Barr Declines The Special Counsel Gambit

By now you've all heard that self-disgraced soon-to-be-former AG Bill Barr has declined to appoint one or more Special Counsels, to investigate either Biden Inc. or election fraud. In a sense he even went out of his way to add insult to injury. In the case of election fraud, he explicitly reaffirmed his earlier expressed view that fraud in elections happens all the time and this time was in line with the past. I'm sorry, that's absurd.

What was especially insulting, however, was his comparison of the Biden Inc. case to the Russia Hoax case, from the special counsel standpoint.

Special Counsel's are supposed to be appointed because

That investigation or prosecution of that person or matter by a United States Attorney's Office or litigating Division of the Department of Justice would present a conflict of interest for the Department or other extraordinary circumstances

To my knowledge Barr never articulated any specific conflict nor any other extraordinary circumstance. What he said was that he wanted to assure Team Durham that they'd be able to complete whatever it is they've been doing for lo! these many months.

Compare that to what he said today regarding the ongoing Biden Inc. investigation:

"I think to the extent that there's an investigation, I think that it's being handled responsibly and professionally," Barr said Monday about the investigation into Hunter Biden. "To this point I have not seen a reason to appoint a special counsel and I have no plan to do so before I leave."

To my way of thinking it's far easier to articulate a conflict for DoJ or some "other extraordinary situation" when officials subject to summary dismissal by the president would be investigating not only the president's son but would be required to follow out investigative leads involving the president himself. Barr's Biden Inc. statement, to me, simply doesn't pass the laugh test when compared to the Russia Hoax case. And anyway, given that Durham's appointment appears to violate the DoJ regulations (he's a DoJ employee rather than an outsider), I assume Durham will be quickly gone unless he does something very soon.

Speaking of the laugh test, Jen Psaki is quoted as saying that Biden won't mention his son to any prospective AG candidates. Apparently a wink and a nod will cover the situation.

To hammer all this home--and this is really almost like using a sledgehammer on a fly--I'll quote from James Kunstler's The Gyre Widens, which commenter Cassander linked yesterday:

The mind-numbing weirdness of Joe Biden’s insertion into the election of 2020 — like the furtive groping of an intern in a cloakroom — only signals the Democratic Party’s reckless drive to self-destruction, dragging the republic over the edge of an abyss with it. How did this hollowed-out figure of a grifting old pol find himself pretending to national leadership, and in an historic moment of crisis that goes far beyond the mere wrecking of an election? Who wanted him there so badly, and why?

My guess would be Barack Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, and John Brennan anxious to stay out of prison, heading a long list of officials present and former who committed crimes trying desperately to protect them, with accessories aplenty across the aisle. That’s what this four-year coup has been about, snowballing criminality, culminating in an orgy of blatant ballot fraud. At this fraught stage of the drama, they’re hiding behind the pretense that all the old rituals of torch-passing must be observed for the sake of decorum, and they’re mistaken.

The Biden family’s moneygrubbing exploits in foreign lands had already been revealed in the previous act of sedition, the ridiculous impeachment attempt. In that episode, it was well-established in the public record that Hunter Biden grifted more than a million dollars out of the Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, and that his father had stupidly bragged on tape about covering for him. Yet William Barr’s DOJ was already in the possession of Hunter’s laptop, chock full of evidence that Hunter was raking in way more millions from other countries, and that the loot was being distributed to his relatives. Why did they keep that from the president’s lawyers with Mr. Trump in jeopardy of being railroaded for asking Ukraine’s president to have a look at it? Would Mr. Barr say they were protecting an ongoing investigation by keeping it all secret? What a lame excuse, under the circumstances.

Just as impeachment concluded in failure, Mr. Biden got smoked in the early primaries, only to triumph mysteriously in the March Super Tuesday voting. After all, a primary is the party’s own election, and they can engineer it however they want. So, they contrived to elevate someone already criminally culpable in the mind of any citizen paying attention and capable of adding two-and-two to get four. Weird, a little bit?

Says it all, I think. And yet Barr seems determined to thoroughly disgrace himself beyond what he's already done. Fooled me once, but it sure won't happen again.