William Barr, an attorney with a long history of involvement in government, was just appointed to US Attorney general by President Trump:
The Senate voted Thursday to approve William Barr as the next attorney general and successor to Jeff Sessions, who stepped down in November. Now, the pressing question is what the country can expect from its new top law enforcement official: a continuation of Sessions’ hard-line stance on immigration and crime, or a new course?
The answer is most likely some of both.
Barr, who previously served as attorney general under the first President Bush, has embraced positions on immigration and crime that were also backed by Sessions, a former federal prosecutor and U.S. senator from Alabama.
But the two men are not identical in their views, said John Malcolm, vice president of the Institute for Constitutional Government at the conservative Heritage Foundation. He has studied Barr’s record and watched his January confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “There was a dogmatic quality to Jeff Sessions’ approach, and I think Barr will be more open-minded,” Malcolm said.
So far, questions about Barr’s plans have centered on special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Sessions recused himself from overseeing the investigation, angering President Donald Trump. Barr has said Sessions did the right thing.
But Barr’s impact on the criminal justice system will be wide-ranging. Here’s what we know so far about his views on three key issues:
A HARD LINE ON IMMIGRATION
Barr has taken uncompromising positions on immigration, and experts say they don’t expect that to change.
During Barr’s first term as attorney general, from 1991 to 1993, he made it harder for asylum-seekers to enter the United States. He sent immigration officers to foreign airports to screen people before they boarded planes to America. And he blocked Haitians fleeing a 1991 coup, arranging for them to be detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and screened for HIV and AIDS before they could claim asylum at the U.S. border.
More recently, while in private law practice, Barr has defended Trump’s travel ban that primarily affected Muslim countries. He also praised Sessions’ ramping up prosecutions of people trying to re-enter the country after being deported.
“We need money right now for border security, including barriers and walls and slats and other things,” Barr said at his January confirmation hearing.
Those statements indicate Barr won’t depart much from Sessions, who played a guiding role in the Trump administration’s efforts to curtail immigration.
Sessions made it tougher for migrants to seek asylum, forced immigration judges to speed up deportation hearings, enforced a “zero tolerance” border policy that included separating migrants from their children, and helped Trump craft new versions of the travel ban after it was blocked in the courts. (source, source)
He has been an advocate for the mass incarceration of people as expressed in a 1992 paper entitled, quite pointedly, The Case for Mass Incarceration:
Two portraits of William Barr emerged during the second day of his confirmation hearing to lead the Justice Department as President Trump’s choice as attorney general.
One was of a brilliant and moral man who oversaw the resolution of a hostage crisis at a federal prison without any casualties and another was of an early 1990s attorney general who held views on race and policing that now seem antiquated and unacceptable to many in law enforcement.
Wednesday’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, from a number of legal experts and civil rights advocates, illustrated that Barr, if confirmed, will do much more than just oversee Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference.
That investigation dominated the conversation on Tuesday, when senators got the chance to question Barr, but Wednesday’s discussion was more wide-ranging.
Barr previously served as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush from 1991 to 1993. He voiced support for aggressive incarceration policies at that time, which led to large increases in the prison population at a time when violent crime rates were skyrocketing across the country.
“As attorney general, [Barr] championed mass incarceration and deprived countless persons of color of their liberty and dramatically limited their future potential,” said Derrick Johnson, the president and CEO of the NAACP. “His Justice Department tenure was marked by extraordinarily aggressive policies that harmed people of color.”
Both Tuesday and Wednesday, Democratic senators pointed to a 1992 memo issued by Barr’s Justice Department entitled “The Case For More Incarceration.”
Barr wrote in that paper’s forward that “there is no better way to reduce crime than to identify, target, and incapacitate those hardened criminals who commit staggering numbers of violent crimes whenever they are on the streets.” (source, source)
But most interestingly, as Wikipedia and Fox News both mention, as well as his Justice Department biography (here, here), that after graduation and while pursuing his law degree he worked for the CIA:
Barr worked in the Central Intelligence Agency from 1973 until 1977 as an analyst and assistant legislative counsel, according to his Justice Department biography.
During this time, he studied law at night at George Washington University. He already received a bachelor’s degree in government and a master’s degree in government and Chinese studies – both from Columbia University. (source, source)
Now let’s put this together.
Many are saying that TRUMP is “fighting” the DEEP STATE (whatever that is, as nobody can name any actual persons or structure associated with it in any clear manner).
Trump just appointed a “former” CIA employee to the post of Attorney General for the second time, and this comes at a time when he is also bringing back all of the old PNAC neocon war hawks such as John Bolton to his administration.
Doesn’t that seem strange?
Likewise, this particular “former” CIA employee says that he will take a “hard line” on immigration.
However, we know for a fact that it is the CIA who has been running drugs and weapons to and from Central America for decades, is the main actor in the “drug war”, and does so in order to raise funds for black ops (in the case of drug operations) and for “stay-behind” operations in the case of weapons, which often times involves either funding revolutions in other countries or terrorist groups. Three obvious examples of this are the overthrow of Muammar Gaddhafi in Libya to precipitate the “refugee crisis”, the current “revolution” taking place right now in Venezuela, and the infamous support of ISIS that has resulted in the genocide of Christians in Iraq, destroying in scarcely fourteen years what THE MUSLIMS did not destroy to the same extent in the extent of fourteen centuries.
How can one believe that this man, who has a long history with government and direct ties to the CIA, will actually take a “hard line” against immigration when it is the very agency he is associated which has facilitated much of the human migrations to take place from Central America by their actions done in the name of geopolitical manipulation and power struggles?
It proves again that truth really is stranger than fiction, and that even Hollywood screenwriters could not make up some of the things that one is seeing today.
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