Books

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      One Damn Thing After Another review: Bill Barr’s self-serving screed

      by

      One Damn Thing After Another review: Bill Barr’s self-serving screed Donald Trump’s attorney general wants you to know the bad stuff wasn’t his fault and the media and Democrats were nastyTake Bill Barr literally, but not too seriously. One day before his memoir was published, the former attorney general told NBC he would vote for Donald Trump for president in 2024, if Trump were the Republican nominee. For all Barr’s protestations about how the man was unsuited to the job, he continues to resist being banished from Trump’s garden.William Barr: Trump is full of bull – but I’ll vote for himRead moreSaid differently, Barr’s memoirs are best viewed as just one more installment of Trump-alumni performance art.As a read, One Damn Thing After Another delivers the expected. Barr gives Trump a thumbs-up for galvanizing the Republican white working-class base, satisfying social conservatives and meeting the demands of donors.At the same time, Barr lets us know suburbia came to find Trump offensive and insists that in the end, Trump crashed and burned despite Barr’s best efforts. Ultimately, like everyone else the 45th president ceased to find useful, Barr was simply spat out – a reality his memoir does at least acknowledge.The book is informative – to a point. As expected, Barr omits relevant facts and engages in score-settling. It’s a first-person tell-all, after all.Barr records the suicide in federal custody of Jeffrey Epstein, predator and friend of presidents Trump and Clinton. He makes no mention of the fact that his own father, Donald Barr, gave Epstein one of his first jobs, as a high-school math teacher at the Dalton school, a tony Manhattan establishment. Even then, former students have said, Epstein creeped out young women.Barr was attorney general for the first time under George HW Bush. In his book, he attacks Democrats and the media for their pursuit and coverage of “Iraqgate” and the US government’s extension of loan guarantees to Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the invasion of Kuwait. Barr singles out William Safire, the late Nixon speechwriter and New York Times columnist, for special condemnation.A Clinton administration investigation cleared Barr of legal wrongdoing – a fact he rightly emphasizes. But he neglects to mention that in October 1989, Bush signed National Security Directive 26, which effectively boosted Iraq as a counterbalance to Iran. From there, things didn’t exactly work out as planned. The president and his team overly emboldened Saddam. His unprovoked land grab was an unintended consequence of a policy pivot.Barr lets us know he grew up in a loving home, a product of a Catholic education, a player of the bagpipes. He attended the Horace Mann school in Riverdale, an affluent part of the Bronx. As Barr notes, the school was liberal and predominately Jewish.As a Columbia undergraduate, he stood against Vietnam war protesters. His antipathy toward the radical left is longstanding. He joined the Majority Coalition, a group of students and faculty members who defended the main administration building. As recorded by the late Diana Trilling, some rioters had no qualms about trashing the school, then demanding academic honors.Unstated by Barr is the operative campus divide, “Staten Island v Scarsdale”: conservative, often Catholic students from the blue-collar outer borough versus liberal, often Jewish students from the well-heeled suburbs. Though far from working class, Barr was firmly in the first camp.Barr came by his conservatism organically. His father served in the second world war. His older brother fought in Vietnam. In 1964, Barr helped his dad distribute campaign literature for Barry Goldwater’s ill-fated presidential campaign. Amid the turmoil of the 60s, Barr yearned for the stability of yesterday. He still does: he is a culture warrior in a Brooks Brothers suit.He takes shots at James Comey and Robert Mueller, key figures in the Russia investigation. Of course he does. He also takes aim at Lawrence Walsh, special counsel in Iran-Contra. Barr accuses Walsh, now dead, of torpedoing Bush’s campaign comeback in ’92 by filing election-eve charges against Casper Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary. Barr’s ire is understandable.But he also offers up a full-throated defense of his own decision to drop government charges against Michael Flynn, despite the Trump ally’s guilty plea to lying to the FBI and, later, demand for martial law. Furthermore, Barr says nary a word in response to the volley of criticism he earned from the federal bench.In spring 2020, Judge Reggie Walton, a George W Bush appointee, “seriously” questioned the attorney general’s integrity and credibility. To drive home the point, to describe Barr’s behavior over the Russia report, Walton deployed words like “distorted” and “misleading”.Emmett Sullivan scorned Barr’s legal gymnastics over Flynn. Amy Berman Jackson ruled that the government had to turn over a memorandum it relied upon in declining to prosecute Trump. Her take was lacerating. Not only had Barr been personally “disingenuous” by announcing his decision before Mueller’s report was released, Berman Jackson said, but the Department of Justice itself had been “disingenuous to this court”.Insurgency review: how Trump took over the Republican partyRead moreSuffice to say, Walton, Sullivan and Berman Jackson do not appear in Barr’s book.As luck would have it, though, Barr does take aim at Joe Biden for his stance on Russia. “Demonizing [Vladimir] Putin is not a foreign policy,” Barr writes, nor “the way grown-ups should think”.Really? Looks like Barr didn’t have an invasion of Ukraine on his bingo card. Trump’s admiration for Putin, of course, continues.As it turned out, Barr wasn’t alone in spilling his guts to NBC. In a letter to Lester Holt, its lead anchor, Trump wrote of his former attorney general: “He is groveling to the media, hoping to gain acceptance that he doesn’t deserve.”So true.
      One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General is published in the US by HarperCollins
      TopicsBooksWilliam BarrUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationRepublicansPolitics booksreviewsReuse this content More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump thought US troops were in Ukraine in 2017, ex-ambassador says in book

      by

      Trump thought US troops were in Ukraine in 2017, ex-ambassador says in bookMarie Yovanovitch, who was fired by Trump in 2019, reveals details of then president’s Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian counterpart At an Oval Office meeting with the then Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, in 2017, Donald Trump asked his national security adviser if US troops were in Donbas, territory claimed by Russian-backed separatists, which Vladimir Putin last month used as pretext for a full and bloody invasion.Describing the meeting in a new book, the then US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, writes: “An affirmative answer to that question would have meant that the United States was in a shooting war with Russia.”Likelihood of criminal charges against Trump rising, experts sayRead moreYovanovitch adds: “I pondered whether it was better to interpret Trump’s question as suggesting that the commander-in-chief thought it possible that US troops were fighting Russia-led forces, or instead as an indicator that the president wasn’t clear which country was on the other side of the war against Ukraine.“Either way, it was disconcerting that he did not seem to know where we had our troops – his troops – deployed. I could only imagine what the Ukrainians were thinking.”Trump fired Yovanovitch in 2019, amid attempts to withhold military aid to Ukraine in return for political dirt on Joe Biden and other rivals, an affair which fueled Trump’s first impeachment.Yovanovitch describes the Trump-Poroshenko meeting in Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir, which will be published on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.The book comes three weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which followed years of proxy warfare in the east of the country.Yovanovitch also writes that Trump told Poroshenko Ukraine “was a corrupt country, which he knew because a Ukrainian friend at Mar-a-Lago had told him”.Trump, she says, also said: “Crimea was Russian, as the locals spoke Russian”.Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, a move never recognized by the international community. Yovanovitch writes that Trump’s words were “surprising enough to hear from one head of state to another” but Trump topped them by asking his national security adviser, HR McMaster, whether US troops were in Donbas.“Everyone kept a poker face on,” she writes.Echoing descriptions of Trump’s favored working techniques by multiple close aides, Yovanovitch says Poroshenko deployed “visual aids, which Trump really liked” as he “ably pushed back” and made his case for support.Poroshenko requested the inclusion of Javelin anti-tank missiles in a package of security aid. Trump seemed open to the idea, Yovanovitch writes. In 2019, however, news broke of his attempt to withhold military aid and secure dirt on Biden.Yovanovitch’s book comes as Poroshenko’s successor, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, leads his country’s fight against Russian invaders, his forces using US-supplied Javelins and other weapons sent by allies.The Poroshenko meeting was brief and forms a small part of a book which tells Yovanovitch’s story of machinations involving Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, which led to her firing and Trump’s impeachment.But her description of the meeting echoes others by sources including John Bolton, McMaster’s successor as national security adviser, which have shown Trump risking embarrassment and mishap when one-on-one with world leaders.Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, recently revealed that Trump risked disaster in an early meeting with his counterpart Reuven Rivlin, when he praised the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and criticized Benjamin Netanyahu, then the Israeli prime minister, for being unwilling to seek peace.Trump’s comments “knocked everyone off their chairs”, Friedman wrote.Participants in the meeting with Poroshenko appear to have stayed seated.Yovanovitch writes that she sensed “Trump had come into the meeting viewing Ukraine as a ‘loser’ country, smaller and weaker than Russia”, only to be “a little surprised by Poroshenko”, who was “as physically imposing as Trump” and who was also “a billionaire businessman”.After the meeting, Trump said Ukraine was “a place that everybody’s been reading about”. Poroshenko told reporters he was “satisfied with the results of the negotiations”, and said the two leaders discussed military and technical cooperation.Yovanovitch “hoped that Poroshenko had created the kind of favorable impression that would make Trump rethink his views of Ukraine and its importance to our strategic interests”.However, she adds, “Trump’s obsequiousness toward Putin was a frequent and continuing cause for concern”.In 2018, Trump staged an infamous summit with Putin in Helsinki at which the two men spoke in private for close to two hours. Trump’s “toadying up” to Putin at the press conference which followed, Yovanovitch writes, made her lose her appetite.“When the Ukrainian media called,” she writes, “… we took the opportunity to reinforce the point that US policy was to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression”.Five years on from Trump’s meeting with Poroshenko, with Ukraine in a fight for its existence, Trump seems not entirely to have shed his suspicion that US troops could be in the country – a step the Biden administration has made clear will not be taken, given the potentially huge cost of confrontation with Russia.Last month, Trump appeared to misunderstand a Fox News host, to the extent of believing Americans troops had landed in Ukraine.“You shouldn’t be saying that, because you and everybody else shouldn’t know about it,” the former president said, seemingly mistaking reports of Russian troop movements for US ones. “They should do that secretly, not be doing that through the great Laura Ingraham.”“No, those are the Russians,” Ingraham corrected him.“Oh, I thought you said that we were sending people in,” Trump said. “That’ll be next.”TopicsBooksPolitics booksUS politicsDonald TrumpUkraineCrimeaRussianewsReuse this content More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      William Barr: Trump is full of bull – but I’ll vote for him

      by

      William Barr: Trump is full of bull – but I’ll vote for himBarr’s book reveals he told Trump he was ‘like a bull in a bull ring’ – in return, Trump calls his former attorney general a ‘horse’ Donald Trump’s second attorney general, William Barr, told the former US president he was “like a bull in a bull ring” and “someone’s going to come and put a sword through your head”.Trump: US should put Chinese flags on F-22 jets and ‘bomb shit out of’ RussiaRead moreIn return, Trump called Barr a “horse” who had been “broken” by the radical left.Such was the state of debate in the upper echelons of the Republican party on Monday as it digested the latest round of promotion of Barr’s memoir, One Damn Thing After Another.The book will be published on Tuesday but it has been extensively trailed – including by the Guardian. On the page and in interviews, Barr says Trump is unfit for the presidency and should not be the Republican nominee in 2024.But Barr remains a staunch conservative. On Monday, he told NBC’s Today that despite it all, if Trump was the Republican nominee in 2024, he would vote for him.“Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic party, it’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee,” Barr said.In his book, Barr repeatedly describes disagreements with Trump and tactics used by senior aides including the then secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to distract or obstruct the erratic and often furious president.Speaking to NPR on Monday, Barr repeated a passage in his book when he said: “At one point, I said to [Trump]: ‘You know, Mr President, you’re like a bull in a bull ring and your adversaries have your number. They know how to get under your skin, and all they have to do is wave a red flag over here and you go charging and attack it.’“And I said, ‘At the end of the day, you’re going to be in the middle of the ring sweating and someone’s going to come and put a sword through your head.“He didn’t think much of that metaphor.”Trump evidently no longer thinks much of Barr. This weekend, the former president wrote a lengthy letter to Lester Holt, an NBC anchor who interviewed Barr on TV.“Bill Barr cares more about the corrupt Washington media and elite than serving the American people,” Trump wrote, as reported by Axios.“He was slow, lethargic, and I realised early on that he never had what it takes to make a great attorney general. When the radical left Democrats threatened to hold him in contempt and even worse, impeach him, he became virtually worthless for law and order and election integrity. They broke him just like a trainer breaks a horse.”Trump also said: “I would imagine that if the book is anything like him, it will be long, slow and very boring.”Critics might disagree. Reviewing the book for the Washington Post, Devlin Barrett said Trump’s second attorney general “was easily [his] most effective and important cabinet member” and Barr’s memoir showed he could “tell a good yarn and has a penchant for deadpan punchlines”.That said, Barrett wrote, Barr had really written “a defense of his tenure to fellow conservatives”.“Barr bided his time before taking one last swing,” Barrett said. “But as long as there are senior officials like Barr, there will be presidents like Trump.”The book has produced a flood of media attention, including charges that Barr is seeking to whitewash his role in some of Trump’s most controversial moments.Barr defends his handling of the investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow. In particular, he focuses on his decision to release a summary of the report by Robert Mueller. In that letter, Barr cleared Trump of seeking to obstruct justice despite the special counsel laying out 10 possible instances of such potentially criminal behavior.Speaking to NBC, Barr repeated his conclusion that Trump’s claims of voter fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden were baseless – he has used the word “bullshit” – while skating over criticism for using the Department of Justice to investigate such lies.He said Trump was “responsible in the broad sense of that word” for the deadly Capitol riot over which he was impeached a second time, for inciting an insurrection.William Barr’s Trump book: self-serving narratives and tricky truths ignoredRead more“It appears that part of the plan was to send this group up to the Hill,” Barr said, of the storming of Congress by Trump supporters around which seven people died. “I think the whole idea was to intimidate Congress. And I think that that was wrong.”But he also said: “I haven’t seen anything to say he was legally responsible for it in terms of incitement.”Barr also addressed an incident he left out of his book: the firing of a US attorney, Geoffrey Berman, who was supervising investigations of Trump associates and business affairs as well as an investigation of a Turkish bank which the Turkish president asked Trump to drop.“I didn’t think there was any threat to the president,” Barr told NBC, adding that the decision “was my call”.“I hadn’t really thought much of him,” he said. “I wanted to make the change.”TopicsWilliam BarrDonald TrumpUS politicsUS elections 2020US elections 2024US Capitol attackPolitics booksnewsReuse this content More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Take Up Space review: the irresistible rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

      by

      Take Up Space review: the irresistible rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez The New York congresswoman is the subject of an admiring biographical portrait. Love her or not, her story is impressiveThis book should have been titled Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez But Were Afraid to Ask.William Barr’s Trump book: self-serving narratives and tricky truths ignoredRead moreWhether you love her or loathe her, the former Sandy Ocasio has an irresistible story, told here in a brisk four-chapter narrative followed by brief sections on everything from a make-up video she made for Vogue to her evisceration of Mark Zuckerberg at a congressional hearing.The woman now known everywhere as AOC was born in the Bronx and lived there until her Puerto Rican-American parents moved her to Westchester to make sure she attended a decent public high school. A science nerd whose first ambition was to be a doctor, she dropped her pre-med major at Boston University and majored in economics and international relations. Like Pete Buttigieg, she did a brief stint as an intern for Ted Kennedy, but she didn’t enjoy it as much as he did.She spent her junior year in the African nation of Niger, where she had an unusual reaction to poverty. She decided Niger’s struggling citizens had “a level of enjoyment” that “just does not exist in American life”.In college she met Riley Roberts, a tall, smart, red-haired finance and sociology major who went from coffee house debating partner to boyfriend. Today he is a web developer and still her boyfriend, someone who tiptoes “through the public sphere, leaving little evidence of his presence”, according to the four-page section of Take Up Space which is devoted to him.AOC’s father, an architect, died of cancer while she was in college, leaving her mother struggling to hold on to their house. So after college her daughter came to New York and became a restaurant worker to make money and to be close to her mother.The striking-looking bartender who came out of nowhere to be elected to Congress three weeks after her 29th birthday was launched into politics by her brother Gabriel, who heard a group called Brand New Congress formed by Bernie Sanders supporters was looking for people to nominate anyone they thought should run in 2018.Pulled over to the side of the road in a rainstorm, Gabriel phoned his sister and asked if she wanted to run. Her reaction: “Eff it. Sure. Whatever.” So her brother, still sitting in his car, filled out the web form and hit “send”.Brand New Congress morphed into “Justice Democrats”, who had 10,000 nominations for candidates. Gradually, AOC became their favorite, not only because she was extremely smart but also because she was “really pretty”. That, Corbin Trent explained, is “like 20%, 50% of being on TV”. Trent became her communications director.The rigid leftwing ideology of Lisa Miller, who wrote the longest section of this book, sometimes leads her into statements directly contradicted by AOC’s success. Miller writes that the “facts of Ocasio-Cortez’s life” made her both an “impossible candidate” and “the kind of American whose hopes for any social mobility had been crushed by a rigged system perpetuated by officials elected to represent the people’s interests”.In real life, the facts of AOC’s Cinderella story made her the perfect candidate to take on Joseph Crowley, the Democratic boss who held the House seat she was going after – and AOC turned out to be the least “crushed” person in America.As she learned at a political boot camp organized by Justice Democrats, nothing was more important than “telling an authentic believable personal story”– and no one was better at doing that than she was.As a Black Lives Matter activist, Kim Balderas, noticed in 2017, AOC spoke like an organizer. That made Balderas realize “she’s not coming to play. She is coming to fight”. Outspent in the primary by Crowley, $4.5m to $550,000, AOC still managed to crush him with 57% of the vote.One secret to her success was Twitter. The month she won the primary she had 30,000 followers. Four weeks later she had 500,000. The number now hovers closer to 13 million. A 10-page section of the book describes her “art of the dunk”, including diagrams of her most successful exchanges, including one in which Laura Ingraham accused her of wearing $14,000 worth of clothes for a Vanity Fair photo shoot.“I don’t know if you’ve been in a photo shoot Laura,” AOC replied, “but you don’t keep the clothes.”She added: “The whole ‘she wore clothes in a magazine’, let’s pretend they’re hers’ gimmick is the classic Republican strategy of ‘let’s willfully act stupid, and if the public doesn’t take our performance stupidity seriously then we’ll claim bias’.”But her very best exchange is also the strongest evidence that the now 31-year old two term congresswoman has grown into a national treasure – and an interlocutor who almost always manages to have the last word.In “The Zuckerberg Grilling” section of the book, she interrogates the Facebook founder at a congressional hearing shortly after his company announced it would not fact-check political ads.She asked: “Would I be able to run advertisements on Facebook targeting Republicans in primaries saying they voted for the Green New Deal? … I’m just trying to understand the bounds here, what’s fair game.”“I don’t know the answer to that off the top of my head,” said the flustered Zuckerberg. “I think probably …”AOC calls Tucker Carlson ‘trash’ for saying she is not a woman of colourRead moreAOC: “So you don’t know if I’ll be able to do that.”Zuckerberg: “I think probably.”AOC followed up by asking how Facebook had chosen the Daily Caller, “a publication well documented with ties to white supremacists”, as an “official fact-checker for Facebook”.Zuckerberg said the Daily Caller had been chosen by “an independent organization called the Independent Fact-Checking Network”.AOC: “So you would say that white-supremacist-tied publications meet a rigorous standard for fact-checking? Thank you.”
      Take Up Space: the Unprecedented AOC is published in the US by Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster
      TopicsBooksAlexandria Ocasio-CortezUS politicsPolitics booksDemocratsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesreviewsReuse this content More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      William Barr’s Trump book: self-serving narratives and tricky truths ignored

      by

      William Barr’s Trump book: self-serving narratives and tricky truths ignoredThe two-time attorney general portrays himself as a bulwark against his former boss – but his accounts are highly selective In his new book, Donald Trump’s former attorney general William Barr complains that in the US, the “most educated and influential people are more attached to self-serving narratives than to factual truth”. Barr book reveals Trump’s secret to a ‘good tweet’: ‘just the right amount of crazy’Read moreBut in his own narrative of his tumultuous time as Trump’s top lawyer, Barr regularly omits inconvenient truths or includes self-serving versions of events previously reported with his evident input.Barr was only the second US attorney general to fill the role twice, working for George HW Bush from 1991 to 1993, then succeeding Jeff Sessions in 2019. His memoir, One Damn Thing After Another, will be published on 8 March. Excerpts have been reported by US news outlets. The Guardian obtained a copy.As widely reported, Barr defends himself from accusations that he was too close to Trump and acted to shield him over the Russia investigation and Robert Mueller’s final report on election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.He defends his decision to say Trump did not seek to obstruct justice during Mueller’s work, despite Mueller laying out 10 possible instances of such potentially criminal conduct.Barr also defends his decision to seek to dismiss charges against Michael Flynn and to lessen the sentence handed to Roger Stone, Trump allies convicted as a result of the Russia investigation.On other controversies, Barr’s accounts are often highly selective or noticeably incomplete.In June 2020, Barr was engulfed in controversy over the removal of Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney in the southern district of New York.Berman was investigating Trump’s business and allies including Rudy Giuliani. He was also supervising a case involving a Turkish bank which the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, pressured Trump to drop.Shortly after John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser, said Trump promised Erdoğan he would get rid of leaders in the southern district, Barr announced Berman was stepping down. When Berman said he would not quit, he was fired.The incident prompted calls for Barr to resign, including from the New York City Bar Association.In his book, Barr praises the “quality and experience of the group of US attorneys I inherited” and says he told them “to go full speed ahead on the department’s existing priorities”. He also says he regrets not installing an aide, Ed O’Callaghan, “into his dream job – US attorney in the southern district of New York”.But he does not mention Berman and how or why he fired him.Barr also defends his decision to restart federal executions after 17 years, which lead to 13 state killings in the final six months of Trump’s presidency. Barr describes, with apparent relish, the crimes of many of those killed.He does not mention Lisa Montgomery, the first woman executed by the federal government in 67 years, whose lawyers argued she had brain damage from beatings as a child and suffered from psychosis and other mental conditions, having been sexually abused.Trump, the death penalty and its links with America’s racist history – podcastRead moreBarr also outlines why he thinks Trump lost the election and should not run again.His former boss’s volcanic anger is repeatedly described. Detailing Trump’s fury during protests against racial injustice outside the White House in June 2020 – after confirming that Trump was once hustled to a protective bunker, which Trump denied – Barr writes: “The president lost his composure.“Glaring around the semi-circle of officials in front of his desk, he swept his index finger around the semi-circle, pointing at all of us. ‘You’re all losers!’ he yelled, his face reddening … ‘You’re losers!’ he yelled again, tiny flecks of spit arcing to his desktop. ‘Fucking losers!’ It was a tantrum.”After that tantrum, peaceful protesters were violently cleared from Lafayette Square before Trump walked to a historic church to stage a photoshoot holding a Bible. Barr and other senior aides made the walk too.It was widely reported that Barr ordered the clearance. In his book, Barr says Trump told him to “take the lead” in dealing with the protesters. But he echoes an official report in saying the clearance was already planned by police.Barr portrays himself and other aides obstructing or defying Trump’s demands, including pressure to investigate Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, and the contents of a laptop obtained by Giuliani.“I cut him off again,” Barr writes, “raising my voice. ‘Dammit, Mr President! I can’t talk about that, and I am not going to!’“He was silent for a moment, then quickly got off the line.”Barr also gives space to his falling out with Trump over the president’s lie about electoral fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden – a rupture which happened after Barr controversially ordered the Department of Justice to investigate electoral fraud claims, a decision he now defends.A tempestuous meeting between Trump and Barr on 1 December 2021, at which the attorney general told the president no widespread fraud existed, has been widely reported. Such accounts do not say Barr attempted to resign. In his memoir, he says he did and that Trump accepted but was talked around.In his account of a meeting on 14 December 2020 at which he did resign, Barr says Trump first gave him a report which the president claimed contained “absolute proof that the Dominion machines were rigged [and] I won the election and will have a second term”.The House oversight committee released the report in June 2021, detailing how Trump sent it to Barr’s replacement, Jeffrey Rosen, shortly after Barr left his resignation meeting.But accounts of that meeting in books by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa (Peril) and Jonathan Karl (Betrayal), heavily informed by Barr, do not say Trump gave Barr the report and that Barr, in his own words, said he would look into it.William Barr uses new book to outline case against Trump White House runRead moreThe report was produced by Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG), which Barr says “described itself as a cybersecurity firm in Texas”, and purported to deal with events in Antrim county, Michigan, a Republican area where a clerking error appeared to give Biden victory before a Trump win was confirmed.The report, Barr writes, concluded that voting machines were “intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results”.Barr calls the report “amateurish” and “sensational” and its conclusion “an ipse dixit, a bald claim without even the pretense of supporting evidence”.Dominion Voting Systems, the company which made the machines, has sued Trump allies including Giuliani, Mike Lindell and Fox News, seeking billions in damages.Trump has not commented on Barr’s book. But he has previously called his attorney general – who many saw as a ruthless “hatchet man”, determined to do the president’s bidding – “afraid, weak and frankly … pathetic”.TopicsBooksWilliam BarrDonald TrumpUS politicsTrump administrationRepublicansPolitics booksanalysisReuse this content More

    • 188 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Barr book reveals Trump’s secret to a ‘good tweet’: ‘just the right amount of crazy’

      by

      Barr book reveals Trump’s secret to a ‘good tweet’: ‘just the right amount of crazy’Ex-president made remark to his attorney general, according to William Barr’s forthcoming memoir Donald Trump told William Barr, his attorney general, that the secret to a “good tweet” was “just the right amount of crazy”.William Barr uses new book to outline case against Trump White House runRead moreThe detail from Barr’s forthcoming memoir leaked out on Monday, via Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post.The Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have reported on the contents of One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, which will be published on 8 March.Barr’s title is taken from a description of the job by Ed Levi, appointed by Gerald Ford after the Watergate scandal.Some critics responded to the news that Barr says Trump is unqualified to be president and defends his own handling of the Russia investigation by wondering if the world really needs one book after another by former Trump aides bent on self-justification.Barr, for example, describes a tumultuous Oval Office meeting on 1 December 2020, at which he refused to back Trump’s lie about electoral fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden. On the page, the former attorney general says he tried to resign.But the resignation offer is not described in books by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa (Peril) and Jonathan Karl (Betrayal), which otherwise closely mirror Barr’s description of the meeting.Barr did quit nearly two weeks later, on 14 December.Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, a reporter who had a direct line to Trump during his time in power, has her own Trump book coming out in October.She said the revelations so far from Barr showed that “the cabinet member/person of stature most loved by Maga has become the latest person in a long string who worked for Trump to say he’s unfit”.Dawsey tweeted the tidbit about Trump’s tweets, tweeting: “One bit from Barr book: Trump told his former attorney general the ‘secret of a really good tweet’ was ‘just the right amount of crazy’.”Trump used Twitter as his primary means of communication but he has been suspended from it since the deadly Capitol riot, which happened after he told supporters to “fight like hell” in service of his lie about voter fraud in his election defeat by Biden.The Post reported that Barr and White House lawyers developed a system for dealing with Trump’s more extreme – or “legally problematic” – ideas, such as using an executive order to end citizenship for people born in the US to undocumented parents.The lawyers, Barr writes, “operated like a tag team, so that neither of us would provoke too much of the president’s ire at one time”.“We referred to this as choosing who would ‘eat the grenade’,” Barr says.TopicsBooksPolitics booksWilliam BarrDonald TrumpTrump administrationTwitterUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      William Barr uses new book to outline case against Trump White House run

      by

      William Barr uses new book to outline case against Trump White House runFormer attorney general also describes tempestuous Oval Office meeting in which he rejected electoral fraud claims

      Trump hints at 2024 presidential bid in CPAC speech
      In a new memoir, the former US attorney general William Barr says Donald Trump must not be the Republican candidate for president in 2024.Trump ignores Farage – and risks midterm elections farrago – with insistence on big lieRead moreThe man he served between 2019 and 2020, Barr writes, has “shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed”.Trump, Barr says, has surrounded himself with “sycophants” and “whack jobs from outside the government, who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories”.Trump hinted again on Saturday that he intends to run in 2024. He did not immediately comment on Barr’s analysis. Last summer, though, he called his former attorney general a “swamp creature” and a “Rino [Republican in Name Only] … afraid, weak and frankly … pathetic”.Barr’s book, One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, will be published on 8 March, its title taken from a description of the job by Ed Levi, appointed by Gerald Ford after the Watergate scandal.The Wall Street Journal, like publisher Harper Collins owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, first reported Barr’s book on Sunday. The New York Times and Washington Post followed suit.A strong conservative, Barr was seen by most as a loyal servant to Trump, the second president he worked for after George HW Bush. The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren was among those who thought Barr way too loyal, calling him “a disgrace” and “not a credible head of federal law enforcement”.In his book, Barr rejects such accusations, prominently over the investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.Barr was accused of running interference for Trump, ultimately releasing a preemptory report summary which prompted an objection from the special counsel, Robert Mueller.According to the Times, Barr calls claims he interfered “drivel” and says it was a “simple fact that the president never did anything to interfere with the special counsel’s investigation”.Mueller, however, laid out extensive evidence of possible obstruction of justice by Trump, including the dangling of pardons. In his own report, the special counsel said he could not exonerate the president of trying to obstruct his work.Regarding Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with Russians, Barr writes: “Predictably our motion to dismiss the charges led to an election-year media onslaught, flogging the old theme that I was doing this as a favour to Trump.“But I concluded the handling of the Flynn matter by the FBI had been an abuse of power that no responsible AG could let stand.”A former judge appointed to review Barr’s move to dismiss disagreed, saying it was “clear evidence of a gross abuse of prosecutorial power” and represented “highly irregular conduct to benefit a political ally of the president”.Flynn was eventually pardoned by Trump and became a key player in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.Barr also sought a more lenient sentence for the Trump ally Roger Stone, convicted of trying to obstruct the Russia investigation. Four prosecutors resigned but Barr insists in his book it was “reasonable” to act as he did. Stone’s sentence was ultimately commuted by Trump.Barr also describes a previously reported Oval Office meeting on 1 December 2020, at which Trump pressed his lie about electoral fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden.Barr had outraged many by using the Department of Justice to investigate Trump’s claims. But no evidence of widespread fraud was found and Barr used an interview with the Associated Press to say so.The same day, according to Barr’s book, Trump shouted: “This is killing me – killing me. This is pulling the rug right out from under me.”Echoing accounts of the meeting in Peril, by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, and Betrayal, by Jonathan Karl, Barr says the president slipped into the third person.“He stopped for a moment and then said, ‘You must hate Trump. You would only do this if you hate Trump.’”Barr says he told Trump he had “sacrificed a lot personally to come in to help you when I thought you were being wronged”, but could not support the lie about electoral fraud.After Trump listed other grievances, Barr offered to resign – an offer not reported by Karl or Woodward and Costa.Betrayal review: Trump’s final days and a threat not yet extinguishedRead moreTrump, Barr writes, yelled “Accepted!”, banged his palm on a table and said: “Leave and don’t go back to your office. You are done right now. Go home!”Barr says White House lawyers persuaded Trump not to allow him to quit. Barr finally resigned on 14 December, nearly two weeks later.On 6 January 2021, after Trump spoke at a rally near the White House, the Capitol was attacked. Seven people died around the riot and more than 100 police officers were hurt. More than 700 people have been charged, 11 with seditious conspiracy. Trump was impeached, for inciting an insurrection.In his book, Barr says: “The absurd lengths to which [Trump] took his ‘stolen election’ claim led to the rioting on Capitol Hill.”But he also says Trump’s behaviour did not meet the legal standard for an incitement charge.TopicsBooksWilliam BarrUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationRepublicansAutobiography and memoirnewsReuse this content More