UPDATED: I Believe Andrew Weissmann

There are currently two narratives making the rounds about AG Bill Barr. Both portray Barr as a bit of an evil genius, but from distinctively different perspectives.

The first narrative is put forward by former Mueller consigliere, Andrew Weissmann:

One of Robert Mueller's former top prosecutors said the outside prosecutor picked to review the case against retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn is a ruse to investigate President Trump's perceived enemies. 

Andrew Weissmann, a former Justice Department official who was known as Mueller's "pit bull" during the Russia investigation, said the Justice Department swapped out the "loser case" of Andrew McCabe, who escaped criminal charges on Friday for allegedly lying to investigators about authorizing media disclosures, for a fresh one targeting top former FBI officials, including McCabe, led by Jeffrey Jensen, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. 

"All they did was swapped out a loser case for starting an investigation that is going to be of Comey, McCabe, Pete Strzok," Weissmann told MSNBC host Chuck Todd. 

All three officials were involved in the investigation into the Trump 2016 campaign's alleged ties to Russia, which Trump and his allies have called a "witch hunt." Mueller, who took over the inquiry after FBI Director James Comey was fired in May 2017, found no criminal conspiracy when the investigation ended last year. 

Attorney General William Barr picked Jensen, the top federal prosecutor in St. Louis, to work alongside the Flynn case's lead prosecutor Brandon Van Grack one month after the former Trump national security adviser filed to withdraw his guilty plea in Mueller's investigation. 

... Barr is also under intense scrutiny for U.S. Attorney John Durham's inquiry into the origins of the Russia investigation, which critics claim is meant to discredit Mueller's work.

The second narrative has been put forward repeatedly--not to say obsessively--by sundance at CTH. I count a minimum of four trademark on-and-on sundance posts attacking Barr in the last week alone. According to this narrative, Barr is busily defending the Deep State, deep sixing any possible prosecutions of people like ... Comey, McCabe, and Strzok--and many more. As usual, sundance is long on narrative but short on actual facts to demonstrate that Barr is covering up for the Deep State.

The timing of these attacks is remarkable, in that they come at a time when Barr is under increasing fire from the Left. Whom does sundance think he's helping? Tellingly, the only argument sundance offers is that Barr hasn't declassified what he (sundance) thinks should be declassified when he (sundance) thinks the docs should be declassified. Or, Barr hasn't indicted who he (sundance) thinks should be indicted when he (sundance) thinks they should be indicted. Nor does sundance offer anything at all persuasive to explain the nearly hysterical fear of Barr that we see in the Dem establishment and the allied Deep State intel agencies and MSM.

I think Weissmann's narrative is far and away more persuasive. The reason is that it recognizes the few things we know for sure. We know that Durham and Barr have traveled repeatedly to foreign powers seeking cooperation in their investigation of the Russia Hoax, we know that Durham is targeting CIA and FBI funding of key sources, we know that with the appointment of Jensen the Durham targeting is pointing not only at the top echelon at the FBI but also at Team Mueller and Weissmann, and of course the Horowitz deep dive into the FISA abuse also exposed vast amounts of related and highly troubling information about FBI and CIA criminality. Sundance's claim that all that is the action of Barr trying to cover it all up is to me absurd on its face.

The real question to me is: Who's behind these anti-Barr narratives? Looking to the Left, there's no doubt. But who's behind sundance? Why is he so obsessively anti-Barr? After all, who seriously thinks that Barr being driven from office at this juncture would help Trump and his agenda? It wouldn't. So whoever is behind sundance must be persons for whom hatred for Barr and Barr's supporters outweighs support for Trump.

As I've said before, it's clear that sundance is merely a frontman who is being fed insider information. The question, then, is: Who are the people who are behind sundance? My theory has been that those people are "conservative" elements who are enflamed by hostility toward the GOP establishment in the Senate and in past GOP presidencies, especially the Bush 2 presidency. I think you can see that as another consistent theme at CTH--hatred for Mitch McConnell, for example. Barr, of course, has for years had close ties to the GOP establishment and, in fact, contributed heavily to the Jeb! campaign.

If you can identify the people who fit into that portrait, you'll probably know who is inspiring and feeding sundance's obsessive anti-Barr narratives. My view is that the portrait is that of the Jim DeMint element of the Republican party.

UPDATE: Connoisseurs of Sundance Brand Koolaid like to point out that "after 3+ years no indictments" as proof that Barr--who's actually only been AG for 1 year--is covering up for the Deep State. They always avoid addressing the inconvenient and indisputable fact Barr has allowed One Thousand Investigations to Bloom. Commenter Titan 28 links to a blog by James Kunstler, At Stake, that provides a nice summation of the matters into which Barr, Durham, and others are probing--it's a daunting task Barr has taken on, and even a brief perusal of it explains why it hasn't all come to a head. I happen to share Kunstler's distaste for the use of "lying to the FBI" charges. OTOH, I think the various conspiracy statutes provide plenty of wherewithal for getting to the bottom of all this--I suspect Kunstler simply doesn't really understand what RICO is actually all about. Anyway, I've reformatted Kunstler to make it more digestible:

I have a theory about the McCabe case: The Attorney General has taken the rinky-dink “lying to the FBI” charge off the table. It has become a liability, virtually the emblem for government misconduct, and Mr. Barr is getting rid of it in these matters. It has already caused too much mischief, insulted Americans’ sense of justice, and damaged the DOJ’s standing. Note, Andrew McCabe has been let off only on this charge, stemming from only one particular IG referral; he may well yet be liable for more serious charges-to-come. From here on, there will be no more rinky-dink lying charges against any of those implicated in the coup, only the most serious charges, and only those that add up to a solid case.

The coup has been so broad, deep, and thick that I predict cases will have to be brought under the RICO statutes in batches for different groups in separate agencies and branches of government. For instance, there is 

1. the Intel Mob, including former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intel (DNI) James Clapper, current Intel IG Michael Atkinson, so-called whistleblower (he that cannot be named, E*** C**********) and International Man of Mystery Joseph Mifsud. 

2. There is the gang from the State Department who helped engineer UkraineGate, including former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, former Sec’y of State John Kerry, and others. 

3. There is that big herd of rogue lawyers in the DOJ and its stepchild, the FBI, the names widely disseminated by now, Comey, Strzok, Baker, Boente, Carlin, Clinesmith, et al. 

4. There’s Robert Mueller and his henchpersons, Andrew Weissmann, Jeannie Rhee, et al. 

5. There’s another band of seditionists in Congress that includes Mark Warner of the Senate Intel Committee, the now notorious idiot Adam Schiff over in the House, and staffers who worked for both. 

6. There’s a bunch in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment that paid over a million dollars to Alternate International Man of Mystery (actually, CIA asset) Stefan Halper to run entrapment schemes against people working for Mr. Trump. 

7. There’s a swarm from Barack Obama’s White House, including Valarie Jarrett, Susan Rice, Samantha Powers, Alexandra Chalupa, former Vice-President Joe Biden and the former President himself. 

8. And finally, there is the 800-pound-gorilla over in the Democratic Party thicket, namely Hillary Clinton, and those connected to her and her charity fraud, the Clinton Foundation, which is the real and actual predicate for the whole sordid affair — a list that includes Viktor Vekselberg of Russia’s Skolkovo project, $25-million donor Russian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, and Dmitri Alperovich of CrowdStrike, (Russian collusion, anyone?) as well as rascally freelancers such as Christopher Steele, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, the shadowy Nellie Ohr, lawyer/lobbyist Adam Waldman, and Hillary errand boys Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer. The stories behind those names are all over the web, in case you want to edify yourself.