With the confirmation that, after days of evasion, loathsome Secretary of
The Justice Department has prioritized a probe that the president hopes will discredit a finding by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help him win. As part of that effort, Attorney General William P. Barr has met overseas with foreign intelligence officials to enlist their aid in “investigating the investigators,” as the right’s rallying cry goes, and dig into the president’s suspicions.
The State Department, meanwhile, has been investigating the email records of as many as 130 current and former department officials who sent messages to the private email account of Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Trump’s 2016 opponent. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defied Congress on Tuesday by attempting to block the depositions of five department employees called to testify in the impeachment inquiry. [snip]
“Barr and Pompeo are stuck in the fog machine. They seem captives of the president’s perverse worldview,” said Timothy Naftali, a historian and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. “Authoritarian regimes have this problem all the time . . . when all government activity is the product of the id of the leader. But in a republic, that’s unusual.” [snip]
... Trump’s moves represent a fundamental reorientation of American democracy, said Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor and author of “On Tyranny,” a resistance guide to what he describes as America’s turn toward authoritarianism.
This passed norm- busting years ago. As Snyder says, it's a fundamental reorientation of American democracy. Fighting back against this is an all hands on deck effort by every citizen who values the rule of law.“Rather than having the boring system we take for granted, where you have laws based on facts, instead you have a personality who makes up his own reality,” Snyder said. “At first, that reality is just confusing and seems to gum up the works, but after a while, the leader starts to draw people into that reality by making them defend it or making them prove it. This is what’s happening here.”
As far as Pompeo and fellow co- conspirator AG William "Low" Barr go, they're not to be seen as victims of Trump's mania, but rather as cynical enablers and enthusiastic messengers. They're true believers who bubbled up from the miasma of the ultra- right (Pompeo from the tea bagger movement and Barr from the Iran-Contra coverup and radical Opus Dei Catholic movement). Trump is the vessel to achieve their ends, so they're willing and active co- conspirators in his corruption and authoritarian actions.
