jocal505
moderate, informed, ex-gunowner
"Ghostbuster" Bill Barr was the “Who Ya Gonna Call?” Guy for Three Treasonous GOP Presidents
Now we learn Barr apparently went so far as to cover up Trump’s involvement with Putin, providing opportunities for Trump to extort Ukraine and pass classified documents along to Russian Intelligence
hartmannreport.com
"Ghostbuster" Bill Barr was the “Who Ya Gonna Call?” Guy for Three Treasonous GOP Presidents
Now we learn Barr apparently went so far as to cover up Trump’s involvement with Putin, providing opportunities for Trump to extort Ukraine and pass classified documents along to Russian Intelligence.
(You may remember Deripaska was also the oligarch who helped Mitch McConnell win the 2020 election by announcing he was going to build a $200 million “many-new-jobs” aluminum operation in Kentucky — that was then cancelled after McConnell won reelection. McConnell helped get sanctions lifted, apparently so Derapaska could help his campaign, earning him the “Moscow Mitch” nickname.)And Trump was in tight with the Russians throughout the election: the week before the 2016 election, unbeknown to American voters, Trump even signed a letter of intent with the Putin administration to build a Trump Tower in Moscow if he lost the race for president.
When the FBI got wind of the Trump campaign’s deep ties to Putin, they referred the case to the New York FBI field office, which handles spies and intelligence operations.
But on October 4, 2016, one month before Election Day, the FBI had named Charles McGonigal special agent in charge of the FBI counterintelligence division in New York City.
Apparently nobody realized at the time that McGonigal would also end up in the employ of Deripaska, just like Manafort. McGonigal, who was arrested last week, apparently deep-sixed the investigation, hiding the whole sordid story.
(...) In his first month in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador, resulting in MOSSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy. That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime US spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.
The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned the spy was so great that, at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may have helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine, we pulled the spy out of Russia in 2017.
(...)— On July 31, 2019 Trump had another private conversation with Putin. The White House told Congress and the press that they discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…
— The following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had just asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our spies and overseas intelligence officers) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”
— Within a year, The New York Times ran a story with the headline: “Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants.” The CIA then alerted spies around the world that their identities had probably been compromised, apparently by the president himself.
— Three weeks after Trump groveled before Putin in Helsinki while attacking US intelligence agencies from the podium, Rand Paul flew to Moscow on Trump’s behalf and hand-delivered a package of classified documents to Putin which remain undisclosed to this day. In response, Senator John McCain went to the floor of the Senate to say that “The Senator from Kentucky is now working for Putin.”
But with Bill Barr now in charge of the Justice Department and Derapaska’s guy Charles McGonigal in charge of the FBI’s oversight of Russian spying activity, these reports also appear to have gone nowhere.
(...) Back in 1992, the first time Bill Barr was U.S. Attorney General, iconic New York Times writer William Safire referred to him as “Coverup-General Barr” because of his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s involvement in “Iraqgate” and “Iron-Contra.”
Christmas day of 1992, the New York Times featured a screaming all-caps headline across the top of its front page: Attorney General Bill Barr had covered up evidence of crimes by Reagan and Bush in the Iran-Contra “scandal.”
Weinberger, trying to avoid jail himself, was preparing to testify that Bush knew about it and even participated, and Walsh had already, based on information he’d obtained from the investigation into Weinberger, demanded that Bush turn over his diary from the campaign. He was also again hot on the trail of Abrams.
So Bush called in his attorney general, Bill Barr, and asked his advice.
(...)
Which is exactly what Bush did, on Christmas Eve when most Americans were with family instead of watching the news.
