After Attorney General Bill Barr offered quite a sympathetic view of President Trump’s behavior that prompted a probe into potential obstruction of justice, even Fox News’ Chris Wallace seemed taken aback by Barr’s defense of Trump.
“I suspect that the President was pretty pleased with the performance of Bill Barr today and particularly on the issue of obstruction,” Wallace said following the press conference.
Wallace argued that Barr’s description of the report’s conclusions on the “collusion” matter was more straightforward, but that Barr seemed quite defensive of Trump when describing the President’s behavior examined for the obstruction part of the probe.
“Then you got into this very curious area where the attorney general seemed almost to be acting as the counselor for the defense, the counselor for the president, rather than the attorney general talking about his motives,” Wallace said. “Talking about his anger, his feeling that this was unfair and he was being — there were leaks. And really, as I say, making a case for the President. I suspect the Democrats heads on Capitol Hill were exploding, and they are going to come down very sharply about the way that Bill Barr today laid this out.”
Fox News' Chris Wallace assesses Barr's performance at Mueller report press conference pic.twitter.com/ZUDsOdG8sB
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) April 18, 2019
Methinks if FOX News talking heads are unimpressed it does not bode well for Toadglans and his whitewashing crew.
So much for Easter burials.
I just caught a little news just now since I can’t even with this bullshit. But my quick takeaway is that this may have done more harm in the long run. Reactions were pretty uniform in disgust for Barr.
Could it be that this is a lie too far, even for Fox? or are the real Billionaires who run this country finally making the pivot?
Chris Wallace show occasional glimmers of journalistic integrity.
He does, however, do his best to smother those little glimmers.
“Wallace argued that Barr’s description of the report’s conclusions on the “collusion” matter was more straightforward,”
Not straightforward at all. Rather he played a shell game with the term “collusion.” He relied on the legal term “conspiracy” in talking about Wikileaks, suggesting that cooperating with their dissemination of the hacked material is not technically illegal (since they weren’t involved with the hacking). But then he glossed it with the non-legal term “collusion,” as if it had been established that the Trump campaign did not coordinate with Wikileaks. But that was not established by Mueller, evidently. Barr was obviously trying to trick us.