Anyone who does not believe that almost every member of the current Democratic contingent assigned to the House Judiciary Committee has not lost his or her mind and reason, and become an angry, violent, and raving Jacobin, should watch the hearing conducted Tuesday by that Committee with Attorney General William Barr. https://www.c-span.org/video/?473384-1/attorney-general-barr-testifies-justice-department-mission-programs Reference to the Mad Queen in Alice in Wonderland also serves as an aid to understanding. Questions were asked angrily, the Attorney General attempted to answer, and was immediately cut off while it was claimed that his attempt to answer showed disrespect to the questioner.
Chairman Jerry Nadler laid out the Democrats’ attack points in his opening statement. According to Nadler, the Attorney General is Donald Trump’s fixer and is illegally investigating Russiagate to protect the President, and has “deployed the military and federal troops’ to violently attack peaceful protesters, while giving short shrift to ending the systemic racism in the United States. He is also using an illicit law and order campaign to cover up and divert from the simple fact that every death from COVID-19 is Trump’s responsibility. The other major area of contention was the proposal to conduct the 2020 election by mail-in ballot, which the Attorney General said would increase the probability of fraud. The Democrats, for the most part, just railed and frothed with variations of Nadler’s script, very often not even giving the Attorney General a chance to answer their statements and tirades.
In his written testimony, Barr noted the actual cause of this mental disorder in his Democratic inquisitors: “Ever since I made it clear that I was going to do everything I could to get to the bottom of the grave abuses involved in the bogus ‘Russiagate’ scandal, many of the Democrats on the Committee have attempted to discredit me by conjuring up the narrative that I am simply the President’s factotum who disposes of criminal cases according to his instructions.”
Representative Jim Jordan, the ranking Republican on the Committee came out swinging in response to the wholesale attack on Barr in Chairman Jerry Nadler’s opening statement, playing a video of media — across the board — referring to every protester as “peaceful” while showing actually violent scenes from Washington, D.C. and Portland, Oregon. Jordan’s video showed black garbed protesters throwing bricks at police, setting fires, throwing kerosene bombs and commercial grade firecrackers, attempting to tear down the fence around the federal courthouse in Portland, aiming lasers at cops’ faces, and jumping on top of and smashing police cars and setting them on fire. Barr confirmed that the protests in Washington, D.C. had become so violent that the President was moved to the basement of the White House by the Secret Service.
Barr repeatedly emphasized that the federal presence in Portland was the result of 61 consecutive days of attacks on the federal courthouse there. The deployment involves a limited number of U.S. Marshals and has recently included a tactical component as the attacks have become more intense, largely as the result of Democratic Party-orchestrated statements to the media that Barr and Trump are deploying stormtroopers. He detailed numerous injuries both to the federal officers in Portland and the Secret Service in Washington. Exasperated by the continuous characterization of Antifa as peaceful protesters, the Attorney General was forced to ask, “Since when is it OK to burn down the federal courthouse? Is that OK, now?”
Typical of the exchanges were those concerning Roger Stone. As Barr has done repeatedly, he defended the Stone prosecution as just, which hardly quieted the frothing Democratic majority. He conveyed, “This is a 67-year_old man, first-time offender, no violence, they were trying to put him in jail for seven to nine years. I was not going to advocate for that. That is not the rule of law.” Barr went on to point out that Judge Amy Berman Jackson actually agreed with him that the Mueller prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation was over the top. Nonetheless, Barr’s intervention to reduce the sentence and the President’s commutation became an endless television line to attack the Attorney General. The constant proposing of angry questions and strutting, without the possibility of the Attorney General answering them, led Barr to remark, sardonically, “I thought this was a hearing when the witness was supposed to be heard.”
