May 1, 2019

In this brutal exchange, Bill Barr was eviscerated by soft spoken Senator Mazie Hirono. She may speak with a quiet voice, but she chooses her words carefully and she knows how land every punch.

She started off with a BANG:

Mr. Barr, now the American people know that you are no different from Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway or any other people who sacrificed their once-decent reputation for the grifter and liar who sits in the Oval office.

GET HIM, GIRL.

She continued:

You once turned down a job offer from Donald Trump to represent him as his private attorney. You told Senator Feinstein at your confirmation hearing that "the job of Attorney General is not the same as representing" the President. So you know the difference, but you've chosen to be the President's lawyer and side with him over the interest of the American people.

To start with, you should never have been involved in supervising the Robert Mueller investigation. You wrote a 19-page, unsolicited memo, which you admit was not based on any facts, attacking the premise of half the investigation and you also should have insisted that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein recuse himself.

He wasn't just a witness to some of the President's obstructive behavior, we now know he was in frequent, personal contact with the President, a subject of the investigation. You should have left it to career officials.

Then once the report was delivered by the special counsel, you delayed it's release for more than two weeks. You let the President's personal lawyers look at it before you even deemed to let Congress or the public see it. During that time, you substituted your Special Counsel's legal conclusion in a four-page letter to Congress.

Now we know, thanks to a free press, that Mr. Mueller wrote a letter, objecting to your so-called summary. When you called Mueller to discuss this letter, the reports are that he thought your summary was giving the press, congress and the public a misleading impression of his work. He asked you to release the report summaries to correct the misimpression you created, but you refused.

When you finally did decide to release the report over a Congressional recess and on the eve of two major religious holidays, you called a press conference to, once again, try to clear Donald Trump before anyone had a chance to read the Special Counsel's report and come to their own conclusions.

But when we read the report, we knew Robert Mueller's concerns were valid and that your version of events was false. You used every advantage of your office to create the impression that the President was cleared of misconduct. You specifically removed context from the special report. Behind a public relations effort to help Donald Trump protect himself.

Finally, you lied to Congress. You told Representative Charlie Crist that you didn't know what objections Mueller's team might have to your March 24th so-called summary. You told Senator Chris Van Hollen that you didn't know if Bob Nueller supported your conclusions, but you knew. You lied. And now we know.

A lot of respected nonpartisan legal experts and elected officials were surprised by your efforts to protect the President. But I wasn't surprised. You did exactly what I thought you would do. That's why I voted against your confirmation. I suspected you would protect the President and, indeed, you did. In 1989 when you refused to show congress an OLC opinion that led to the arrest of Manuel Noriega. In 1992 when you recommended pardons for the subjects of the Iran scandal. And when you wrote a memo telling Donald Trump as President can't be guilty of obstruction of justice and then didn't recuse yourself from the matter.

From the beginning, you are addressing an audience of one. That person being Donald Trump. That's why before the bombshell news of yesterday evening, 11 of my Senate colleagues and I called on the Department of Justice Inspector General, and Office of Responsibility to investigate the way you have handled the Mueller report. I wanted them to determine whether your actions then complied with the department's policies and practices and whether you have demonstrated sufficient impartiality to continue to oversee the 14 other criminal matters that the Special Counsel referred to in other parts -- to other parts of the Department of Justice. Now we know more about your you have betrayed that trust.

America deserves better.

You should resign.

Someone send Bill Barr a crate of burn cream, because he is going to need it.

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