Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr, President Trump's nominee to return to the post, presented two starkly different images at his U.S. Senate confirmation hearing on Jan. 15 in Washington, DC.
Barr, 68 (shown in a screengrab), stressed through his words and manner the appearance of an independent lawyer dedicated to public service and a "rule of law" according to relatively neutral principles on the conservative side of the political mainstream with his principles honed by his long 
experience and integrity.
These, nationwide cable audiences saw throughout the day, included Barr's respect and friendship for such former U.S. Justice Department colleagues as the current Special Counsel Robert Mueller III and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
Barr's Republican supporters on the Senate Judiciary Committee eagerly promoted that Barr persona, which is most likely to maximize Barr's votes for confirmation. The supporters include the new chairman of the Republican-controlled committee, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, below right.
Barr's other persona was that of a pushy supplicant eager to butter up President Trump with dubious legal theories granting the president strong protections from federal corruption and 
similar investigations. Those probes most notably involve Mueller's ongoing probe Russian influence helping enable Trump's 2016 presidential election victory, among other alleged misconduct or crime.
Support for that version of Barr's motives arose primarily from questions and comments by committee Democrats. Such questions came from those who cited Barr's previous written and verbal statements. The gist was that Barr sent an unsolicited memo to Trump's White House staff arguing that Mueller has been abusing his authority in unconstitutional ways.
Some have described Barr's public statements as a campaign for the post. Separately, some questioned Barr's statement to a New York Times reporter that prosecution of Hillary Clinton for a uranium deal approved by the Obama administration was more justified than the current inquiry over Mueller.
Barr would supervise Mueller if confirmed as attorney general and could fire Mueller.
So, the question remained at the end of the day: which, if either image, previews for the public how the real William Barr would act if confirmed?
The Justice Integrity Project will explore the possibilities in depth during this confirmation process.
We begin with excerpts below on selected news stories and commentaries early this week about the nominee's confirmation process.
The case’s drama included the defendant’s tearful apologies for wrongdoing that cost him both his job and threatened his marriage because the FBI exposed how Wolfe, shown in a file photo from an appearance on C-SPAN discussing security issues, had been having an affair with a young reporter.
She said that she would sentence him purely on the charge of lying in his plea agreement, but then said that he deserved jail time in part because he had violated his position of responsibility.
The judge noted, however, that Berger and Petraeus had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, unlike Wolfe.
The material in Part 4, highlighted below in red, is taken from the chapter 'George H.W. Bush: Poppy's Seed and Bitter Harvest' (Part 2). 'Poppy'' was the late president's nickname among his family.
collaboratively with the CIA and FBI operational arms.
After the family moved to Houston in 1959, Poppy became active in Texas Republican politics. His initial post was as Harris County GOP finance chairman. This enabled him to leverage his financial contacts, and prepare for a losing Senate campaign against Democrat Ralph Yarborough in 1964. Bush aimed lower for his next campaign, and won a Houston congressional seat in 1966. By then a millionaire, he exited from Zapata Offshore by selling his shares to fellow Yale Bonesman Robert Gow.
One of the book's central findings was to document via more than 1,100 endnotes that all recent presidents between President Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump established covert ties to the CIA or FBI before they entered politics.
from the Yale's Skull and Bones Society to helping finance Hitler's chief financier, Fritz Thyssen.
All of efforts at historical understanding are too important to delay or leave to hand-picked courtiers of the powerful whom the major media put before us. Several major national problems afflicting the United States have direct roots to little-known aspects of the Bush dynasty and the 41st president (1989-1993) in particular, as will be seen in the last segment of our multi-part series.
Another result traceable to this president and this family is a notable advance in the growing culture of "elite deviance," whereby wealthy, well-connected insiders are spared the consequences of their actions, whether it is Bush family members who helped bring on the multi-billion-dollar Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980s or the Iran-Contra criminals whom the 41st president pardoned with the support of his Attorney General 
Russ Baker (Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put It In The White House, And What Their Influence Means For America
Peter Dale Scott (shown at right) (American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan);
Washington Post, 
Washington Post, 
That was enough for Kelly’s Republican rival, Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), who is trailing him in early polls, to go on the attack. The television spot she debuted days later spent nearly as much time talking about plans by the democratic socialist from Vermont to raise taxes and award new benefits to undocumented immigrants as it did about Kelly.
The reality is that only three states have voted thus far (out of fifty). Two of the three were nearly all white. Two of them used the gibberish caucus format. We now know that Vladimir Putin was rigging things for Bernie while all these states were voting, and yet he still only won two out of the three. The problem is that because the Democrats have four great candidates (Biden, Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar) and none of them has been dominating over the others, it’s created this fatalist notion that Sanders simply 
can’t be stopped.
some must shift their focus. While no one should exclude the possibility that Sanders might beat President Trump, his manifest weaknesses and extreme ideology make such a victory unlikely, thereby subjecting the country to the horror of another four years of an unhinged, authoritarian president.
First, former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg has offered a model for other candidates in making Sanders the top target. Buttigieg will hang on for now, relying on his results in Iowa and New Hampshire, and what looks like a barely adequate third-place finish in Nevada.
finish sixth in Nevada, Klobuchar — despite her feisty demeanor and practical agenda — has no path to the nomination. The 5 percent to 7 percent or so of the electorate that has supported her certainly could be used by a more viable candidate.
the pack in each contest. No amount of spending will lift him into contention.
2019.
WMRD 1420 AM / WLIS 1150 AM (Middletown and Old Saybrook, Connecticut), 
director of the Justice Integrity Project and the author of Presidential Puppetry, joins S.T. Patrick to discuss presidential politics of the last 40 years. What should we have known about George H.W. Bush, Bill & Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, John Kerry, John Edwards, and John McCain?
Bush and the October Surprise, the Willie Horton ad, The Election of 1992, Ross Perot’s deficiencies, what Fletcher Prouty still teaches us, the legitimacy of Bob Dole’s 1996 nomination, the value of Jack Kemp, Bush v Gore, The Two Johns: Kerry & Edwards, the real John McCain, and much more.
#MeToo movement, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford decided to send a letter in confidence to a leading Democratic lawmaker alleging that her former high school classmate and Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers. The FBI was given 1 week to investigate the allegations, but even after Kavanaugh’s confirmation, two New York Times reporters - Robin Pogrebin, who was in Kavanaugh’s undergraduate class at Yale, and Kate Kelly, who grew up not far from his childhood home – kept digging.
