SEN. MAZIE HIRONO: Mr. Barr, now the American people know you are no different from Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway, or any of the other people who sacrifice their once decent reputation for the grifter and liar who sits in the oval office. You once turned down a job offer from Donald Trump to represent him as his private attorney. At your confirmation hearing, you told Sen. Feinstein that, quote, “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 fact, attacking the premise of half of the investigation. And you also should have insisted that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein recuse himself. He was not just a witness to some of the president’s obstructive behavior, we now know he was in frequent personal contact of 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 its release for more than two weeks and let the president’s personal lawyers look at it before you even deigned to let the public or the Congress see it. During the time you substituted your own political judgment for the special counsel’s legal conclusions in a four-page letter to Congress and now we know, thanks to a free press, that Mr. Mueller wrote you a letter objecting to your so-called summary.

When you called Mueller to discuss his 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 selectively quoted fragments from the special counsel’s report, taking some of the most important statements out of context and ignoring the rest. You put the power and authority of the office of the attorney general and the Department of Justice, 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 objectives Mueller’s team might to the March 24 so-called summary. You told Senator Chris van Hollen that you didn’t know if Bob Mueller 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’d do, that’s why I voted against your confirmation. I expected you would try to protect the president. And indeed, you did.

(Transcript from RealClear Politics)

Finally, Senator Hirono baffled Barr when she tried to discover his moral compass, asking him in several ways if he thought the “President”‘s behavior was OK. Barr either couldn’t grasp the question, or was afraid to answer; he just babbled random lawyer words.

The cherry on top was inducing a spluttering hissy fit in Chairman Lindsey Graham. Good on ya, Mazie!

They justify this morally by rationalizing that any factoid that might conceivably interfere with the ownership class’s capacity to maintain and expand profits is inherently evil and ANY strategy is justified if it obstructs it. Subverting law and the constitution is only the beginning. They will resort to murder if it gets them their way. Remember the Pinkerton goon squads of the laissez-faire Gilded Age? How often have conservatives right here on this board waxed nostalgically about the Robber Baron era?

The primary motivation is to reduce taxes (especially for the rich, taxes on the poor are OK), reduce social welfare (especially for the poor, charity for the rich is just fine), and to cripple all regulation that might protect the environment, worker and product safety, ability of workers to organize or be protected by law, to translate their votes to political change, financial oversight and any other essential regulation that might conceivably inconvenience them in their god-given right to accumulate unrestricted wealth at the society’s expense. And, of course, any free market forces which actually lower prices, increase salaries or threaten profits must be legislated out of existence as soon as possible.

These people see their gravy train threatened, and they will do whatever it takes to keep the tracks greased with the blood of working people if it helps them prolong their hegemony.

I’m not being hyperbolic in my use of the term “murder”. Remember carcinogens in tobacco products? Global warming? Pesticides? the gun lobby, industrial pollution, Unsafe At Any Speed? The attack on socialized medicine? These actions kill people. They will stop at nothing, including killing. The only reason we haven’t seen a wave of political assassinations directed at Liberals is that so far, “legal” and “public relations” tactics have been just as politically effective at comparatively less risk. But you can see the current administration setting the groundwork for future violence. Just watch one of Trump’s MAGA rallies from start to finish sometime. There is no doubt he is building a foundation of terror among his followers that can be unleashed once purely administrative obstruction proves insufficient.

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

It sounds like Robert Mueller is angry.

You don’t want to make Robert Mueller angry.

Barr is scheduled to appear Wednesday morning before the Senate Judiciary Committee…where he is likely to be questioned at length about his interactions with Mueller.

Meanwhile, Nadler just revealed he’s being stonewalled about getting Mueller to testify, which the DOJ can apparently get away with while Mueller is an employee.

If you make Robert Mueller angry enough, he may well quit his job at the DOJ.

And all hell will rain down on Barr and his client.