Wily Willie Barr-- A Guest Post By Sam Husseini

Grand Rapids Congressman Justin Amash (R-MI) doesn't get a vote of William Barr, luckily for Barr and unfortunately for America. "William Barr," he tweeted soon after Trump nominated him, "is another unfortunate pick for attorney general. His record is one of empowering government, specifically the executive branch, at the expense of liberty and the rights of the people. We need an AG who will uphold the 4th Amendment and 5th Amendment, not erode them. After the Senate hearing Tuesday, he wrote that "Barr reiterated his support for legalized theft, also known as civil asset forfeiture, calling it a 'valuable tool.' This anti-liberty position and others from Barr are disqualifying." Sam Husseini, a frequent DWT contributor and the communications director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, has a very different perspective about why Barr should be disqualified. Today he sent us his own Barr-related coverage, which originally appeared in FAIR, as a guest post.

Triumph of Conventional Wisdom: AP Expunges Iran/Contra Pardons from Barr’s Record
by Sam Husseini

A president facing a major scandal, just as the highest-profile trial is about to begin, pardons the indicted or convicted officials around him to effectively stop the investigation that’s closing in on his own illegal conduct.

Trump soon? We’ll see. But this actually describes what President George H.W. Bush did in 1992.

The Iran/Contra scandal revealed, among other things, that the Reagan/Bush White House had secretly sold missiles to Iran in exchange for hostages held in Lebanon, using the proceeds to fund right-wing forces fighting the leftist Nicaraguan government in violation of US law.

On Christmas Eve 1992, just as the indicted former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was about to face trial, Bush pardoned him and five others, including former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams and and former National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane. The New York Times (12/25/92) reported this as “Bush Pardons 6 in Iran Affair, Averting a Weinberger Trial; Prosecutor Assails ‘Cover-Up.'”

The attorney general for Bush who approved the pardons, William Barr, is now being nominated for the same position by Trump. Is this background relevant? Though current news columns are rife with speculation that Trump might likewise protect himself by pardoning his indicted or convicted associates, the dominant US news wire service doesn’t seem to think so.

In “Barr as Attorney General: Old Job, Very Different Washington” (1/14/19), Associated Press reporter Eric Tucker made no mention whatsoever of the Iran/Contra pardons. Rather than seriously examine the trajectory of presidential power and accountability, Tucker framed the story, as the headline indicates, as a stark contrast between the  gentlemanly Bush and the “twice-divorced” Trump:

Serving Trump, who faces intensifying investigations from the department Barr would lead, is unlikely to compare with his tenure under President George H.W. Bush.

The false implication is that Bush did not himself face intensifying investigations from Lawrence Walsh, who operated out of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Counsel. The misleading comparison is compounded by Tucker describing Trump as “breaking with the practice of shielding law enforcement from political influence” and ousting Attorney General Jeff Sessions for “not protecting him in the Russia investigation”—as if Barr didn’t have direct experience in the first Bush administration with imposing political influence on law enforcement to protect a president from investigation.

Instead, Tucker cites Barr’s supporters calling him “driven by his commitment to the department” and “very much a law-and-order guy.” (The praise for the new head of the department Tucker regularly covers marks his article as a “beat-sweetener,” a long and unfortunate tradition of journalists’ making their jobs easier by sucking up to sources.)

This deceptive piece was apparently picked up by literally thousands of media outlets. A search of “unlikely to compare with his tenure under President George H.W. Bush” produces over 2,400 results.

As Consortium News founder Robert Parry, who broke much of the Iran-Contra story for AP, would later write in a review of Walsh’s book Firewall: Inside the Iran/Contra Cover-Up:

The Republican independent counsel [Lawrence Walsh] infuriated the GOP when he submitted a second indictment of Weinberger on the Friday before the 1992 elections. The indictment contained documents revealing that President Bush had been lying for years with his claim that he was “out of the loop” on the Iran/Contra decisions. The ensuing furor dominated the last several days of the campaign and sealed Bush’s defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton.

Walsh had discovered, too, that Bush had withheld his own notes about the Iran/Contra Affair, a discovery that elevated the President to a possible criminal subject of the investigation. But Bush had one more weapon in his arsenal. On Christmas Eve 1992, Bush destroyed the Iran/Contra probe once and for all by pardoning Weinberger and five other convicted or indicted defendants.

Parry, who died a year ago, left AP after many of his stories on Iran/Contra were squashed (Consortium News, 1/28/18).

After I criticized AP on Twitter for the omission, a later piece by Tucker, co-written with Michael Balsamo, noted perfunctorily in the 16th graph: “As attorney general in 1992, he endorsed Bush’s pardons of Reagan administration officials in the Iran/Contra scandal.” (A search on “as attorney general in 1992, he endorsed Bush’s pardons of Reagan administration officials in the Iran/Contra scandal” produced a mere 202 results.)

While much of the media obsesses over every bit of “Russiagate,” some breathlessly anticipating the next revelation will surely bring down the Trump presidency, it’s remarkable how little interest there is in the trajectory of presidential power.

Rather, much of the establishment media has gone to great lengths to rehabilitate officials from both Bush administrations, including the elder Bush himself when he died last month. (One exception to the generally hagiographic coverage of his death was Arun Gupta’s “Let’s Talk About George H.W. Bush’s Role in the Iran/Contra Scandal”-- in The Intercept, 12/7/18.) Indeed, Trump naming Barr just after George H.W. Bush’s funeral could be seen as a jiu-jitsu move: How could anyone object to his nominating the AG of the just-sainted Poppy Bush? It’s as though Trump were saying, “If you all like him so much, I’ll have what he had.” See the Institute for Public Accuracy news release, “Barr as AG? Bush and Trump Dovetail.”

AP‘s actions also fit into the institution-protecting mode of what Parry derided as the “conventional wisdom”-- which in its current formulation depicts Trump’s authoritarian tendencies as aberrations from the norms of US politics, rather than a continuation of the worst tendencies of his predecessors.

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Messages to Associated Press can be sent to info@ap.org (or via Twitter @AP). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

Fact Checking The Associated Press

-by Noah

Last week, I took a sarcastic look at the righty bias of the AP as expressed in their whining about what President Obama even wore on his feet. The empty-headedness of that particular article lent itself to a bit of snide humor to make a point; not this one.
 
Regular DWT readers know that I am not a big fan of President Obama, but I am a fan of fairness. Did the President’s speech satisfy me? Not really. It was little more than a campaign speech, right down to the lengthy god stuff at the end. But that’s not what this post is about. Others can, have, and will take that angle. His speech wasn’t even aimed at people like me. I’m just writing about one particular example of the AP’s righty propagandizing.

In this day of local media outlets all over the country downsizing and lazily relying, more and more, on just printing or broadcasting syndicated readymade outsourced news copy that is fed to them like pabulum, this Associated Press article is a good example of how a conservative news corporation spreads its righty talking points to the masses. It is agenda-mongering packaged news and, it is gobbled up by an easily fooled, unquestioning public: not unlike a politician’s speech. There was a time when there was a lot more news writing available than just what the AP had to offer, even diversified points of view, but not so much any more. If you look at any small city paper or watch the local stations, chances are really good that you’ll only get AP’s righty point of view.
 
Here’s what got served up by the AP, via my Roadrunner account, the morning after President Obama’s Oval Office address to the nation about the underwater oil gusher crisis. First, the frontpage header:

“Fact Checking Obama’s Speech-President Addresses Gulf Disaster But Does Lofty Rhetoric Meet Reality?”

       
So, right away we have a headline that implies that President Obama lied or is somehow out to lunch. When the readers clicked on the link to the article by a writer going by the name of Calvin Woodward, they found an interior headline that read:
 
          “FACT CHECK: Obama left blanks in oil speech”
 
I would not have been surprised if Woodward had substituted “oily speech” or “slippery speech” for ‘oil speech.’ Yeah, we all know Obama left out a lot of detail, maybe out of a desire for brevity or the simple desire to just make a statement that he was “working on it” and that he was about to confront BP head on in the oval office, on his own turf and terms, as it were. By his own standards, it wasn’t much of a speech. Compared to what we got in the way of Oval Office talks from his predecessor, though, at least we can say it wasn’t gibberish, if not the Gettysburg Address, which, by the way, was deemed by many at the time, including Honest Abe himself, to be a failure. But why does the AP imply that President Obama got his facts wrong or is lying to the public? Why use the words ‘fact check’? How about we FACT CHECK the AP’s Woodward instead? Straightaway in his first paragraph of propagandizing, Woodward says:

“In assuring Americans that BP won’t control the compensation fund for Gulf oil spill recovery, President Barack Obama failed to mention that the Government won’t control it, either.”

Two things in that quote from Woodward leap out at me. One, he has skillfully used the Republican tactic of associating the word ‘fail’ or a variation of it with the man they can’t stand seeing in the White House. Two, Woodward lies. The President did mention it and it appears in the very portion of the speech that Woodward quotes further down in his article:

“Tomorrow, I will meet with the chairman of BP and inform him that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company’s recklessness. And this fund will not be controlled by BP. In order to ensure that all legitimate claims are paid out in a fair and timely manner, the account must and will be administered by an independent, third party.”

Right there, President Obama has indeed mentioned that an independent third party, not the government (or BP), will control the fund. Yo, Calvin, Sometimes the Gotcha moments go the other way.
 
Woodward goes on to point out that “an independent arbiter is no more bound to the government’s wishes than an oil company’s” and points out that there is much uncertainty remaining about the process. True enough. Woodward then makes a comparison that all of us are worried about-- the Exxon Valdez case, and how Exxon managed to have their lawyers outlast many of their victims.
 
Next Woodward brings up the issue of the construction of new barrier islands off of Louisiana that would, hopefully, block the oil from reaching shore. He bitches about how long the decision for approval took. Only at the end, in a separate paragraph, does he imply that there might have been a reason for the delay. Really, to objective readers, it’s a perfectly good one: There might have been a possibility that the new barriers might only shift the oil to someone else’s shores by altering currents.  Imagine the field day someone like Woodward would have had if the Army Corps of Engineers had rushed into an ill-advised plan that failed to meet its intentions or made something even worse. One might be tempted to ask, “Isn’t that how we got into this mess in the first place?”
 
Woodward does also manage to get something right at the end of his “report." He points out the caginess of Obama’s repeated declaration that he has called a “moratorium on deepwater drilling." The fact is, as we all already know, that the moratorium is only for new permits and that the deep water drilling in the Gulf is continuing.
 
Bottom Line: The President of the United States is appointing the same guy who administers the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, Kenneth Feinberg, to oversee the compensation of BP’s victims, and, is shaking down BP for $20 BILLION to pay for it, just for starters. I’d still like to see BP’s heads on sticks, but coughing up that kind of money is a start. That’s twice what Congress was asking for and could not get due to Repug recalcitrance, and, certainly a hell of a lot more than the $75 MILLION cap that current law would hold BP liable for. THAT’S the real story, and, it’s the story that the Associated Press chose not to tell America on Wednesday morning, choosing instead to attempt to discredit the one person that can actually do anything to help BP’s victims. A few years ago, AP’s idea of a President met a crisis with a “Mission Accomplished” banner.
 
I will now wait for a stirring AP report that thoroughly fact checks FOX NEWS. I will wait, and wait, and wait, and wait…

All The News That Fits The Agenda-- The A.P. Scrapes The Bottom Of The Barrel, Again

-by Noah


I’m watching you, AP. I’m watching you. And I’ve been watching you for a very long time.

With everything else going on in the world these days, the Associated Press recently decided to pick up a 3 day old Daily Beast report from former Hollywood film-scene commentator, and, apparently, the righty moron at the Daily Beast, named Nicole LaPorte who just scraped up a critical report on what shoes President Obama wore on the beach during his second visit to the Gulf of Mexico, which happened another 5 days before she even managed to dredge it up! The AP article is headlined “Obama Commits Fashion Mistake.” This is news? What was the President’s big FAIL this time? Oh my God, he wore ordinary “drab, brown, mountain boots” instead of what the locals call Shrimp Boots! Impeach him!!!!! Impeach him!!!!! Shoegate!! In an article that borders on an April Fools Day parody, LaPorte, in her Palin-esq 8th grade writing style, begins (!) by pointing out what one of her obvious idols wore to the World Trade Center site:

“After the attacks of 9/11, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was shown at Ground Zero decked out in FDNY apparel. His leadership during that time is still remembered as exceptional; Oprah Winfrey called him ‘America’s Mayor’.”

I know, in the world superficiality capitol of LA, fashion and appearance is the most important thing in the world, other than what restaurant you are seen at and what “image car” you drive up to the curb before handing over the keys to the valet parking guy, but, “exceptional” is not a word we New Yorkers have ever used to describe “Mr. Noun, a Verb, and 9/11” and, unfortunately, we know him best. In fact, up until 9/11, the majority of us viewed Rudy Julieandrews as a miserably failed mayor who, in a moment of his special genius, placed the city’s security center right in The World Trade Center, after it had already been attacked once! Perhaps, his hand picked, and now convicted felon, police commissioner, Bernie Kerik recommended it. After 9/11, Rudy was a shameless huckster who managed to exploit the events of 9/11 while making millions doing it and then spending $50 million for one lonely delegate in one of the most farcical presidential primary campaigns of all time. Today, his megalomaniacal freak flag still flies high as he ponders another run for something every few months, only to be greeted by boos from both Democrats and Republicans alike.

Obviously, to righty baboons like LaPorte, President Obama’s leadership lies solely in what he wears! Of course, if Obama actually wore what the AP and the Daily Beast would like to see, he would have been accused of pandering. Sigh, we have a Repug Party that’s got nothin’ to offer, so this is what the come up with. It gets better (worse).

“Perhaps Rudy could have helped President Obama with disaster accessorizing, considering how flat the president’s speech fell during his second visit to Louisiana last week. For a photo-op among the tar balls that have washed ashore at Grand Isle and to address a very scared and furious state and nation-- he failed to wear what have become the symbolic accoutrement of the Gulf disaster: white shrimp boots. Instead, on Obama’s feet was a pair of drab, brown mountain boots.”

Hey, I didn’t notice a pair of “Shrimp Boots” on Louisiana REPUBLICAN Governor “Bobby” Jindal! Where’s the bitching? Where’s the outrage!!! For Obama, LaPorte ticks off the Repug talking points “photo-op” and “flat speech,” but, alas, no hate for Jindal. I mean, where’s the fair and balanced?

“The people down here-it’s probably 90 percent of their attire,” said Venice native Chris Dahl the other afternoon, standing near the waterfront at the Cypress Cove Marina, where Gov. Bobby Jindal was about to hold a press conference after a tour of the water [Note: In Jindal’s case, it’s “tour” not a “photo-op.] “For some people, it’s 100 percent of their attire.”

90% of their attire? 100% of their attire? Really? I’ve been to Louisiana. I know it gets hot, and I know that, in the French Quarter at least, the folks can get pretty crazy, but I’ve never witnessed this phenomenon of people walking around wearing nothing but white rubber boots. Really? Is that something we really want to see? Is pole dancing on the beaches the local custom, too? Will the great Louisiana songwriter, Randy Newman, now have to change his fine stripper song “You Can Leave Your Hat On” to something else? Does this explain why the state votes for Senators that wear diapers on a date?

Although it’s, in no way, President Obama’s style, sometimes I think he should just go out one sunny afternoon dressed in a nice West African Dashiki shirt and matching Kofia hat. That just might send these Republican morons into such a tizzy that they’d explode and we’d be rid of their poison once and for all. Hate speech on my part? You gotta problem with that? Well, do ya, punk?