Tuesday, July 21, 2020

UNHINGED: Fred Trump mean, Fred Trump greedy, Fred Trump misanthropic. Damaged goods. In the White House. But Barr has no such obvious cause or excuse for being facilitator numero uno. Or does he?

 Unhinged | Definition of Unhinged by Merriam-Webster
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unhinged
Unhinged definition is - highly disturbed, unstable, or distraught.

That said, enough about Trump. What's the background that makes Barr the brigand turd that he is? The question hinges upon his being trained in the law to where he should know better. A starting point. That link gives a short list of who he is. But why? Does he have a Fred Trump in his insecurity closet? Who is he?

Such a question is not easy to unwind. Expect UPDATING of this post from time to time. However, just as a teaser, a doth protest too much wonderment:

Statement Regarding U.S. Attorney General William Barr

A clarification regarding William P. Barr and the Prelature of Opus Dei.

Press releases and statements

Our normal policy is not to identify members (or non-members) of the Prelature, but rather to leave it to each individual to make known this information. Nevertheless, because there have been recent news accounts referring to the U.S. Attorney General, William Barr, as a member of Opus Dei, we would like to clarify that Mr. Barr is not a member of Opus Dei nor has he ever been one.

Normal policy, but hey, gotta say? Well, what ties does he have to the organization? Strangely, it seems that is all Opus Dei has to say about Bill Barr, inciting more curiosity than it answers. (They could have said the same, "... not any official membership ..." about Jeffrey Epstein, but restraint is the better part of valor since nobody's speculating that way, yet at least.)

What? Some things are better left unsaid? Come on. Be real.

Read a speech Barr gave to the Notre Dame law community (posted online by the Barr "Justice" Department) and read a quite gentle short critique.

You have to wonder, or you can just go along to get along.

NOTE: As stated above, if the motivation remains at Crabgrass, there may be more posting here about Barr. If so, it would most likely be via UPDATING to this post. So check back from time to time.

Closing for now, a websearch; and a 45 sec YouTube video of Barr just before Layfeyette Park was brutally cleared for Trump's stupendously offensive backfiring bible stunt. Barr checking things out, surveying the lay of the land, before a gross curtailment of citizens exercising civil rights. That video gives the impression Barr dislikes citizens exercising civil rights and will reach for any lame excuse - even one the video does not validate. Or he was doing as told. It is not easy to distinguish, and overlap - dislike and lame excuse making while being an obedient toady - is not to be ruled out.

_________UPDATE_________
Church and State published about Opus Dei, and DC power forces, item title: "Opus Dei’s Influence Is Felt in All of Washington’s Corridors of Power" By Betty Clermont | 22 January 2019. With that claim, it is of interest that no other individual is known at Crabgrass to have been expressly disavowed by that operation, as was the case with Barr.

Sins of the father shaping the son? Vanity Fair published its lengthy chatty [i.e., very wordy] thing about Barr's father Donald Barr as headmaster of a tony New York private school, Dalton, and how he during Vietnam war days may have shaped son Billy.

Late in the VF item, you can search the all-CAPS heading, 'On watching William Barr testify: “I thought, This man cares deeply about his place in history. Billy has a score to settle.'" This quoting:
The year before, [Dalton headmaster Donald] Barr had made it clear how livid he was about the Columbia riots. His son William had been a freshman there, and in a column for Vogue, the elder Barr decried the middle-class students who “go to demonstrations by taxi,” dismissing the protests of Columbia’s radical Students for a Democratic Society and their opposition to a quasi-segregated gym the university wanted to build in Harlem. Donald Barr expressed his rage in print, noting that he was frightened of the anarchy and the mob tactics of the New Left as well as their moves at Columbia to try to stop ROTC funding from going to national defense. “Parents,” he wrote in a McCall’s essay, “are directly financing the New Left revolution and the drug cop-out, and indirectly they are supporting the black militants.” At the height of the Black Power movement, Barr came out against “the black militants…who are tired of asking for a little share and are going to take a big share of Whitey’s good life and education.”

Barr’s opposition to the chaos wrought by the protesters was echoed by his son. “Our next-door neighbor in our building was the acting president of Columbia,” William Barr would later tell an acquaintance. “He tried to take a tough stand and came under a lot of pressure from the attackers. I felt: If the leaders had taken a stronger stance, up front, it would not have degenerated so much. That year, 1968, was formative for me.”

The draft lottery, announced in 1969, had traumatized families with sons in college—including the Barrs. “Billy’s mother told me how upset she was that he might be going to war,” Semel remembered. “It was a time of body bags and students moving to Canada,” Friedan said.

Freedman, the editor of the Daltonian in 1970, tangled with the headmaster over the political slant of the school paper. “We had called for a strike in support of the moratorium,” Freedman said. “I was called into Barr’s office and he began to read me my college recommendation—this was before I applied. ‘Danny is not such an exemplary student but he is a real leader,’ Barr read in a tone that was both condescending and menacing. I pushed back and said he could threaten me, but I wasn’t calling off the strike. Then I ran out of his office and found the social studies teacher. I cried in his arms. I was that upset.”

“I would be called in periodically by Headmaster Barr,” Edelman remembered. “I would be interrogated about any number of things. I was having to constantly remind him that students had constitutional rights. There was a constant monitoring of our student press and of outside activities that involved going to demonstrations or organizing for demonstrations. One time, at the end of a harangue, he said, ‘Well, Marc, I would rather have a little Lenin like you than some of these little Timothy Learys we have got here.’ That was his way of saying that I was pretty terrible but at least I didn’t seem to be a big druggie.”

In November, Friedan and his friends took off for the Vietnam War moratorium, sleeping on church floors. When they came back, Barr was uncharacteristically quiet. Their college applications were in the mail. Friedan and Slon had assumed that as A students with superior SATs, they would have their choice of schools in the Ivy League. Their parents had been under the same impression. But how naive could they have been? It was a moment in America when colleges, worried about campus unrest, carefully vetted applications for would-be agitators. What’s more, Betty Friedan was a vocal member of a group of Dalton parents who were trying to have Barr dismissed.

In April, Jonathan Friedan, who had applied to eight schools, was rejected from each and every one, including his safety choices. Slon, the valedictorian, was admitted only to Swarthmore and one of his safety schools. The Slons and the Friedans immediately suspected Barr had sabotaged the boys’ applications, flagging their sons as agitators who had incited their peers.

“I was in shock,” Friedan recalled. “And Barr immediately called me into his office. He read me a glowing recommendation letter. The first thing he said was, ‘It wasn’t me.’?” Had Barr felt remorse? Did he worry about his own liability—or the school’s—and therefore want to deflect possible legal action? “My mother [Betty Friedan] worried that it was her fault—that her big opinions and personality had frightened the colleges. It was a traumatic period. My parents were going through a divorce, and my father wanted to sue Dalton.”

One of Friedan’s extracurricular activities had involved organizing an antidrug program, affiliated with Columbia. That summer, the university agreed to admit him, and though he attended for two semesters, he dropped out, thrown off his axis by what had happened to him at Dalton. He spent what he called a few “wandering years” working as a carpenter and a commercial fisherman in the Pacific Northwest. “It was a blessing in a way,” he told me. “I was able to confront life without the scrim of all the privilege I had grown up with.”

Later, Friedan went back to Columbia, where he finished his engineering degree, but his mother was determined to find out what happened. “A Harvard trustee somehow was able to penetrate the admissions office—at least this is what my mother told me,” Friedan said. (Betty Friedan died in 2006.) And what he discovered was shocking. “There was a long letter Barr had written accusing me of being a rabble-rouser and a troublemaker. He said I was ‘a latent homosexual’ and ‘could be a danger to the school.’?”

Years later, while working on a biography of Betty Friedan, writer Judith Hennessee confronted Barr about his possible role in her son’s college rejections. At first he denied it. Then he admitted that, in fact, he had had some input that was “laudatory.” Jonathan Friedan, looking back at the exchange between Hennessee and Barr, felt that Barr was trying to suggest that “it was Betty who had made all the trouble, meddling in the admissions offices. But my mother? Calling eight admissions offices? Out of the question.” Stories about the alleged sabotage circulated within the Dalton community. But by then, many of the parents, board members, and alumni had had enough. The man who had brought such prestige and robust innovation to Dalton had become insular, autocratic, and tone-deaf to the competing needs of the stakeholders in the school. It took Dalton parent Richard Ravitch—a real estate titan who later became the head of the city’s transit authority—to devise a strategy to get Barr out.

Ravitch, the head of the trustees, polled the parents and teachers and discovered, he would tell me, “a pattern of behavior that was troubling. I came on to run the board after Barr had won the right to stay at the school by a single vote. Many on the board resigned over it. The teachers hated him. The parents disliked him.” Barr, at the time, was backed by at least one influential trustee, a sympathetic litigator who challenged the bylaws of the school, discovering a loophole that allowed him a seat on the board. The mandate of the PTA was taken away. There were legal maneuvers meant to call into question the very authority of the board. “This actually went to court,” Ravitch recalled. “The head of the PTA was in favor of Barr and they litigated: Did the PTA have the right to impeach the PTA president? The courts said yes, they did.”

“There were frequent screaming matches at PTA meetings,” Sarah Crichton said. “One night,” Semel recalled, “all of these well-mannered parents were stomping their feet and pounding the floor.”

Ravitch recounted the denouement. “I brought in the dean of the Harvard School of Education and the head of Teachers College to evaluate Barr. They came back and said that Barr was not the right headmaster for Dalton.” It was a humiliating end to Barr’s years at the school. “I fired him. It took years to get him out, but we did it.”

Barr, as part of an arrangement, announced his resignation; the Dalton yearbook, playing nice, had this to say: “The whole of Dalton owes a great debt to Donald Barr…. We are all greatly saddened by his leaving.” Barr found a new job running Hackley, a more conservative private school in Westchester County. In an interview with the New York Times, he said, “Kids up here are…better-natured and less bitchy.” It was a relief, Barr insisted, to be liberated from the “ego display and radical chic of private-school kids in Manhattan.”

William Barr was very much aware of the Dalton scandal; his father’s concerted campaign to save his job was covered widely in the Times and elsewhere. One can only speculate how much this saga affected Bill Barr in later life—or helped solder his father-son fealty.

Soon after Donald Barr left Dalton, he surprised many who knew him by publishing Space Relations, an odd sci-fi novel which imagined the kingdom of Kossar, a hellscape where power, drugs, and boredom have turned the ruling caste into vicious sexual predators. The hero, John Craig—“a rising young Earth diplomat” who is captured and enslaved—eventually triumphs, restoring virginity and monogamy to the colonized.

William Barr recently confided to an associate that he has never read the book, even as he pointed out that it was part of his father’s personality to be a renegade, often using earthy phrases to provoke—such as “the sneeze of the genitals.”

Barr was also said to have noted that of all the lessons he learned from his father, the most overriding one was the fierce pride he took in being a contrarian. Barr would later tell one colleague, “My father once said to me that we have been used to being different and it doesn’t bother us at all. I have always been in situations where I had no problem being politically different. I don’t govern my life by polls or by what other people think about what I do.”

Indeed. This, then, is the same Bill Barr who once argued that President Johnson, not Congress, had the overriding authority to determine the military course of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Twenty years later, during the Iran-Contra crisis that rocked Ronald Reagan’s second term, Barr, then a White House policy adviser, voiced the view that administration members should be granted pardons for their roles in the ill-fated arms-for-hostages deal. As assistant attorney general and then A.G. under George H.W. Bush, Barr pushed back against a proposed independent probe of Bush insiders, earning the epithet “Coverup-General” Barr.

In June 2018, he wrote a voluminous memo, unsolicited, that made the case that as chief executive, Donald Trump—if he had not committed crimes—should not be investigated for obstructing justice. (President Bill Clinton’s impeachment had been warranted, in Barr’s estimation, because Clinton had violated the law.) Then, after Trump appointed Barr as attorney general, his stiff-arm summary of the Mueller Report was firm and categorical—and consistent with his past stances. He cast aside the nuanced findings of the special counsel and declared that even if the Russian government had tampered with the U.S. presidential election, the nation’s chief executive and his team had basically been cleared of any complicity or wrongdoing. And finally, Trump’s depiction of Barr and Rudy Giuliani as his “personal envoys” (as described in the whistle-blower’s account) appears to be the coup de grâce: the president characterizing his attorney general and personal lawyer as conduits for foreign governments assisting Trump against his political enemies.

For Barr’s schoolmate Garrick Beck, there is no question how much Alfred Briggs—Horace Mann’s high school history teacher—would have approved of Trump’s Justice Department, which has seen defections of career federal lawyers who have refused to serve at the whims of a truculent president who publicly defies the rule of law, spews racists tropes, and shatters judicial norms. It was Briggs, after all, who was known to say, “We need more Roy Cohns in the world.” One statement of Barr’s from the 1990s bears repeating here. After a stint as George H.W. Bush’s attorney general, Barr participated in the Miller Center’s oral history of the administration. At one point, he spoke eloquently about the president that he and his cohorts had served, someone they considered to be “a man of honor, a man of character, and a man they were actually proud to have as the president.” One can only wonder: Does he now feel the same about his tenure with Donald J. Trump?

Dan Freedman remembered an encounter he’d had 20 years after he’d graduated from high school: the day he met William Barr, who was then George H.W. Bush’s head of the White House Office of Legal Counsel. At the time, Freedman was reporting for Hearst newspapers. “Barr,” he recalled, “had already written a famous legal memo asserting that presidents could not be indicted. I thought, This is Donald Barr’s son! I walked in to interview him and I said, ‘Your father was my enemy and we fought each other tooth and nail.’ He deadpanned and said, ‘I hope that won’t influence your coverage of the Justice Department.’ He was a straight shooter—and I respected him.”

The two would interact from time to time; Barr was once Freedman’s guest at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. “When he was appointed by Trump, I thought, Trump isn’t getting the person he thought he was getting,” said Freedman, who respected Barr’s sincerity and his consistent positions on issues of law. “Now, I am not sure what to think.”

Freedman shared one final memory. On the day in 1991 that William Barr was sworn in as attorney general, Freedman was invited to the ceremony. There, he encountered Donald Barr, then in his 70s. It was the first time he had seen him since their Dalton days.

“Enough time had gone by,” Freedman recalled. “I went up to him and shook his hand. I said, ‘You must be very proud of your son.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I am very proud that all the things I stood for have come to fruition. Now the executive branch has finally embraced my way of thinking.’ It was clear to me that Donald Barr felt completely vindicated.”
The quote is long, the VF item much longer. While less the sheer bastard of a man Fred Trump was, housing discrimination anti-racism lawsuit in New York when Fred and Donald were represented by Roy Cohn with the suit settled, Donald Barr was a man with his own pride, pitfalls, and prejudices - such as against the Vietnam era Columbia U protest events.  Like father, like son? Lafayette Park civil demonstration worming under the AG skin much as dad had been afflicted over Columbia U being an earlier site of citizen unrest, openly expressed, to the dismay of some, dad included.

__________FURTHER UPDATE__________
How does this WaPo report grab you? Barr's respect for rule of law, and his respect for diversity of the U.S. population, when things go not his way, not Trump's way, so it's the highway back to the jug while Flynn and Stone skated free of doing a day of time:
Michael Cohen’s book to allege Trump made racist comments about Obama and Nelson Mandela, lawsuit says
By Shayna Jacobs - July 21, 2020 at 1:23 PM EDT

The lawsuit seeks Cohen’s immediate release from federal custody. He was rearrested July 9, less than two months after he was approved to serve the remainder of his sentence on home confinement because of the coronavirus pandemic. His attorneys allege that Cohen’s First Amendment rights were violated when he was detained at the federal courthouse in Manhattan during a meeting with probation officers, who had asked him to sign a gag order prohibiting him from speaking to the media or publishing a book while serving the rest of his sentence.

Cohen’s suit names Attorney General William P. Barr and Federal Bureau of Prisons officials, in their official capacities. The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in the Southern District of New York, and an initial hearing was scheduled for Thursday.

Neither the Justice Department nor the White House responded to requests for comment.

In the court filings, Cohen said his book will contain “my firsthand experiences and observations based on my decade-long employment and relationship with Mr. Trump and his family, both before and after he was elected.” [...] “In particular, my book will provide graphic and unflattering details about the President’s behavior behind closed doors,” Cohen wrote as part of the court filings. The memoir “describes the President’s pointedly anti-Semitic remarks and virulently racist remarks against such Black leaders as President Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela, neither of whom he viewed as real leaders or as worthy of respect by virtue of their race,” Cohen wrote.

[...] Authorities have said Cohen was taken back into custody because he refused to wear an ankle monitor, a claim his legal team disputes. Cohen’s lawyers also contend he did not refuse to acknowledge the media policy presented to him before his arrest, but rather that he expressed concerns about it and asked for an amendment.

Cohen’s legal team, including lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union and former federal prosecutor Danya Perry, allege that his home confinement was revoked because of his book plans. [...] The order he was asked to sign required “no engagement of any kind with the media, including print, TV, film, books, or any other form of media/news.” It also prohibited “all social media platforms” and barred family or friends from posting on his behalf.

The provision was crafted specifically for Cohen and was not part of any standard procedure, his lawyers argue.

Cohen’s lawsuit references recent efforts to block the publication of books by Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton and the president’s niece Mary L. Trump. Both accounts are intensely critical of Trump and disclose biting allegations of improper behavior. Cohen’s lawyers allege the effort to silence him is part of a pattern.

In Bolton’s case, the Justice Department had sued on behalf of the administration, [...]

Cohen recently received a cease-and-desist letter from Charles Harder, the attorney who challenged Mary Trump. Harder said Cohen was bound by a nondisclosure agreement, which Cohen disputes. One of Cohen’s lawyers asked for a copy of the agreement but it was never sent, the lawsuit says.

Harder could not immediately be reached for comment.

Cohen has been held in solitary confinement at a federal prison in Otisville, N.Y., since he was taken back into custody earlier this month, the court documents say. [...] 
[italics added] Barr has to know the law against prior restraint of speech, just as he has to know the law allowing freedom of peaceful assembly and the right to challenge government overreach. Protest against police brutality was, per order of Barr, reportedly suppressed by federal agent brutality immediately prior to the Trump bible stunt.

This, while the AG by law, is the government's lawyer, not the president's nor a personal advocate for any particular individual within the government. He is not Flynn's lawyer, nor Stone's. Nor Paul Manafort's.

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