‘This is the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The sleazy, partisan lawyer commissioned by President Bill Clinton to rewrite the rules for independent investigations whined Thursday about how unfair those rules were after the Mueller Report exonerated President Donald Trump.
Neal Katyal claimed on the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” that Attorney General William Barr had corrupted the process by doing Trump’s bidding.
“There’s a couple things that we didn’t anticipate, you know, we thought about corrupt attorneys general and nefarious ones, but Barr’s actually more nefarious in some ways than anything we anticipated.”
Katyal, who briefly became the Obama administration’s acting solicitor general after Elena Kagan was nominated to the Supreme Court, said nothing during the interview about Eric Holder, the abjectly crooked DOJ chief he had served under.
Although the post-Starr Report rules that Katyal drafted in 1999 effectively gave more influence to the attorney general over Congress in independent investigations, he claimed the opposite on Thursday.
“The special counsel regulations were written to deal with the central problem that our constitution creates, which is, the president and his attorney general control prosecution entirely,” Katyal said. “So if you have a corrupt attorney general, there isn’t a way to stop him from doing the president’s bidding.”
Attacks on the current attorney general were an oft-repeated talking point in the liberal media following the Mueller Report’s release, despite clear indications that both Barr and Trump took unprecedented measures to provide transparency and access.
While both Clinton and Obama claimed “executive privilege” to block investigations into their dubious conduct, Trump declined to use it and asked for no redactions beyond what were legally mandated.
Prior to Barr’s becoming attorney general for the second time (he also filled the role under President George H. W. Bush), he had penned a legal analysis pointing to constitutional guidelines that prevent a sitting president from indictment.
Katyal and Colbert claimed Thursday that, contrary to being a reflection of fact-based judicial interpretation, this was his “audition” for the Trump AG spot.
“You can read this Mueller Report as, like, a 400-page, epic subtweet of the Barr memo saying the president can’t obstruct justice,” griped Katyal.
Even while saying that the report “parroted” Barr’s views, though, Katyal also claimed that the attorney general had completely misread and misinterpreted the conclusions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
“I kind of feel like with Barr if he tells you, ‘Don’t see this movie,’ you probably should see it because he saw a different movie than the one that actually exists,” he said.
Katyal desperately clung to footnote 1,091 of the Mueller Report, asserting that Mueller may have been secretly begging Congress to investigate further—and possibly to indict Trump after his presidency had ended.
“I’m feeling pretty good tonight because, basically, I feel that this is the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end,” Katyal said.
Although the rules he wrote were ostensibly intended to diminish the influence of partisan politics on investigations, Katyal said the ball is now in the court of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her legion of left-wing radicals in Congress to keep the witch hunt alive “at least until the president is no longer president.”
Shockingly, Katyal did acknowledge that he had been wrong about one prognostication in the lead-up to the report’s release.
Mueller found that the Trump campaign had resisted overtures from Russia to conduct election interference on its behalf—at least some of which actually stemmed from coordination between the Kremlin and the Clinton campaign through the Fusion GPS firm.
The report’s conclusion proved a far cry what Katyal had suggested the outcome would be in a February hit piece for The New York Times.
Under the false auspices of his legal expertise, he made a wildly off-the-mark prediction that members of the Trump inner-circle, including the president’s own son, would be arrested for collusion.
But rather than recognize that his assumptions were not evidence-based, Katyal used his supposed mea culpa instead to snipe at both Trumps.
“I plead guilty—I got this wrong,” he said. “Basically, there’s two variables here: Who has a greater proclivity to lie, and who has less respect for the rule of law—and between Trump and Trump Jr., Senior trumps Junior.”
Perhaps Katyal should consider including himself in that equation.