Alksne visited AM Joy this morning to discuss Attorney General William Barr’s laughable attempt to paint himself as independent from Donald Trump. “He’s destroyed his reputation,” Alksne said about Barr. “The question is, what happens next.”
Alksne finds no reason to be optimistic. Despite Barr’s public admonition to Trump to stop tweeting and the subsequent announcement that there would be no prosecution of former FBI official Andrew McCabe, she said, “I don't see him exerting any independence at all and it's very dangerous for the country and for the department."
“Not to be a little black helicopter,” Alksne said ominously, but at the same time that he was making a showy rebuke of Trump’s attempts to interfere in DOJ cases, Barr was also "reinvestigating the Russia case, they're reinvestigating Flynn, they're looking at the Stone case. I just don't see Andrew McCabe as being out of the woods, because everything is being reinvestigated.”
Even worse, when host Joy Reid asked if Barr will jail members of the Russia investigation team such as McCabe or even former FBI Director James Comey, Alksne thought that quite likely. “I think he will do everything in his power to do that and I also think he will stand by when the president pardons Flynn and Manafort and Stone.” Also, “absolutely” Rudy Giuliani.
“That is what's coming,” Alksne said. That may not happen until after the election, whether Trump wins or loses, “but I think you would be naive to think that all those men will not be pardoned.”
Asked whether Barr will face any legal consequences for his behavior in the next administration, Alksne said, “I think it’s too soon to tell that. I really don’t know.”
In other words, grassroots resistance and organizing have never been more important.
