Sen. Lindsey Graham took to the Sunday talk shows to bask in the Senate’s nullification of Donald Trump’s impeachment for using the tools of his power to extort the Ukrainian government into providing him “dirt” on a Democratic election opponent. It is not just Trump who appears to feel unleashed; Graham, too, was eager to describe the next steps of the administration-led descent into American fascism.
A first step: Trump “private lawyer” Rudy Giuliani’s smear campaign against the Bidens is now moving into Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department. Whatever Barr’s prior pretenses may have been, Barr is now explicitly establishing the means by which Rudy’s propaganda can be filtered into official “investigations” of Trump’s targeted enemies.
Throughout the House and press investigations into the Ukraine scandal, Trump Attorney General Barr either refused comment or denied that he was involved with the Giuliani efforts, despite Trump specifically naming both Barr and Giuliani as contacts for the Ukrainian president in the “transcript” of Trump’s now-infamous phone call. Whether this was a lie or not—and it is almost certainly a direct lie by a complicit Barr—such pretenses have now vanished. Continue reading.