Wide-Ranging Barr Investigation Ends, Doesn’t Find Sh!t

“Fans” of the Bill and Hillary Clinton Whitewater investigation, the Clinton administration Vince Foster investigation, the Clinton administration Filegate investigation, the Clinton administration Vandal Scandal investigation, the Hillary Clinton Rose Law Firm investigation, the Barack Obama birther investigation, the Obama administration “Fast and Furious” investigation, the Obama administration Solyndra investigation, the Obama administration Shirley Sherrod investigation, the Hillary Clinton Benghazi investigation, the Hillary Clinton emails investigation, the Clinton Foundation investigation, and all the other “scandals” knew exactly what William Barr’s “exhaustive” investigation into the Obama administration found.

It didn’t find shit.

The prosecutor tapped by BARR to investigate unmasking — billed by Trump and his allies as one of the biggest scandals of the era — has concluded his investigation "without finding any substantive wrongdoing," per @mattzap and @shaneharrishttps://t.co/gDySDmfC4J

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) October 13, 2020

US Attorney John Bash, who walked away from Barr’s stable of Trump nutlickers at the DO”J” last week, had been tasked with finding out whether Obama officials had wrongly requested the identities of individuals whose names were redacted in intelligence documents has completed his work without finding anything worth reporting.

Literally. Bash will not issue a public report. (If he did, and he was honest, he would submit a one-page report scrawled in crayon that read, “We didn’t find shit,” illustrated with drawings of piles of doggie poo with flies buzzing around them.)

Washington Post reporters Matt Zapotosky and Shane Harris wrote that the news of Bash’s “not shit” findings

will rankle President Trump at a moment when he is particularly upset at the Justice Department. The department has so far declined to release the results of Bash’s work, though people familiar with his findings say they would likely disappoint conservatives who have tried to paint the “unmasking” of names — a common practice in government to help understand classified documents — as a political conspiracy.

It’s making him even madder that the other “massive” investigation into Obama, also being run by Barr’s ball-washing crew, won’t be ready to issue its “findings” until after the election.

Care to guess what those findings will be? I’ll give a hint: N_T SH_T. I’d like to solve the puzzle, Pat…

Trump, of course, wants Barr to immediately arrest and indict Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden for, well, who the hell really knows? For outclassing him? For standing as actual patriotic American leaders in contrast to his pitiful, Russian-compromised ass? It was about three weeks ago when Trump echoed the bizarre claims of the bigoterati that, by daring to mount a formidable chances to his re-election chances, Biden was instigating a coup.

Zapotsky and Harris wrote:

Legal analysts feared that Bash’s review was yet another attempt by Trump’s Justice Department to target political opponents of the president. Even if it ultimately produced no results of consequence, legal analysts said, it allowed Trump and other conservatives to say Obama-era officials were under scrutiny, as long as the case stayed active.

Well, duh. Of course it was. The Justice Department itself, in the person of spokestroll Kerri Kupec, admitted as much as far back as May, when she went on Fox News and, after giiving Sean Hannity a long and loving on-air tongue bath (okay, that part might be exaggeration), told Hannity that the practice of unmasking “inherently isn’t wrong,” but the number of requests supposedly made and the motive for making them might be “problematic.” Trump and his stormtroopers were pissed because the unmasking requests uncovered Trump NSA Director Michael Flynn as a traitor and criminal.

Bash also failed to find any evidence that Obama officials had leaked classified or sensitive information to reporters. Again, the results were so disappointing (read, legal) that Bash’s office chose not to release the findings to the public.

Bash says his abrupt departure from Barr’s Hump Club has nothing to do with the report or with anything else. He just wanted to take a job in the private sector. Mm-hmm.

There’s another investigation that has garnered more sturm und drang than the Bash circle jerk, of course. Federal prosecutor John Durham is looking into the burning question of whether the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians to sabotage the 2016 election — no, wait, the investigation into the FBI’s investigation of the Trump-Russia mosh pit of treason and sabotage. That isn’t going well, either; as noted above, Durham will not be releasing any of his no-findings before the election, and his second-in-command, Nora Dannehy, abruptly resigned from the investigation on September 11. Reports say Dannehy no longer wanted to be part of an investigation that was so nakedly political.

Trump, of course, is livid at the very idea that his planned “October surprise,” or brace of surprises, will garner nothing but hooting and laughing on Twitter. He called the delay in the Durham case “a disgrace,” fumed about Hillary Clinton not having been summarily executed on the White House lawn (again, mild exaggeration), and stomped, bellowed and farted around the White House like a castrated bull sewer rat. (Probably not exaggerated here.)

The Bash investigation was, of course, hyped from the outset as “the biggest thing since Watergate” (Senator John Cornyn’s words, not mine). It was orchestrated by the Justice Department and Fox News, with then-Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grennell declassifying the names of the Obama administration officials (including Biden’s) and hand-delivering the list to the Justice Department while a pre-positioned Fox News camera recorded his arrival at the DOJ for posterity. That same day, with great fanfare and crotch-grabbing, the department announced it was dropping charges against Flynn. Cornyn’s Senate colleague Rand Paul said then:

[W]e sort of have the smoking gun because we now have the declassified document with Joe Biden’s name on it.

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! Trump shrieked on Fox Business Network that everybody was going to jail. “I’m talking with 50-year sentences,” he belched.

Of course, it didn’t work that way.

Did I mention that Twitter was having its wild way with this news? There are times when I really detest Twitter. Today, not so much.

Interesting that Barr – who announced with great fanfare an investigation into a BS ballot case – hasnt released the report establishing nothing happened in the much ballyhooed “unmasking” investigation. Seems Fox News talking points are announced, proof they are Lies is hidden.

— Kurt "Mask Up, Vote Early" Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 14, 2020

Wow, Dude couldn’t even fake charges. Damn, hahahahaha, now investigate the Lincoln shooting. I hear John Wilkes Booth emails are tawdry. Hahaha

‘Unmasking’ probe commissioned by Barr concludes without charges or any public report – The Washington Post https://t.co/qlxLdHUUez

— Titus (@TitusNation) October 14, 2020

Fitting that what always appeared to be a politically motivated investigation ginned up by Attorney General Barr into “unmasking” (a totally common procedure) ended up finding no wrongdoing. https://t.co/GnXedQ0yvy

— Noah Bookbinder (@NoahBookbinder) October 14, 2020

Oh, and the amazingly high numbers of unmaskings during the Obama administration? In 2019, the Trump administration made over 10,000 unmasking requests. In 2018, they made almost 17,000. They made nearly 10,000 requests in 2017. In 2016, the last year of the Obama administration, they made just over 9200 requests. In 2015? 654.

An appropriate time to point out that the Trump administration has deployed unmasking, a fairly routine and uncontroversial practice prior to 2017, at a significantly higher clip than the Obama administration, per the DNI.https://t.co/pXR9Z67Mag pic.twitter.com/X8AVPZ0ugh

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) October 13, 2020

Should we demand an investigation into these “problematic” numbers?