President Trump began to hate former Attorney General Jeff Sessions right around the time he recused himself from the Russia investigation. In November 2018, Sessions was forced out of the position and it was clear that Trump wanted a bodyman to take over that spot. The president believed that he needed someone like Eric Holder, former President Obama’s attorney general, whom Trump believed looked out for Obama. None of this was true, of course, as Holder held the position as the nation’s top cop in the highest regard, but Trump assumed Holder was Obama’s main man since, you know, both of them are Black.
So Trump found someone that would do his dirty work without question and that man is Evil Fred Flintstone, aka Bad John Goodman, aka Attorney General William P. Barr. On Wednesday, top officials will tell Congress of Barr’s latest scandalous attempts to give Trump’s friend Roger Stone a lighter sentence.
From the Washington Post:
A federal prosecutor and another Justice Department official plan to tell Congress on Wednesday that Attorney General William P. Barr and his top deputies issued inappropriate orders amid investigations and trials “based on political considerations” and a desire to cater to President Trump.
Aaron Zelinsky, an assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland formerly detailed to Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation, will tell the House Judiciary Committee that prosecutors involved in the criminal trial of Trump’s friend Roger Stone experienced “heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice to cut Stone a break” by requesting a lighter sentence, according to Zelinsky’s prepared remarks. The expectation, he intends to testify, was that Stone should be treated “differently and more leniently” because of his “relationship with the President.”
And that’s not all. John Elias, an official in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, will also testify that Barr ordered an investigation into marijuana company mergers just because he “did not like the nature of their underlying business,” according to his prepared testimony.
As a result, the antitrust division launched 10 reviews of mergers in the marijuana industry, according to Elias’s prepared remarks, and was ordered to probe a deal between major U.S. automakers and the state of California after Trump tweeted about it disparagingly. Months later, when the matter seemed near a close, political leaders ordered a subsequent investigation after California announced it would purchase vehicles only from automakers that complied with fuel efficiency standards, Elias’s prepared testimony says.
Zelinsky and Elias’ combined accounts to the House Judiciary Committee are expected to shed light on the...who are we kidding? Are we really acting like Congress doesn’t know what kind of games the White House is playing? Since Barr took office, he’s not only proven himself to be Trump’s hitman but he’s insulated Trump from taking damage from the press. Barr has claimed responsibility for going after Trump’s enemies and even fallen on the grenade to protect the president. Remember Barr’s retelling of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings from his Russia investigation? Remember the press conference he held just to tell America before the Russia report was released that there was nothing to see here? Hell, just last week, literally on Friday, Barr claimed that the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, was resigning. That was a lie. Berman was like, “No the fuck I’m not.” So then Barr got Berman, the man who just so happens to be investigating Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s business dealings, fired by using the president as the hitman.
So Zelinsky, who resigned after his objections to the way the Stone case was being handled, is expected to claim that he was told “to water down and in some cases outright distort events that transpired in his trial, and the criminal conduct that gave rise to his conviction,” in order to justify the lighter sentencing request, the Post reports.
He also notes that the U.S. attorney in charge of prosecuting Stone agreed to “unprecedentedly favorable treatment because he was ‘afraid of the President.’”
Stone, who dresses like the famous white pimp, Mr. Whitefolks, was convicted of lying to Congress and sentenced to 40-months in prison. He was expected to report to prison on June 30, but he’s asked for an extension until Sept. 3 to turn himself in so he can appeal his conviction, citing the pandemic. And of course, the Justice Department is totally fine with that.
If all else fails, the president will most likely pardon him because they are all in cahoots. So let’s stop acting like this testimony or anything else matters at this point. If you don’t see it, it’s because you don’t want to and nothing happening in Congress on Wednesday will mean anything.
There is something we all can do to try and change this: vote. Literally, that’s all we have because as a reader pointed out in a story that I’d written in which I was gleefully hoping for change, or as Quincy Maddox put it, “Ain’t nothing gonna happen.”