then-Attorney General Barr supported the president's decision in the Iran-Contra case, which gave clemency to people who had been officials in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. He had been set to go on trial to face charges about lying to Congress.

To the man who led the Iran-Contra investigation, however, the pardons represented a miscarriage of justice.

"It demonstrates that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office, deliberately abusing the public trust without consequences," said Lawrence Walsh, the independent prosecutor in the case, at the time of the pardons.

Barr said later that he believed Bush had made the right decision and that he felt people in the case had been treated unfairly.

"The big ones — obviously, the Iran-Contra ones — I certainly did not oppose any of them," Barr said as part of the Presidential Oral History Program of the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.


"I favored the broadest pardon authority," Barr said. "There were some people just arguing just for Weinberger. I said, 'No — in for a penny, in for a pound.' "

As Washington prepares for Barr's confirmation hearings on Tuesday, this controversy from 1992 has begun to feel very familiar.

Today's Justice Department also is running a high-stakes investigation into the current administration: Whether Trump or his campaign coordinated with the Russian attack on the 2016 election. The president's onetime aides also have been caught up in it.

Trump, meanwhile, calls the investigation a "hoax" and a "witch hunt."

And there also has been talk about whether Trump might pardon some of those people — or even, potentially, himself.

Would Barr support pardons again?

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/14/684553791/william-barr-supported-pardons-in-an-earlier-d-c-witch-hunt-iran-contra