This paragraph from the Times, similar to a report from CNN and likely relying on the same sources, shows a big problem with the biggest US media operations and their continued validations of Bill Barr’s intentional deceptions.

Mr. Barr, who began his career at the C.I.A., did not intend to imply that spying was inherently wrong, according to a person who has discussed the matter with him but was not authorized to share their conversation. Mr. Barr sees no technical difference between that term and surveillance. He indicated that at issue was not the act of surveilling but whether officials followed proper procedures when they decided to gather intelligence on Trump’s associates in 2016.

Barr is not simply using his job to defend the President. He’s repeatedly playing word games like this. He issues a supererogatory exoneration of President Trump and then claims he had never meant to do that. He’d like to release the whole Mueller Report. But the rules just make it really hard for him to do that. He very clearly used the word “spying” and then said he needed to make sure it hadn’t happened. That was to give the President his talking point. Then he or his staff tell the Times that he didn’t mean to imply anything by that. He just meant “spying” as a synonym for surveillance, which of course judges authorize law enforcement to conduct routinely. This is obviously not true. Yet the Times passes it on as though it were a good faith explanation of what Barr was thinking.

Here we have Robert Costa of the Post saying that Republicans are themselves wondering what Barr is up to. The explanation they’re being given? Well, it turns out he’s actually not a career prosecutor. So he’s just not really in tune with DOJ practices and policies and traditions.

Another example of MSM journos reaching for the most special pleading of explanations of what Bill Barr's up to. https://t.co/OopLo8oG0K pic.twitter.com/sdwhb22dFj

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 11, 2019

They simply can’t grasp their way toward the obvious explanation. He’s a bad actor, using his office for the purpose of defending the President as opposed to enforcing the law. He’s a crook. But he’s a smart one. And at least as far as we know so far he’s using his legitimate powers in creative ways to take corrupt actions.

Let me start by saying what is likely already clear to you. I see Julian Assange as a loathsome, destructive, megalomaniacal figure. These tendencies, apparent from the start, have undoubtedly been accentuated by years in self-imposed captivity which started and for many years was an effort to escape a legitimate sexual assault investigation. But I think we should be highly skeptical of his arrest and extradition to the US. Read More

I want to show you a couple clips from Bill Barr’s testimony today. You’ve heard the headlines but the full language is pretty key.

When Barr said he believed there was “spying” against the Trump campaign he explicitly compared that to spying on civil rights and anti-war activists during the 1960s. In other words, while saying he simply needs to ‘look into it’, he is quite consciously validating Trump’s claims of ‘Deep State’ spying going back two years. This is conscious, intentional and the grossest form of bad faith, pretending concerns about illegal surveillance of domestic dissidents while actually seeking punitive expeditions against people the President has targeted as enemies. Read More

Bill Barr basically openly embraced the President’s discredited claim that the Obama administration “spied” on his campaign. He later seemed to partly backtracked and then tried to suggest that by “spying” he might just mean court approved surveillance as part of a counter-intelligence investigation. But that’s really just caviling. He’s embracing the President’s conspiracy theories and pushing ahead with what can only be called a retributive new investigation of the origins of the Russia probe. Read More

The President appeared a few moments ago before leaving the White House. The gist: he “won” the Mueller investigation. He doesn’t care about the report. And the investigators are guilty of “treason.” Video after the jump. Read More

As I wrote last night, with dark humor but very seriously, the iron law of 21st century Israeli politics is that in the final analysis Netanyahu always wins and becomes the next Prime Minister. As indeed, he has. Another fairly fixed rule is that Israeli election nights end better for the right than they begin. This goes all the way back to 1996, with Netanyahu himself.

The simple fact is that there is a not terribly large but hard and durable rightwing majority in Israel. The Israeli Knesset has 120 members. So you need 61 seats to form a government. Recent elections have all gotten just a bit over 60. Yesterday’s election appears to have netted Likud and its ‘natural partners’ 65 seats. Read More

Just a quick update for those following the Israeli election results. Read More

We’re getting the first exit polls out of today’s election in Israel. And they are showing unexpected strength for Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party over Netanyahu’s Likud. It seems clear Gantz’s is doing better than expected. But it’s less clear whether he’s ahead. And if he is ahead the coalition of the right still seems larger, even though a number of parties on the right appear to have come under the electoral threshold. If this seems hyper-cautious, I’ve learned over time, Netanyahu always ends up winning. It’s a law of nature. But things look to be turning out at least a bit differently. Read More

We’ll have the video shortly. But in his brief comments this morning, President Trump said this: Ending child separation is “why you see many more people coming. They’re coming like it’s a picnic. Because let’s go to Disneyland.”

In recent years we’ve witnessed the increasing ideological marriage of the Israeli Likud and the American GOP. Nor is it just ideological and cultural. There is increasingly transnational cooperation, with longtime Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu frequently intervening in US politics on Republicans’ behalf. But Likud took a big step today adopting more or less wholesale GOP ‘voter fraud’ tactics to suppress minority voters.

Today is election day in Israel, an election the right again seems likely to win by a narrow but decisive margin. But the big story of the day in the Israeli press is Likud sending party activists to Arab majority precincts with hidden cameras to monitor “voter fraud.” The party reportedly distributed 1200 hidden cameras to activists. Read More