Tipsheet

Oh, So This Is Why ABC News Got In On The Barr Bashing

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  May 01, 2019 3:30 PM

MSNBC wasn’t the only network to interrupt the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Attorney General William Barr. ABC News decided to cut in to offer close to a half hour of Barr bashing because…they wanted to get in the allegation that he lied. This is the latest Democratic attack line, which was also manufactured without evidence. Barr being viewed as a Trump agent was an inevitable consequence of his confirmation to the top DOJ post, despite being supremely qualified for the job. And it was on full display today. The Democrat-media complex is hard at work trying to destroy Barr, Trump, and this White House because even after the 2016 election has long passed us by—the institutional Left cannot stand that Hillary Clinton is not the president. Cecilia Vega was first at-bat—and Curtis Houck of Newsbusters was more than happy to give us the play-by-play of this nonsense:


On Wednesday morning, ABC broke in for roughly 20 minutes of coverage for the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing featuring Attorney General Bill Barr concerning the Mueller report and, predictably, ABC journalists were livid with Barr and painted him as a lying, partisan stooge. But they were undermined by chief legal analyst Dan Abrams asserting that he doesn’t think Barr critics will be able to sufficiently prove that he lied.

Senior White House correspondent Cecilia Vega told World News Tonight anchor David Muir that Barr “is facing very serious new questions, renewed questions about his credibility” in addition to the supposed Barr vs. Mueller riff.

VEGA: The — the attorney general really created the impression that Mueller's team found no wrongdoing and then we later came to find out that that is not at all what the report concluded. And just as of two hours ago, President Trump was tweeted these words that we have heard him say so many times before: “No obstruction. No collusion. Complete vindication.” That's been their narrative and in many ways, it was a gift from the attorney general. I think there are some questions right now about whether — the Democrats will certainly ask them, about whether this is the attorney general acting as the attorney general of the United States or the lawyer for President Trump.

MUIR: Or the lawyer for President Trump because remember, Bob Mueller said in his report that if we could exonerate him, we will. He did not.

And then ABC chief legal analyst Dan Abrams came in for the sack:

It was here that Abrams burst some liberal bubbles: “Look, it's a very lawyery answer, right? And this is why I don't think they’re going to be able to truly kind of prove that Barr, quote unquote, lied, right? Because I think there will be an explanation for everyone of Barr's comments about the Mueller investigation.”

The media seems to be obsessed with this letter, where Special Counsel Robert Mueller outlined his concerns to Barr. There were conversations between the two men. The letter dealt with Mueller’s concerns about Barr’s context in his released summary of the report, but was Barr’s summary inaccurate? No. Even Mueller admitted that. 

Still, Democrats want Barr gone. Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) was the one on the Senate side who made that aim explicitly clear in her unhinged rant against Barr. Real Clear Politics has the transcript and the video. 

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SEN. MAZIE HIRONO: Mr. Barr, 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.

I mean this was a nicely wrapped Democratic line. Hirono is just insufferable. If she didn’t have Democratic talking points, could she even ask relevant questions…on anything? Remember, she got tripped up on…the basics of illegal immigration.

Still, there was not enough for obstruction and it’s now a fact, though a lot of us knew this already, that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. The lack of evidence for obstruction, however, has offered the Democrats a lifeline to continue their attacks on the Trump White House. That’s the downside. The upside is that, again, all of these allegations are without evidence, in a similar manner of the smears they lob at Barr for being an agent of Trump. It’s the same old stuff, different day. I’m okay with that because it continues to show that the media and the Democratic Party are abjectly insane over this Trump-Russia clown show, it reminds Trump voters who the enemy is and hopefully force independents away from the Democratic Party come 2020 because this rodeo is bound to become more out of control. It also keeps the liberal media angry, and when they’re infuriated and irritated, they screw up royally. Just look at the Russian collusion myth. Every so-called bombshell was debunked. Every angle rendered worthless with the Mueller report, which was a dagger to the heart of this manufactured myth produced by the Left. Let them keep embarrassing themselves. Maybe we can get them to douse themselves in gasoline and set a match. I say that figuratively of course.