This post is just meant as a quick supplemental message ahead of tomorrow’s (Thursday’s) release of AG Bill Barr’s redacted Mueller Report (I know I promised to write about compassion next, and I will, when I finally post my next full article)…
Here are the points I wanted to get out tonight:
First of all, AG Barr has amply fulfilled my expectations that Mueller’s report would be stifled this spring (see my last article). Barr has obviously been the agent of the “favorable winds” that we foresaw in Trump’s astrology for this spring (see my last article). But admittedly, I didn’t foresee Mueller’s timing completely correctly (and I was also wrong in saying that Trump would likely return from his summit in Vietnam with Kim Jung-un with seemingly successful results), but I’ll cover that in more detail in my next complete article.
Secondly, I’d be very surprised if Barr didn’t continue to stifle Mueller’s work in tomorrow’s redacted version of the Mueller Report, at least to an extent that politically protects Trump. There are several suspicious facts that put Bill Barr’s credibility deeply in question:
1) It has taken Barr nearly four weeks to redact a report that reportedly was written to be released to Congress quickly. That’s a suspiciously long time to do what should have been easy work.
2) Barr refused to say in his congressional testimony if he had discussed Mueller’s findings with the White House. That’s pretty suspicious, too. What was he hoping to hide? Well, it was reported today that Barr’s department has furnished Trump’s lawyers with information about the report’s findings in advance of its public release, enabling Trump’s legal team to have a “rebuttal” ready as soon as the Mueller report goes public (i.e. for damage control). That’s a very taboo favor for Barr to provide.
3) Barr explicitly asserted that the intelligence community spied on the Trump campaign—stoking distrust of the agency (the FBI) that began the investigation into Trump’s ties with Russia in the first place—even though Barr later walked back his assertion. A man who is very nuanced in his word choices wouldn’t just accuse the FBI in sworn congressional testimony of spying on a president by accident, or by reckless slip of the tongue. He was trying to protect Trump by fueling the counter-story to the Mueller report.
4) Barr already pulled a similar move 30 years ago, when he hid a legal opinion he wrote for George Bush Sr. from Congress’ attempts to see it. That was a kind of coverup. Barr’s written opinion was released 3 years later by Bill Clinton (more on this below).
5) Barr seems to have auditioned for the AG position by writing a very bizarrely Trump-friendly memo on the legal question of obstruction of justice (more on this below).
6) Barr didn’t recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller probe, despite his very explicit criticism of Mueller’s purported views on obstruction of justice in that memo, and despite calling Mueller’s views “asinine” in 2017.
7) Barr then cleared Trump of obstruction of justice based on the view he asserted in his memo. He also seemed to do so a bit too eagerly (it took him less than 48 hours to clear Trump on all counts, despite it taking 4 weeks to edit Mueller’s report).
8) Barr hasn’t asked the court to allow him to give Congress any grand jury information, even though it is customary and easy to do so. In fact, Barr refuses to do so.
9) Barr is bucking precedence by only offering Congress a redacted report. In similar cases, Congress received full, unredacted reports
10) Barr has been playing with words in his communications with Congress, and this suggests that he’s trying to obscure the truth. When Barr said that Mueller didn’t “establish” a case of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia, he used a word (“establish”) that would require the highest legal standard of proof to satisfy. That is, one could find tons of evidence of collusion, but still fail to “establish” collusion between the parties in question. Similarly, when Barr said that Trump wasn’t guilty of obstruction of justice, this didn’t imply that Trump had not significantly obstructed, or tried to obstruct, the justice process. Rather, it merely meant that Trump: a) hadn’t tried to destroy or compromise any specific piece of evidence, and b) Trump technically couldn’t be guilty of obstructing justice for firing James Comey and trying to fire Mueller anyway, because there’s no law against a president shutting down an investigation of himself, in Barr’s view (see next item). Barr’s word play merely obscures the truth; it doesn’t reveal the truth. The only potential reason to obscure the truth about Mueller’s findings would be to protect Trump from those findings.
11) Bill Barr’s June 8th 2018 memorandum to Rod Rosenstein and the justice department, strikes me as a contrived facade of an argument defending: i) Trump’s firing of James Comey, and ii) Trump’s absolute right to terminate any FBI investigation he wants to terminate, regardless of motive. Barr ends up taking the position that, while it would be illegal for a president to destroy a tiny piece of evidence in an investigation, it would not be illegal for the president to destroy the entire investigation itself (by shutting it down). This should strike anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty as an absurd position to take. The only reason why the evidence of an investigation could be important to protect would be if investigations themselves are important to protect. In other words, it wouldn’t be important to protect an investigation’s evidence if it weren’t important to protect the investigation in the first place. Why would the preservation of the evidence be more important than the preservation of the investigation that the evidence serves?
Clearly, Barr just submitted his position to Trump’s justice department in order to be recognized by the president for the president-friendly position Barr propounded. Barr’s memo made it abundantly clear that he was already inclined to fight for Trump’s absolution from guilt on obstruction, and that’s precisely what he did in his 4-page letter to Congress from March 24.
Unfortunately, we don’t have Barr’s birth time, so we don’t know his ascendant. But, because Barr already pulled something similar in the Bush administration 30 years ago, I’m suspicious that Barr’s ascendant is late Sagittarius, like Mueller’s. Admittedly, the current Saturn-Ketu conjunction in late Sagittarius makes it tempting just to speculate that the bad actors on center-stage right now must be Sagittarius rising. But 30 years ago, when Barr defied Congress the last time, Saturn was in the 2nd half of Sagittarius too, just as it is now. This probably indicates that Barr’s ascendant is 17-24 degrees of Sag. If so, then with Ketu beside Saturn in Sagittarius now too, Barr is likely to repeat his previous stunt with even more deception than the first time.
The only redeeming factor weighing in Barr’s favor now, in my view, is that Rod Rosenstein has recently come to the defense of Barr’s integrity. Until now, I have trusted Rosenstein, so his defense of Barr is confusing.
One thing for sure is that we won’t see full exoneration of Trump in any legitimate rendering of the Mueller Report. Of course, that will lead to the question of how badly that lack of exoneration reflects on Trump, and that in turn will largely depend on how much damaging information is redacted by Barr. I expect that the efforts to hold back the tides of damning info on Trump will have failed by this June. June is also a time when the economy is likely to falter and affairs with Kim Jung-un are likely to escalate dramatically. I also think that Americans will be increasingly in conflict with each other at that time as well.
Finally, since Mueller issued his report on March 22nd, I should point out that Trump’s first “peak of accountability” for 2019 occurred right around March 9, about 2 weeks before Mueller finished his report. I interpret that to indicate that Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony (which he gave on February 26 & March 6) was actually part of Mueller’s big move (the big move I’d been predicting would occur by the first week of March). The media seems not to have made much news of the fact that Cohen testified on live TV that Roger Stone told Trump in advance about some Wikileaks dumps against Hillary Clinton—which is something that Trump is said (by Roger Stone himself, on Fox News) to have denied in his sworn written testimony to Mueller.
Thus, if Cohen was telling the truth, then Trump perjured himself to Mueller. My guess is that Mueller was left with just a “he-said/he-said” case for perjury, so he couldn’t make anything legally stick, but he still wanted Congress and the public to know about the issue, so he had Cohen testify accordingly. Either way, Cohen’s appearance in Mueller’s and Trump’s key astrological moment in early March means that Cohen will still play a big role in Trump’s two remaining peaks of accountability this year (June & Nov/Dec). June will be awful for Trump, and Mueller will be deeply in the fray at that point (if not even by late May). I’ll say more in my next full article about all that. I’ll also talk about truth and compassion in that post as well.
Try to stay detached from it all until then! More soon…
