NYT: DOJ Has Opened A Criminal Investigation of Itself

William Barr, who got his job by telling Trump that the Mueller investigation was a witch hunt, has made good on his pledge:  He is now opening a CRIMINAL probe to charge those responsible for discovering Russian interference in the 2016 election, and sounding the alarm about it.

This turn-of-events has Vladimir Putin's fingerprints all over it.

Will it distract from the impeachment?

It won't derail it, that much is sure.  But it'll give Trump TV something else to broadcast for the coming year.

[Heavy sigh.]

Bill Barr decided to open a criminal case after hearing the taped interview with Josef Mifsud, the academic from Malta who passed the information to George Papadapoulos that Russia had hacked into the DNC servers.

How did Mifsud know this?

What's his connection to Papadopoulos?  Well apparently Papadopoulos's wife worked for Mifsud, and when George became Trump's foreign policy advisor, Mifsud felt compelled to warn Papadopoulos of what he knew.

Mifsud, for his part, frequently traveled to Russia and claimed to be friends with Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign minister.  The Mueller report says Mifsud was in contact with someone (name redacted) who was a former staff member of the Internet Research Agency, the troll-farm who carried out the DNC hacking.  So his information was solid.

So... whom would Barr presumably want to charge?  Mifsud?  He's in Switzerland = no extradiction.  Papadopoulos?  He served 12 days in federal prison and is currently on a 12-month supervised probation.  The Russian IRA staffer who passed the info to Mifsud?  Good luck indicting a redacted Russian.  Maybe Barr knows who this person is?

The irony of course is that, regardless of WHY the Mueller investigation started, it found real and substantial wrongdoing by the Trump Administration.  Discrediting the origin of it won't discredit the findings.  So Barr's motive in opening this criminal case is puzzling -- at best.  Presumably he's working the Hannity/Nunes/Meadows/Breitbart/Bannon conspiracy that Obama/Clinton/Uranium One opened the Mueller probe to bring down Trump.  At a worst-case interpretation, Barr/Trump are opening this criminal case simply to distract from the impeachment and give Trump TV another storyline to push to supporters -- who, it's been determined, don't access any sources outside Trump TV for balance or fact-checking.  It's another attempt, in other words, to influence the 2020 election with another false narrative.

And it's got Putin's fingerprints all over it. Too bad the president and his GOP defenders are so credulous that Putin can play them like a fiddle.

Incidentally, the involvement of the Clintons and Joe & Hunter Biden in all these international business schemes of various levels of heinously-rotten stink, are a good reason why the Democrats should distance themselves from these old-style politicians of embedded corruption.

Give me a politician whose robe is white.