5.31 William Barr on 60 Minutes: “I am at the end of my career. Everyone dies, and I am not, you know, I don’t believe in the Homeric idea that you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries.”
5.30 Eugene Robinson in the Post: I ’ve been back and forth on the wisdom of taking that step, but there’s one question that nags me: If the impeachment clause of the Constitution wasn’t written for a president like Trump, then why is it there?
5.30 Tara Bahrampour in The Washington Post: “The evidence, found in the files of the prominent Republican redistricting strategist Thomas Hofeller after his death last August, reveal that Hofeller “played a significant role in orchestrating the addition of the citizenship question to the 2020 Decennial Census in order to create a structural electoral advantage for, in his own words, ‘Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites,’” and that Trump administration officials purposely obscured Hofeller’s role in court proceedings, lawyers for plaintiffs challenging the question wrote in a letter to U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman.”
5.30 Trump: “I don’t know what happened. I was not involved. I would not have done that. I was not a big fan of John McCain in any shape or form. Now, somebody did it because they thought I didn’t like him, okay? And they were well-meaning.”
5.30 After 20 rounds, the judges in the National Spelling Bee ran out of words, and declared an eight-way tie for first place
5.29 Sen. Mitch McConnell, on what he’d do if there occurred a vacancy on the Supreme Court next year: “Oh, we’d fill it.”
5.29 Albany
5.28 Albany
5.27 On Memorial Day, the Fresno Grizzlies ran a tribute video honoring military veterans as patriotic words by former president Ronald Reagan were played. As he denounced “the enemies of freedom,” pictures flashed of Kim Jong Un, Fidel Castro, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
5.26 Rep. Seth Moulton on Kasie DC: “I’d like to meet the American hero who went in Donald Trump’s place to Vietnam. I hope he’s still alive.”
5.26 Bart Starr dies at 85
5.25 Sen. Amy Klobachar said on NBC that during Trump’s inauguration speech, “John McCain kept reciting to me names of dictators during that speech because he knew more than any of us what we were facing as a nation. He understood it. He knew because he knew this man more than any of us did.”
5.24 Alva Noe in The Wall Street Journal: “It isn’t just that he quotes authors like Robert Browning and Langston Hughes with understanding, or that the language is funny and visual. . . .It’s that Mr. Swoboda writs so candidly–not only about his struggles to rise above mediocrity, and about his poor judgments when it comes to his dealings with Hodges and other higher ups, but also about his love for his wife and his friendship with McGraw–that he proves himself to be a pretty smart cookie.”
5.24 Theresa May resigns
5.24 David Graham in The Atlantic: “Trump also knows he needs to build the wall—really, any wall—or at least get a good start before the 2020 election. It was his central campaign promise in 2016, and failing to do so would risk alienating his supporters and might endanger his reelection prospects. As a result, he’s more interested in a performative wall than a wall that performs. If that means hassling the Army Corps to award a contract to a crony whose promises have fallen short repeatedly, so be it. If that means the wall that goes up ends up not being all that effective at stopping border crossings, or if it’s over budget, or if it’s behind schedule, so be it—so long as those bills come due after November 3, 2020.”
5.24 Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) objected to a unanimous consent request to pass a $19.1 billion disaster aid package for victims of wildfires, flooding and hurricanes, Roy not only potentially delayed the measure until June but also bucked both Republican leadership and President Trump, who now supports the bill. Roy said opposes the bill because it would add to the national debt and does not include $4.4 billion in additional spending for federal operations along the U.S.-Mexico border that Trump previously had requested.
5.23 Nancy Pelosi said the White House was “crying out for impeachment” and called on Thursday for Donald Trump’s family to intervene in the president’s wellbeing “for the good of the country”
5.23 Saying goodbye to Johnny V.
5.23 George Conway in tweet: “The reason why Trump loves to talk about impeachment, and why he blathers on about it more than most Dems, including Pelosi and all his 2020 opponents combined, is that it concerns what matters to him most, more than his job, and more than the country—himself. Politically, of course, he’d be better off if he’d just shut up about it, but he’s a pathological narcissist. He can’t help it. Pelosi gets all this. She’s playing him like a drum.”
5.23 SI.com: The Cubs have the ivy at Wrigley, the Red Sox have the Green Monster, the Knicks have 10 million fans who hate themselves, and the Raptors have Drake in $1,200 designer jeans and a hoodie, bouncing up and down the front row like an eighth grade AAU coach. It’s ridiculous. It’s funny. And more than anything, Drake on the sidelines is typical of what has always made the NBA great. On the one hand, this a sport full of high-stakes drama involving some of the most vivid characters in all of sports. On the other hand, there are constant reminders not to take any of this too seriously.
5.22 Kellyanne Conway asked Pelosi if she wanted to respond to Trump’s post-meeting speech in the Rose Garden. To which Pelosi said, “I don’t talk to staff. I talk directly to the president.” The real kicker came when Conway reportedly shot back with, “Wow, that’s really pro-woman of you.”
5.22 Trump: “I don’t do cover ups.”
5.22 Gabrielle Union on Dwyane Wade‘s retirement life: “He has no idea what’s happening.”
5.22 Gleyber Torres hit his 11th and 12th home runs of the season. Ten have come against the Orioles.
5.22 US Distrit Court Edgardo Ramos: “It is simply not fathomable that a Constitution that grants Congress the power to remove a President for reasons including criminal behavior would deny Congress the power to investigate him for unlawful conduct — past or present.”
5.22 Washington Post: As pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson has pointed out, millennials might (like Gen X and unlike the boomers) resist the rightward pull of age and stay Democratic (or move left) as the years go by. Many millennials don’t clearly remember the Reagan-era economic boom, any part of the Gulf War or even a time before the early-2000s iteration of the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal. Instead, we have memories of Sept. 11, Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War, and a recession that caused many to delay marriage, home-buying and many other rites of passage. It shouldn’t be surprising that a generation with those political memories doesn’t want to go back to the political past and “Make America Great Again.”
5.22 Huff Post: Trump’s golf hobby has already cost taxpayers at least $102 million in extra travel and security expenses, and next month will achieve a new milestone: a seven-figure presidential visit to another country so he can play at his own course.
5.21 In Britain, Paul Crowther is charged with assault after milkshaking Nigel Farage. “It was banana and salted caramel. I was actually quite looking forward to it, to be fair. But I think it went to a better purpose.”
5.21 William Barr, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal: “I felt the rules were being changed to hurt Trump, and I thought it was damaging for the presidency over the long haul.”
5.21 Albany
5.20 Albany
5.20 Quartz: Few of us crave a return to the days of command-and-control management. The fearsomeness, the yelling—it doesn’t come naturally to a lot of leaders, and it’s just as well. While company cultures may still vary wildly by employer, new technology over the past two decades has bent the arc of the modern workplace toward transparency, collaboration, and a democratization of ideas. None of this favors those who would seek to lead by intimidation.
5.20 Charles Koch unveils a new organization called Stand Together. Its goals: Empower everyone to find fulfilling work. Help neighbors beat poverty and addiction. Ensure excellent education for every person. Build a stronger economy that works for all. Bridge divides and build respect for one another.
5.20 Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post: We are now experiencing some of the lowest birth figures ever. In 2018, U.S. births totaled 3.78 million , the lowest figure in 32 years. Even worse was the so-called replacement rate: the average number of children each woman must have to stabilize the population, disregarding immigration. This is roughly 2.1 children for every woman. The same replacement rate is also expressed as 2,100 lifetime births per 1,000 women. In 2018, the actual number was 1,728. This was the lowest since at least 1909, when records were first kept, and probably the lowest in U.S. history. . . .We are in the twilight years of the great post-World War II baby boom, which ran from the end of the war until 1964. Now we are in the midst of the great bust. To be sure, there are nuances. Since 1991, the number of teenage births has dropped by more than half, which — given the rigors of raising children — is surely a good development. Likewise, birthrates for women 35 years and up are rising. Still, the main story here is that we’ve quietly altered the nation’s social priorities. Demographer Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute suggests that a decline in religious beliefs is one underlying cause. As secular beliefs rise and religious attitudes fall, birthrates have dropped. Religious “attitudes and values . . . bear on family size,” says Eberstadt. As a society, what we’ve done in recent decades is to create a new life stage — something after adolescence but before adulthood, assuming that you define getting married, buying a home and having children as one version of adulthood. . . . The main impetus for this transformation has been a flood tide of women into the workforce. Millions of jobs that were once off-limits to women are no longer so. Personal and professional choices have proliferated. Men have adapted — or haven’t. As a result of women focusing on their careers, women and men have delayed marriage, homebuying and having children. By and large, they’re not ready just after college or high school. They have more choices than did their counterparts in the 1950s and early ’60s. They can travel; they can sample different occupations and locations. In 1968, typical American men and women first married at ages 23 and 21, respectively; now those figures are 30 and 28. Nor is that all. So-called millennials — those born from 1981 to 1996 — are also squeezed economically. The 2007-2009 Great Recession left a hangover of uncertainty and lost opportunities.
5.20 P.J. O’Rourke in the Washington Post: Being rich looked very uncomfortable. Rich people’s clothes were stiff and starchy, and they wore lots of them. Rich men were choked by tall collars and pinched by high-button shoes. Rich women were corseted to the point of kidney failure, constrained in so much crinoline and brocade that they might as well have been wearing off-the-shoulder burqas, and encumbered by bustles large enough that they couldn’t turn sideways without knocking over a footman and the parlor maid. Now we have Jeff Bezos in a New Kids on the Block bomber jacket, Bill Gates outfitted in Mister Rogers’s sweaters and Gloria Steinem’s old aviators and cutting his own hair, Elon Musk smoking pot on a live Internet show, and Richard Branson looking like the guy at the end of the bar muttering lines from “The Big Lebowski.” That’s not counting the various plutocrats caught in Us and Star magazines wearing nothing much at all. If rich people start getting any more comfortable, police will be shooing them off park benches.
5.19 John Jurgenson in The Wall Street Journal: “Series finale leaves viewers feeling loss — either because show is over or because they hated last episodes. The crux of many complaints: The apparent rush that the show’s writers faced in wrapping up a sprawling story caused many inconsistencies to creep into the characters. Many among the show’s most meticulous analysts felt confused by jarring pivots in plot and character in the sprint to a finale.”
5.19 Game of Thrones comes to an end. Didn’t quite measure up to the build up. Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) was crowned lord protector of the Seven Kingdoms.
5.19 Technology investor Robert F. Smith (net worth: $5 billion), the richest black man in America, announced in his commencement address at all-male, historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta that he’d pay off the student debt of the entire Class of 2019. “On behalf of the eight generations of my family that have been in this country, we’re going to put a little fuel in your bus.” Estimated cost: $16 million
5.19 At a Fox News town hall, Chris Wallace asked Pete Buttigieg how he would handle Trump’s insults, attacks and tweets, the candidate started to respond before inhaling and trailing off. “The tweets are . . . I don’t care,” he said,
5.18 Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan becomes first Republican to call for Trump‘s impeachment. In response, Trump calls Amash “a total lightweight who opposes me and some of our great Republican ideas and policies just for the sake of getting his name out there through controversy.”
5.17 The final episode of Veep. “Trust me, he’ll never see you as anything more than the TGI Friday’s hostess on Proactiv who lets him bend you over his desk while you close your eyes to avoid coming face-to-face with the framed photo of his family’s trip to Aspen, while he drowns that Little Mermaid back tat in a pool of jizz and admires his own reflection.” Also: “Trust me, Amy, I’ve been veep, and there is no safer place to stick Jonah Ryan in all of Washington, D.C. Being vice-president is like being declawed, defanged, neutered, ball-gagged, and sealed in an abandoned mine shaft under two miles of human shit. It’s a fate worse than death. Besides, I’m not going to die. I have the heart and the twat of a cheerleader who’s only done anal.”
5.17 Herman Wouk dies at 103
5.16 Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez: “They’re about controlling women’s sexuality. Owning women. From limiting birth control to banning comprehensive sex ed, US religious fundamentalists are working hard to outlaw sex that falls outside their theology.”
5.16 I.M. Pei dies at 10
5.16 Pat Robertson: “I think Alabama has gone too far,”
5.16 CNN: “The bill impacts women who are “known to be pregnant” and would provide “every female that’s pregnant or thinks they’re pregnant, and the male who was involved, it gives them that window of time — this bill does not change that window of time” says Republican State Sen. Clyde Chambliss, who ushered the bill through the chamber. .Chambliss touted that his bill outlaws surgical abortions as soon as a pregnancy can be medically determined. Speaking on the Senate floor, Chambliss repeatedly referred to a “window” of time between conception and when a woman knows for certain that she’s pregnant. The state senator said he believed that time was between about seven and 10 days. “She has to take a pregnancy test, she has to do something to know whether she’s pregnant or not,” he said.”You can’t know that immediately, it takes some time for all those chromosomes and all that.”
5.16 Alabama passed America’s most restrictive abortion law, not even making exceptions for rape and incest
5.15 Jennifer Rubin in the Post: Put it this way: Is it better for Democrats to go into the 2020 election with Trump buoyed after the Senate fails to remove him from office, or to go into 2020 election with a desperate, floundering president who’s been slapped down by multiple courts and continues to declare that Congress isn’t allowed to investigate him? Pelosi thinks it is the latter and, given her track record, do House members really want to second-guess her?
5.15 Pelosi: “The letter that came from the White House yesterday was completely outrageous.. . was a joke, beneath the dignity of the presidency of the United States, in defiance of our Constitution. Shame on them.”
5.15 Marco Rubio in the Post: “If you go to China, they promise you ‘X percent’ of their overall market share. You make money, and you look good in front of your shareholders, but you’re also turning over your intellectual property and eventually they’re going to replace you. But who cares? You won’t be CEO in 10 years when that happens.”
5.13 Justice Stephen Breyer: It is “dangerous to overrule a decision only because five Members of a later Court come to agree with earlier dissenters on a difficult legal question. Today’s decision can only cause one to wonder which cases the Court will overrule next.”
5.12 Robert Gates on Face the Nation: “The piece of the Mueller report about Russian interference is not ‘case closed. And, frankly, I think elected officials who depend on honest elections to get elected ought to place as a very high priority measures to protect the American electoral system against interference by foreigners.”
5.12 With an high arcing jumper from just inside the three-point arc that bounced four times before falling through, Toronto’s Kawhi Leonard made the first Game 7 buzzer-beater in NBA history to put the Raptors over the 76ers and through to the NBA’s final four. The other contenders: Golden State, Milwaukee and Portland, which also won a Game 7 yesterday
5.12 NYT: Russia is spreading propaganda about a phony “5G Apocalypse” in an effort to make Americans fear the technology
5.12 Trade was with China escalates. Lawrence Kudlow: “I don’t disagree with that. Again, both sides will suffer on this.
5.11 In reaction to the news that her series Fresh Off the Boat was renewed, Constance Wu tweets “fucking hell” and how she was “literally crying” about the news.
5.9 Bob Woodward on CNN: “It’s a constitutional confrontation. I don’t think it’s yet a ‘crisis.'”
5.8 Tyra Banks returns to the cover of Sports Illustrated
5.8 In Mongolia, a couple dies after eating raw marmot kidney
5.8 Albany
5.7 Albany
5.7 Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared “case closed,” insisting that Democrats should accept Mueller’s findings and end their investigations
5.7 Megan Garber in The Atlantic: Game of Thrones . . .might not have been intending, with its latest twist, to wade into the choppy waters of the electability debate, but here it is, nonetheless, navigating the currents. The show, now, is asking questions about what people finally want in their leaders—and how those desires might be constrained by tradition, and assumption, and failures of imagination. Jon may not be a particularly astute military leader. He may not be a terribly astute leader in general. He may be alive at the moment only because he has been saved from certain death multiple times, often by women. And he may have already bent the knee to Daenerys. Those are all things, the show is now suggesting, that will be weighed against another, perhaps overarching fact: He’s so charismatic! He’s so inspiring! He is precisely the kind of guy you’d want to have a beer with! (Or least, some Dornish wine!)
5.7 Billy Joel Proclamation: “Donald Trump, Build a wall, Michael Cohen takes the fall/ Tax returns, Putin stooge, everything he sees is huuuuge/ Fake news, Conway’s fight, costly Stormy night/ Mueller probe, Don McGahn, summit off with Rocketman/ Kavanaugh, Muslin ban, carriers to I-ran/ Roger Stone, tweets at dawn, whole country’s getting conned” MDR: This is fantastic. Great job guys. Stephanie Benton: WOW. Just wow.
5.7 Washington Post: By early Tuesday evening, more than 720 former federal prosecutors who worked in Democratic and Republican administrations had signed a letter asserting that President Trump would have been charged with obstructing justice based on special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings — if Trump were not the president. . . .A handful interviewed by The Post on Tuesday said they hoped for little else than to make public their view that Attorney General William P. Barr had mischaracterized Mueller’s report in asserting it laid out insufficient evidence to make an obstruction case.
5.7 Buettner and Craig in the Times: “Trump made a total of $57 million by briefly presenting himself as a takeover threat to, among others, Hilton Hotels, the Gillette razor company and Federated Department Stores … In all, from 1986 through 1989, Mr. Trump declared $67.3 million in gains from stocks and other assets bought and sold within one year. As with many things Trump, his adventures in the stock market were more image than substance.” In other words, he learned to profit from fakery and fearmongering.
5.7 Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig in the New York Times: “By the time his master-of-the-universe memoir “Trump: The Art of the Deal” hit bookstores in 1987, Donald J. Trump was already in deep financial distress, losing tens of millions of dollars on troubled business deals, according to previously unrevealed figures from his federal income tax returns. Mr. Trump was propelled to the presidency, in part, by a self-spun narrative of business success and of setbacks triumphantly overcome. He has attributed his first run of reversals and bankruptcies to the recession that took hold in 1990. But 10 years of tax information paints a different, and far bleaker, picture of his deal-making abilities and financial condition. . . .In 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade. In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer.
5.7 NBC: Deputies pulled over a pickup truck, in which the woman was a passenger, around 3:15 a.m. in Punta Gorda FL after seeing it blow a stop sign. After stopping, the driver, a 22-year-old man, told authorities that he and the woman were coming from a nearby underpass, where they were trying to collect frogs and snakes, as people do. The deputies issued the man a warning for the stop sign incident, then asked to see their spoils, on the off chance that their perfectly normal outing resulted in gathering some wildlife they shouldn’t have: The driver opened the bags near him, which contained clothes and personal items. The 25-year-old female passenger then opened the backpack at her feet, revealing 42 small three-striped mud turtles and one softshell turtle. When Charlotte County deputies asked her if she had anything else on her person the deputies needed to know about, she pulled a foot-long alligator out of her yoga pants
5.6 The Met Gala
5.6 Susan Sontag: The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is 
playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious.” One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
5.6 Rosie Spinx in Quartzy: That neoliberal sensibility—emphasizing the importance of markets above the intervention of the state, and typified by the attitude that the tide of growth and globalization will lift all boats—has also given rise to the thoroughly modern affliction that we now call “millennial burnout.” A coinage by Anne Helen Petersen in her memorable piece for BuzzFeed, the idea is that all this self-optimization in the digital age is taking a toll, and leaving us with multiple afflictions, including “errand paralysis.” Petersen argues that we’re obsessed with self-optimization because—post-financial crisis, saddled with student debt, with little hope of a pension—we simply have to be: “We couldn’t just show up with a diploma and expect to get and keep a job that would allow us to retire at 55. In a marked shift from the generations before, millennials needed to optimize ourselves to be the very best workers possible.” The result is an economy where it’s more possible than ever to be your own boss, and a lot less possible to buy your own home.
5.5 Robert Samuelson in the Post: In 2018, the net worth of the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans represented 70 percent of household wealth, up from 61 percent in 1989, the study’s first year. Even among this upper crust, wealth became more concentrated. Over the same years, the share of the top 1 percent went from 24 percent to 31 percent. The bottom 50 percent of U.S. households had virtually no net worth, the difference between assets and liabilities, mainly loans. Their wealth share tumbled from 4 percent of total wealth in 1989 to 1 percent in 2018. Their assets (roughly half were homes) stood at $6.8 trillion, compared with liabilities (primarily home mortgages) of $5.6 trillion, leaving a net worth of $1.2 trillion. Many of these households borrowed heavily in the real estate boom. Recall: Total household net worth equals about $100 trillion. The big losers over the past 30 years could be termed the broad middle class: those with wealth starting at the median (the midpoint of all wealth) and going to the 90th percentile. Their share of household wealth, though still sizable, has dropped from 35 percent in 1989 to 29 percent in 2018.
5.4 For the first time in the history of the Kentucky Derby, the horse that crossed the line first was not not declared the winner. After leading wire to wire, Maximum Security was disqualified for interference, leaving Country House the longshot winner, paying 65-1.
5.4 Joe Biden in South Carolina: “You’ve got Jim Crow sneaking back in. You know what happens when you have an equal right to vote? They lose.”
5.4 Nancy Pelosi in the Times: “Own the center left, own the mainstream. Our passions were for health care, bigger paychecks, cleaner government. We did not engage in some of the other exuberances that exist in our party.”
5.3 Employers added 263,000 new jobs last month, a record 103 straight months of job growth, and the official unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent, the lowest since 1969
5.2 North Carolina lawyer Cheslie Kryst was crowned Miss USA. For the first time, three black women are the reigning Miss USA, Miss Teen USA and Miss America
5.2 Nancy Pelosi on Barr: “He lied to Congress. The attorney general of the United States of America was not telling the truth to the Congress of the United States. That’s a crime.”
5.2 Angela Wright in the Washington Post: Biden’s candidacy makes him an easy target for all the feminist wrath that was unleashed in 1991, reignited in 2016 and compounded during the Brett M. Kavanaugh hearings last year. That ire is misplaced. If anyone other than Hill has cause to be furious with Biden, it would be me. I, too, was pilloried and dismissed by Thomas and never allowed a chance to defend myself. But I don’t share the wrath. Instead of scapegoating Biden, we should take aim at the men who have been accused of sexually harassing women, who have risen to positions of power and influence, as well as the people who put them there. Thomas and Kavanaugh have lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court, and the power to affect the rights of women for decades to come. Impeaching them might be impossible, but we can remove the senators who voted them in, along with the man in the Oval Office. That is our moral imperative. Biden is not a #MeToo villain. He wrote the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, which survives despite Republican attempts to cut funding and a Supreme Court decision gutting a key provision that allowed women the right to sue their attackers. That law was recently reauthorized by the House and awaits Senate consideration. The law was a measure of Biden’s character, and what he now proposes as a candidate should be judged just as carefully. This is not the time to ask Biden to answer for what happened 28 years ago. We need him to carve us a pathway forward. He doesn’t owe me an apology. But I will tell you who does: Clarence Thomas.
5.1 In a poll of young Arabs, two thirds say religion plays too big a role in the Middle East; 79% say the region needs to reform its religious institutions; 59% say the US is an adversary while only 41% call it an ally; and are split between Russia (37%) and the U.S. (38%) when asked which is the stronger ally
5.1 Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post: Among Barr’s worst moments: Claiming there was a difference between seeking to remove special counsel Robert S. Mueller III for “conflicts” (which never existed), or firing him; claiming, despite the language of Mueller’s letter, that he did not think Mueller found Barr’s four-page letter from March 24 misleading; claiming that he did not release Mueller’s summaries because the entire report had to be released (yet Barr released his own four-page letter, which he refused to characterize as a “summary”); and claiming that Mueller refused to reach a prosecutorial decision (despite the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) guidelines prohibiting prosecution of a sitting president) because of insufficient evidence. Again and again, the attorney general resorted to word games. He didn’t lie, he now argues, when he told committee members that he was unaware of the Mueller team’s objections because he was referring to the team, not to Mueller. (Isn’t Mueller part of his own team?) On the difference between removing Mueller for phony conflicts and firing him, Shugerman says, “I cannot understand his explanation on Trump manufacturing a conflict of interest as distinguishable from firing. Both are impeding an investigation.” “Barr’s testimony has been disgraceful,” constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe tells me. “He’s betraying his oath as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, acting as though he were Donald Trump’s personal defense attorney.”
5.1 Sen. Kamala Harris on CNN: “He did not answer the question, and I’m sure he didn’t because he knew he was under oath, and he knew that he could potentially expose himself to perjury if he didn’t answer honestly.”
5.1 Aaron Blake in the Washington Post: “The parsing of the letter is really a microcosm of the entire Barr imbroglio. The things he was saying were technically true (at least as far as we know), but focusing on them distracted from the real issue. Similarly, it’s not that Barr necessarily lied about anything in the Mueller report but that he cherry-picked what he disclosed to create a narrative unduly favorable to President Trump. Rather than making it clear that Mueller had decided it wasn’t his place to accuse Trump of obstruction of justice, for instance, Barr simply said that he hadn’t done so. That left some with the impression maybe Mueller viewed the evidence as inconclusive.”
5.1 Senator Maisie Hirono to Barr: “Being attorney general of the United States is a sacred trust. You have betrayed that trust. America deserves better. You should resign.”
5.1 Barr on Mueller: “The letter’s a bit snitty.”
