**Barr’s Master Class In Disinformation: ‘Controlling The Narrative’s The Thing’***

Photo by Michal Matlon on Unsplash

This week’s bombshell report in The New York Times, How Barr’s Quest to Find Flaws in the Russia Inquiry Unraveled, reminds us, yet again, of the destruction William P. Barr wrought on the rule of law by politicizing the Trump Department of Justice and, from the DOJ’s highest roost, weaponizing it against truthtellers and facts unpleasant to Trump and his millions of disciples. That the false narrative ultimately unspooled is no surprise. But the damage was already done. Controlling the narrative that fed and reinforced Trump’s distortions and his following’s confirmation bias was the thing.

The Times article reveals more detail about what we already knew was Barr’s vast disinformation campaign.

In an interview with conservative outlet Townhall.com shortly before the last presidential election, then Attorney General Barr described himself in projected, albeit thinly veiled, code. Reading the following, one could easily mistake Barr himself for the object he derides:

“They’re a collection of liars and they know exactly what they’re doing,” asserting that the press’s lying to the American public for partisan reasons was “destructive to our Republic.”

“The press . . . has dropped any pretense of professional objectivity and are political actors, highly partisan who try to shape what they’re reporting to achieve a political purpose and support a political narrative that has nothing to do with the truth,” Barr said.

“They’re very mendacious about it. It’s very destructive to our Republic; it’s very destructive to the Democratic system to have that, especially being so monolithic. It’s contributing to a lot of the intensity and partisanship.”

AG Barr Rips National Media as a ‘Collection of Liars’ (emphasis added).

Every fair-minded person who reads the foregoing recognizes the perfectly parallel example in Barr of what he claimed, hypocritically, to disdain in the media: his use of a monolithic perch to lie to the American public to shape a highly partisan political narrative that had nothing to do with the truth — his “shameless misrepresentation” of the special counsel’s findings in which he “dishonestly obscur[ed] Trump’s efforts to obstruct the special counsel’s probe . . . . Barr flatly distorted the Justice Department inspector general’s findings that the investigation was lawfully predicated.”

William Barr’s new defense of Trump actually unmasks his corruption.

*Acrylic on Panel, Richard J Van Wagoner, Courtesy of Van Wagoner Family Trust***

In his brilliant essay, Rick Wilson explained Barr’s primary role in the Trump administration:

“Every great authoritarian enterprise comes to its apotheosis more from the soulless, mechanical efficiency of armies of bureaucrats and police than from the rantings of whatever Great Leader or revolutionary firebrand mounts the podium. A four-hour, spittle-flecked speech in Berlin, Havana, Moscow, or Kigali is, in the end, less consequential than the memos and slide decks of competent people given over to the service of evil. . . .

“Barr knew what he was doing when he claimed . . . that the Trump campaign was ‘spied on.’ He was teeing up the upcoming show trials of Trump’s ‘enemies’ in the Department of Justice and the FBI that the president’s craziest supporters in Congress, and at his rallies, have been screaming for. Together with allies like Lindsey Graham, Barr needs to not only feed Trump’s revanchist agenda, but to throw up chaff to confuse the results of the Mueller report that may somehow see the light of day.

“Barr is also openly weaponizing the Department of Justice to potentially sully the future public, private, and legal testimony of members of the DOJ, FBI, and intelligence community who have seen the damning data on Trump and his claque. The goal is to intimidate anyone who would investigate Trump’s vast portfolio of corruption and obstruction of justice, both before and after he took office. It goes far, far beyond the Russia probe; it is an investigation that by its nature aims to terrify all future witnesses and whistleblowers into silence.

“By acceding to Trump’s demands for political revenge and refusing to call out the language of witch hunts, crooked cops, angry Democrats, and treasonous enemies within, Barr sent a message to every member of the DOJ and intelligence community — even before reaching his own investigative conclusion — that they can either follow the Trump line, or potentially face persecution and prosecution.”

Bill Barr Is the Most Dangerous Man in America. See also Barr Has Turned Projection, Lying, and Hypocrisy Into Performance Art.

*Watercolor, Richard J Van Wagoner, Courtesy of Van Wagoner Family Trust***

This week’s NYT Report, investigative journalism at its finest by all accounts, shares new details of Barr’s collusion with John Durham to weaponize the Department of Justice against intelligence and law enforcement agencies in his attempt to control the narrative — discredit the lawful predicate for opening the investigation into the Trump 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia and feed his and Trump’s false claim that Trump was the victim of a deep state conspiracy.

After four long years of investigating the predicate for the investigation, much longer than the Mueller investigation and at a cost of $6.5 million, Barr’s and Durham’s collective failure was epic. Again, success or failure wasn’t really the point. Controlling the narrative was.

You will recall that beyond Barr’s repeated public deceptions about the Mueller report and its findings, he interfered in the sentencing of Roger Stone, dropped charges against former Trump NSA Michael Flynn who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and helped Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani “funnel bogus intel on Biden and Ukraine to the president.” Bill Barr’s revealing defense of the Flynn decision.

Given Barr’s answer to how he thinks history will remember his actions — “Well, history is written by the winners. So it largely depends on who’s writing the history” — setting straight the historical record matters, even though the country may never fully recover from the damage he inflicted through his disinformation campaign to control the narrative.

Durham, whose special counsel status was secretly expanded, has come up with exactly no deep state conspiracy, no intelligence community spying on the Trump campaign, and previously undisclosed evidence of Trump’s financial improprieties courtesy of Italian authorities. Bill Barr asked Italian officials to discredit Russia probe — they responded with evidence linking Trump to crimes.

Durham also initiated two tangential prosecutions, one against a Clinton-Democratic-linked lawyer for allegedly lying to the F.B.I. when he passed on a tip about possible connections between Trump and Russia, and another against the primary source for the Trump-Russia dossier. Both prosecutions ended in not guilty verdicts on all charges.

He was able to secure one conviction, a guilty plea of a low-level FBI lawyer who doctored an email used to justify surveillance of a former Trump campaign aid. The lawyer served no time in jail.

New revelations, quoted from the NYT Report, include:

· Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it.

· Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued.

· There were deeper internal fractures on the Durham team than previously known. The publicly unexplained resignation in 2020 of his №2 and longtime aide, Nora R. Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics. A year later, two more prosecutors strongly objected to plans to indict a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign based on evidence they warned was too flimsy, and one left the team in protest of Mr. Durham’s decision to proceed anyway. (A jury swiftly acquitted the lawyer.)

(Emphasis added.)

As with most things, the devil is in the details, and the NYT Report gives specifics on each new revelation.

*Oil on Panel, Richard J Van Wagoner, Courtesy of Steven C. Clark and David Wiehe***

A recently seated congress with a slim Republican majority in the House is set to begin the promised Benghazi-style investigations using Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan’s newly created House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

See Decoding the “Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government” (“Rigorous congressional oversight of the executive branch, including the Justice Department and FBI, is of great value to our democracy. Abject political abuse of that oversight system is of no value, but instead a threat.”)

On Friday, Just Security published Douglas London’s exceptional analysis and discussion of Jim Jordan’s new subcommittee. Rep. Jordan’s Dangerous New Panel is Nothing Like the Church Committee. London, who served for 34 years in the CIA’s Clandestine Service, explained:

“[U]p until my 2019 retirement, with few exceptions, I found that oversight members acted responsibly, at least behind the closed doors of our engagements. Similarly, and again with a few exceptions, members were unlikely to leak or make political fodder from what they came to learn, good or bad. The CIA took its deserved lumps when appropriate, but also came away at times with even more support than had been requested for critical initiatives.

“Jordan’s committee will not be oversight. Rather, it promises to be the very politicized weapon it claims interest in exposing. The body’s spectacle and powers pose dangerous implications for the ability of the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities to effectively conduct their mission.”

London gives valuable insight into the world of clandestine intelligence services and draws distinct comparisons between those of the United States and Russia. Using the “wasteful Durham probe” as illustrative, London says:

“During Trump’s tenure, then-Attorney General William Barr appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham as special counsel to investigate potential misconduct against the president or his associates in the Trump-Russia probe. Beginning in 2019, Durham was expected to reveal the deep state Trump claimed had created ‘the hoax’ of Russia’s election interference and enmity toward the United States. The Durham investigation had cost at least $6.5 million through the end of 2022 but resulted in the conviction of only a single low-level FBI lawyer, who avoided jail by pleading guilty to doctoring a 2017 email that the FBI used to justify the surveillance of a former Trump campaign aide.

“Durham had complete access to all of the intelligence, operational information, and personnel involved in the intelligence community and to law enforcement assessments and products, details including the nation’s most sensitive secrets and capabilities. Moreover, then Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, in an effort to assist Trump’s 2020 campaign, declassified nearly 1,000 pages of intelligence material for Durham’s use. He did so over CIA Director Gina Haspel’s objection, an action that given the scale and the topic, Russia, put sources at risk and jeopardized the cooperation of agents and the CIA’s foreign government partners. Still, as the New York Times just reported, ‘after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Mr. Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep state plot alleged by Mr. Trump and suspected by Mr. Barr.’

“In addition to taking intelligence and law enforcement personnel offline from their work to answer questions, Durham’s inquiry struck fear among underpaid, junior-level intelligence and law enforcement professionals who had worked on the investigations, collection operations, and ensuing assessments that his probe targeted.

“Civil servants, some of whom struggle just to make ends meet, suddenly had to concern themselves with the cost of expensive legal counsel and the threat of professional consequences for work that diverged from the president’s narrative. ‘Go back to school,’ Trump angrily exclaimed, when the U.S. Intelligence Community’s 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment challenged many of his claims.

“It’s hard to imagine Jordan’s new committee finding evidence of politically motivated malfeasance in the U.S. Intelligence Community that eluded a determined, experienced, well-trained, and well-staffed Durham, who operated with the sitting president’s support, unrestricted access, and essentially unlimited resources. But that doesn’t mean the committee won’t cause havoc, at minimum posing a worrisome distraction and consuming time and resources the intelligence and law enforcement communities could better use to protect the country.

“The greatest danger, though, is the impact on these communities’ protection from political pressure. Professionals dedicated to national service will have to assess the risks of telling it like it is and speaking truth to power. Even those at the bottom of the professional ladder might find themselves having to lawyer up and consider the prospect of subsequent purges depending on who is in office. It also doesn’t make for good buzz among the talented Americans these agencies are trying to recruit into their ranks who might think twice about signing up.

“The GOP and the American people need to reflect on what type of national security institutions they want: Russia’s failed system or a cadre of professionals committed to country rather than party and guided by the Constitution and their oaths. The wrong choice will ultimately be borne by us all in blood and treasure.”

*Watercolor, Richard J Van Wagoner, Courtesy of Van Wagoner Family Trust***

For Kevin McCarthy, who defied a Jan. 6 Select Committee subpoena, Jim Jordan, who defied a Jan. 6 Select Committee subpoena, James Comer, and the members of the newly created House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, changing and controlling the narrative’s the thing.

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*My brother the very talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner. Rob’s second novel, a beautifully written suspense drama that takes place in Utah, Wyoming, and Norway, dropped on November 17, 2020. Available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple Bookstore and your favorite local bookshop, this novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. I have read the novel and listened to the audio version twice. It is a literary masterpiece. The Contortionists is not, however, for the faint of heart.

**Richard J Van Wagoner is my father. His list of honors, awards and professional associations is extensive. He was Professor Emeritus (Painting and Drawing), Weber State University, having served three Appointments as Chair of the Department of Visual Arts there. He guest-lectured and instructed at many universities and juried numerous shows and exhibitions. He was invited to submit his work as part of many shows and exhibitions, and his work was exhibited in many traveling shows domestically and internationally. My daughter Angela Moore, a professional photographer, photographed more than 500 pieces of my father’s work. On behalf of the Van Wagoner Family Trust, she is in the process of compiling a collection of his artwork. The photographs of my father’s art reproduced in https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner are hers.