Why Barr can’t whitewash the Mueller report

Why Barr can’t whitewash the Mueller report

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Neal K. Katyal writes: Many who watched Attorney General William Barr’s testimony on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which followed the revelation that the special counsel Robert Mueller had expressed misgivings about Mr. Barr’s characterization of his report, are despairing about the rule of law. I am not among them. I think the system is working, and inching, however slowly, toward justice. When it comes to investigating a president, the special counsel regulations I had the privilege of drafting…

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William Barr’s ‘snitty’ slip-up gives away his game

William Barr’s ‘snitty’ slip-up gives away his game

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Aaron Blake writes: Attorney General William P. Barr appeared before Congress on Wednesday having been accused of misleading about and pre-spinning the Mueller report for President Trump. He also came on the heels of a newly reported letter in which Robert S. Mueller III rebuked Barr’s handling of the matter. So it should come as no surprise that he misled about and spun Mueller’s letter, too. The difference this time was that he accidentally gave away his game. From the…

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Trump eats your soul in small bites

Trump eats your soul in small bites

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James Comey writes: People have been asking me hard questions. What happened to the leaders in the Trump administration, especially the attorney general, Bill Barr, who I have said was due the benefit of the doubt? How could Mr. Barr, a bright and accomplished lawyer, start channeling the president in using words like “no collusion” and F.B.I. “spying”? And downplaying acts of obstruction of justice as products of the president’s being “frustrated and angry,” something he would never say to…

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How an elaborate plan to topple Venezuela’s president went wrong

How an elaborate plan to topple Venezuela’s president went wrong

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Uri Friedman writes: In the effort to topple Nicolás Maduro, Colombia’s ambassador to the United States once told me, the military men propping up Venezuela’s authoritarian president are like chess pieces. If they defect from the regime, “you lose that chess piece,” Francisco Santos explained. “They work better from the inside.” As Tuesday, April 30, began, the United States and its allies thought they finally had checkmate, after months of building up the opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate…

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Populists far more likely to believe in conspiracy theories

Populists far more likely to believe in conspiracy theories

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The Guardian reports: Populists across the world are significantly more likely to believe in conspiracy theories about vaccinations, global warming and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to a landmark global survey shared exclusively with the Guardian. The YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project sheds new light on a section of the world population that appears to have limited faith in scientific experts and representative democracy. Analysis of the survey found the clearest tendency among people with strongly held populist attitudes was a belief…

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The secretive leaders in the world of organized hate

The secretive leaders in the world of organized hate

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Southern Poverty Law Center reports: Thanks to the anonymity of the internet, a man can become a major player in the white supremacist “alt-right” movement without ever revealing his face to his audience. And that’s just what Joseph Jordan did. Jordan, a 30-year-old-man from Queens, New York, with light olive skin, slicked-back hair and rockabilly sideburns, has inhabited the busy, online alt-right persona of “Eric Striker” since at least 2015, Hatewatch determined through over a dozen interviews with people inside…

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A jawbone shows Denisovans lived on the Tibetan Plateau long before humans

A jawbone shows Denisovans lived on the Tibetan Plateau long before humans

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Science News reports: Denisovans reached what’s now called “the roof of the world” at least 160,000 years ago. Found in a Tibetan Plateau cave, a partial lower jawbone represents a Denisovan who is the oldest known hominid to reach the region’s cloud-scraping heights, researchers report online May 1 in Nature. The fossil suggests that these perplexing, extinct members of the human lineage weathered the plateau’s frigid, thin air long before humans did. Many researchers have assumed that, as far as…

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Congress should be ready to arrest Attorney General Barr if he defies subpoena

Congress should be ready to arrest Attorney General Barr if he defies subpoena

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Robert Reich writes: On Sunday, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee threatened to subpoena Attorney General William P. Barr if he refuses to testify this week about the Mueller report. But a subpoena is unlikely to elicit Barr’s cooperation. “We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” says the President of the United States. In other words, there is to be no congressional oversight of this administration: No questioning the Attorney General about the Mueller Report. No questioning a Trump adviser about…

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Mueller objected to Barr’s description of Russia investigation’s findings

Mueller objected to Barr’s description of Russia investigation’s findings

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The New York Times reports: Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, wrote a letter in late March to Attorney General William P. Barr objecting to his early description of the Russia investigation’s conclusions that appeared to clear President Trump on possible obstruction of justice, according to the Justice Department and three people with direct knowledge of the communication between the two men. The letter adds to the growing evidence of a rift between them and is another sign of…

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Trump pushes to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group

Trump pushes to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group

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There is not a single American expert on the Muslim Brotherhood who supports designating them as a terrorist group, says @shadihamid. pic.twitter.com/blaOvvSNf7 — Brookings (@BrookingsInst) April 30, 2019 The New York Times reports: The White House is pushing to issue an order that would designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization, bringing the weight of American sanctions against a storied and influential Islamist political movement with millions of members across the Middle East, according to officials familiar with the…

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At Trump golf course, undocumented employees say they get systematically cheated when told to work extra hours without pay

At Trump golf course, undocumented employees say they get systematically cheated when told to work extra hours without pay

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The Washington Post reports: His bosses at the Trump country club called it “side work.” On some nights, after the club’s Grille Room closed, head waiter Jose Gabriel Juarez — an undocumented immigrant from Mexico — was told to clock out. He pressed his index finger onto a scanner and typed his personal code, 436. But he didn’t go home. Instead — on orders from his bosses, Juarez said — he would stay on, sometimes past midnight. He vacuumed carpets,…

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Why Trump wants to prevent Deutsche Bank from sharing his financial records

Why Trump wants to prevent Deutsche Bank from sharing his financial records

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The New York Times reports: Over two decades, Deutsche Bank lent Donald J. Trump billions of dollars, even as his tarnished financial record put him off limits for most of Wall Street. “You are a great friend,” Mr. Trump wrote to his Deutsche Bank contact in 1998. “We have a great relationship,” he said in 2013. “They are totally happy with me,” he declared three years later. Now, Deutsche Bank is putting the president on the defensive. Lawyers for the…

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Social rejection doesn’t only hurt — it kills

Social rejection doesn’t only hurt — it kills

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Elitsa Dermendzhiyska writes: The psychologist Naomi Eisenberger describes herself as a mutt of a scientist. Never quite fitting the mould of the fields she studied – psychobiology, health psychology, neuroscience – she took an unusual early interest in what you might call the emotional life of the brain. As a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Eisenberger found it curious that we often describe being rejected in terms of physical pain: ‘My heart was broken’, ‘I…

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Donald Trump committed crimes

Donald Trump committed crimes

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Benjamin Wittes writes: I spent the week after the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report going through it section by section and writing a kind of diary of the endeavor. My goal was less to summarize the report than to force myself to think about each factual, legal, and analytical portion of Mueller’s discussion, which covers a huge amount of ground. Here are five conclusions I drew from the exercise: The president committed crimes. There is no way around…

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