AG BARR - TRUMP'S SUCCESSOR TO ODIOUS ROY COHN

Attorney General William Barr has burst into the public arena as the enforcer in chief of the President and his personal representative in court. Barr is joined at the hip with Trump who has been chastised by the courts as “Not being a king” and more recently as behaving akin to a head of a “banana republic”.  What appeared to be the last straw for the judicial officers in the NY Federal Office was Barr’s ongoing partisan interventions in Trump’s interests. Four career prosecutors withdrew from the Stone case when Barr, for obvious political objectives, unilaterally and unprecedentedly overrode their carefully constructed sentence guidelines .

No one else has been as important to Trump since the demise of his role model the notorious Roy Cohn. Cohn’s toxic influence has been the template for Trump’s predictable and continuing sociopathic behavior. What Barr has in common with Cohn is that they both slavishly served Trump’s questionable interests albeit in different arenas. Where they differed was that flashy Cohn relished being seen as New York’s premier fixer whereas Barr has pretensions to respectability which are in the process of being unceremoniously shattered. 

THE SNOWBALLING DECLINE OF BARR’S REPUTATION.

Barr has run into a storm where in less time than it takes to put out a newspaper eleven hundred former Justice Department bipartisan prosecutors and officials signed an online petition for him to resign. The numbers were doubled within twenty - four hours, including his former Deputy Attorney General, George Ayer, who wrote a detailed op - ed piece in The Washington Post as to why his colleague for forty years had to go. 

Barr had to know the avalanche was about to hit him because in an attempt to forestall it the Attorney General had taken the unprecedented action by appearing on network television to “complain” that the unprecedented  President’s unprecedented tweeting behavior was making it impossible for hm to do his job. Barr needn’t have bothered to go through the charade as no one believed his slick smooth narrative as in fact he was doing exactly what he claimed that the President was making it impossible for him to do, namely hampering the prosecutions of the President’s allies and initiating investigations against the President’s enemies.  

It is one minute before midnight and the crisis escalated to the extent that the Association of Federal Judges has called an Emergency Meeting to discuss what they obviously believe is a constitutional crisis.

IN THE BEGINNING IT WAS ROY COHN AND IN THE END IT IS STILL ROY COHN.

For the first two years in his Presidency Trump fantasized if only the major influence in his life, the infamous deceased Roy Cohn, could be his Attorney General.  In the era of Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first Attorney General, who was right of Genghis Khan, had ethical standards recusing himself from the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Sessions was the butt of abuse because he wasn’t loyal to the boss. Trump admitted that if he had known that  Sessons wouldn’t stop the Mueller investigation he wouldn’t have appointed him to the office.

The POTUS was reported to incessantly ruminate, “Where is my Roy Cohn”. Trump then watered down his objective in that he would be satisfied to have as head of his Justice Department a Bobby Kennedy or an Eric Holder whom he had misperceived as being subservient to Presidents John Kennedy and Barack Obama, respectively. In the end he hit pay dirt as he got his Roy Cohn in the personage of William Barr all dressed with respectability and none of the opprobrium of the shady Cohn.

There was no - one more influential in Donald Trump’s life than his former personal attorney Roy Cohn. It had all started off when Donald and his daddy were charged by the Justice Department for racial discrimination. Cohn advised the Trumps “To tell them to go to hell” and counter sue for a hundred million dollars. If you review Trump’s life thereafter it came from the Cohn playbook. 

So who in the hell was Roy Cohn?

ROY COHN DONALD TRUMP’S PERSONAL COUNSEL AND MAJOR LIFE INFLUENCE

Roy Cohn, Trump’s alter ego was bad, as in the song, “Bad, bad, (Leroy Brown), meanest cat in the whole damn town, meaner than a junkyard dog..”. He was the major player in the seamiest, sleaziest corrupt New York world which saddled the border where the underworld met the malleable political and judicial establishment. He had a long and extensive career starting way back when he was front and center in the unconscionable set up to get Ethel Rosenberg the electric chair. Then for thirty years he was part of the grease for favorable zoning rulings, evading taxes and getting you off charges. His clients ranged from Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, Cardinal Spellman, the mob bosses and of course the Trumps. He gained national notoriety as the counsel to the bater and ruiner of reputations Senator Joe McCarthy where he ranted and raved as part of a duo. When McCarthy finally was disgraced by ethics charges in the Congress he carried on with his other activities as if nothing had happened. 

From the 1970’s through the eighth decade of the twentieth Century Trump relied heavily on the  influential wheeler dealer power broker of New York. According to Marie Brenner in her recent authoritative piece in Vanity Fair, Cohn claimed that Trump called him up to twenty times a day. He was central to much of Trump deals and his epidemic of litigation. Brenner quoting author Sam Roberts the triad of behavior that Cohn instilled in Trump was “Never settle or surrender”, “Counter attack counter sue immediately” and whatever the outcome “claim victory and never admit defeat”. Sound familiar?

However eventually Roy Cohn hit rock bottom, the homophobe, who was gay himself, was stricken with Aids. His misdeeds had simultaneously caught up with him and he was disbarred. However those who pitched up to give character evidence for him were part of the “whose who” of New York. Although Trump was one of them he all but abandoned his now dying powerless mentor. He could be of no further use to him. Cohn was variously quoted as reflecting that “Donald pisses ice water” and “Donald has ice in his veins”.

In an uncanny historical co incidence Cohn was involved with Roger Stone and Paul Mannafort. Stone is reported in Brenner’s article as recalling Trump’s response when he congratulated him on his Presidential victory, “Wouldn’t Roy love to see this moment? Roy do we miss him”. It is fair comment to say his Roy has returned in the form of William G, Barr who was about to deliver on the national scene what Roy had done for him locally. 

ATTORNEY GENERAL BARR - ROY COHN’S SUCCESSOR  

It is hard to believe that Barr has been in office for only a year as he has changed the rule of law, given the Presidency the legal backing to become an autocracy and unashamedly served Trump rather than the people of the United States to who he had sworn an oath to uphold the rule of law.

Barr was prepared to do for the POTUS what Jeff Seasons refused point blank had done - intervene in judicial proceedings on his behalf.  He would be his Robert Kennedy or Eric Holder or even better his Roy Cohn. Nothing in Barr’s history or even in his “job application” or Senate confirmation hearing could have led anyone to have believed that within a year the disgust and criticism he would be subject to. Although traditionally favoring Presidential executive power he was highly regarded by those that had worked with in the Justice Department from the Reagan years onwards. He had been the Attorney General in Bush 41’s administration. In between these stints he had been a hot shot corporate lawyer and had become a multimillionaire in the process. 

The appointment of Bill Barr to be Head of the Justice Department was generally hailed by all political sectors and previous members of the Justice Department. The latter reassured doubters that whatever one might think of his politics he was an “institutionalist”. It is an irony that those defenders are now in the vanguard of demanding that he step down. The doubters were fueled by an unsolicited twenty page memorandum that he had sent to the Justice Department in June 2018. He argued, inter alia, that the Mueller obstruction of justice investigation was “grossly irresponsible” and “potentially disastrous”. That coupled with his duplicitous evasive answers to some of the questions at his confirmation hearing led a number of Democrats to view his memorandum to the Justice Department, with copies to Trump’s legal team as a job application. 

From then on it has been downhill. What shocked Jay H. Ell half way down that slope was the revelation from Lev Parnas that what had made Trump so threatening and powerful was the appointment of Barr. Now Parnas is a hardened operator and he offered that no one was scared of Trump till Barr pitched up. Rudi Giuliani’s associate the indicted Parnas argued that he had saved his life by going public with his evidence of Trump’s direct involvement of the ongoing shakedown of President Zelensky.

Barr openly, deliberately and with malice of forethought misinterpreted the conclusions of the Mueller Report. This action was that much more illegitimate in that he used the President’s political phraseology to exculpate him. This knowing full well that “collusion”was not a legal term. He announced that Mueller had not found “collusion”. What Mueller had concluded was that he could not prove a criminal conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign. Barr ignored that Mueller provided evidence that the POTUS had sort and welcomed Russian interventions. That members of Trump’s campaign had held meetings with Russian operatives in order to coordinate with them on his campaign.  

With regard to the second component of Mueller’s report which had a strong case against Trump for obstruction of justice, Barr concluded the opposite in record time after Mueller had spent two years to come to this conclusion. Mueller who avoids publicity like an albino avoids sunlight publicized a letter that contradicted Barr’s misinterpretation. Barr then withheld the report for a month and finally once his narrative had become set in the public mind he released a redacted Mueller report.

Former Deputy Attorney General Ayer in his attack on Barr claimed that he had negated the post Watergate edict that America must be a government of laws not men. Barr the Cohn clone has given the legal opinion that Trump can defy Congress. In effect Barr has singlehandedly negated the sharing of powers by the three branches of government and all but paved the way for a dictator. Barr has even argued in court that Trump could not be charged if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue.

Barr became more and more unhinged and told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Obama Administration had “spied on” the Trump campaign. Barr has spent the better of the his year in office attempting to prove that Trump’s “Deep State” theory was correct and that the conclusion of the entire Intelligence Agencies of America were involved in this conspiracy which resulted in the Mueller investigation. Consequently those that tried to cover it up were not really covering it up because it didn’t happen. The upshot of this is an attempt to indict those civil servants who came to this conclusion and initiated the enquiry into the foreign intervention in the 2016 election. Barr apparently is involved in Trump’s ongoing attempts to get foreign help in 2020 and Zelensky was cajoled to consult him or Giuliani in regard to connection with collecting dirt on the Bidens.

AT THE END OF THE DAY

This scandal is unravelling quickly as one of three co equal branches of Government, the Judiciary, feels threatened. They are in a unique situation as they have a proud tradition of upholding the rule of law. The Justice Department alumni  are unanimously calling Barr’s Justice Department a threat to impartial justice and have called for Barr’s resignation following the withdrawal in protest by the four prosecutors in the Stone trial. Judge Berman in sentencing Stone to forty months in prison stated that the outside attempts at intervention were comletely inappropriate - the truth still matters. The Federal Judiciary Association itself are holding an emergency meeting. 

A looming crisis is emerging between Barr and the Southern NY Federal Attorney General’s office over the President’s personal lawyer Rudi Giuliani. Barr has established a “special channel” for Giuliani to dump the evidence he has amassed against the Bidens from disgraced Ukrainians. This at the same time that the NY Attorney General Office is far into the criminal investigation into Giuliani. The background to these happenings is that Barr has made it quite clear that he will decide rather than career prosecutors on all matters involving Trump directly or indirectly.

As this crisis evolves, Trump is under increasing pressure with an expose of the bank, Deutsche Bank, where he allegedly did his laundering with Russian money, hitting the best seller list, 

Trump recent string of clemencies and pardons of those convicted for lying under oath or corruption seem to be reinforcing his definition of what is “perfect”. Also it is the precedent he is creating to subsequently pardon the Stones, the Mannaforts, the Flynns….

On all these issues it is hard to capture any Republican legislator on camera. They are all hiding in their offices. Jay H. Ell rather hopes they have learned a belated lesson. 

IT ALWAYS ENDS THE SAME WAY……

How Roy Cohn would have laughed, how Roy Cohn would have laughed as Trump told each and everyone from journalists to the Judiciary “To go to hell”. Barr who has also been told to go to hell himself following his public warning on ABC to Trump to quit tweeting. However, unlike Cohn, he fancies himself as a pillar of legal rectitude and respectability not the fixer that he is. To rescue what is left of his legacy and persuade the thousands of apolitical former members of the Department of Justice that his actions don’t belie his words, he will ultimately resign if Trump doesn’t call it quits. Trump will say he fired him. For the moment the obsequious members of the Trump Court are begging his Highness to stop interefering in the Justice Department. To be continued but if precedent is anything to go by and Trump has not “learned his lesson”, Trump will discard him as he even did Cohn.

All this means as Trump prepares to pardon Stone how important it is for the Democrats to get their act together.