Nicolle Wallace was in top form today, demonstrating once again why she’s our favorite daytime analyst, smartly moving through the implications of the spying scandal and bringing on the best guest to discuss it. When  Andrew Weissmann talks about investigating the Trump administration and all its alleged criminality, we listen, because he’s already been there, already prepared the evidence to bring about the indictments against Trump, ten of them, ten counts of obstruction of justice. We have no idea why Trump has yet to be charged. None.

But the silver lining around the spying scandal is that it might finally break open the log jam, allowing the information to finally flow from the FBI and DOJ as to the Barr DOJ’s practices. Back in December, we wrote a long good-bye to Bill Barr and we told him to not get too comfortable. He might very well face a situation where his name isn’t the lead counsel for the United States as Attorney General, but suddenly the defendant.

If an investigation is going to rip open the worst of the Trump administration, this is how it will begin and  Andrew Weissmann agrees. This investigation will surely “expand” and when he says “expand,” he means everything. Trump wanted his Roy Cohn. All the real dirty work went through the DOJ.

Weissmann told us how it would all begin to crumble:

So there’s no question that to subpoena this kind of information you would need extensive factual predication and you would brief this to the highest levels in the FBI and the Justice Department. My educated guess about what’s going on here is the reason we’re seeing this, I suspect we’ll see more of this, is because these gag orders are running out and that the current Justice Department is not willing to stand behind them when they’re not warranted.”

We damn well want to see more out of the current Justice Department and this might light the fire that’s been needed right in under them.

“I suspect what’s going on is they’re shocked about what’s going on. I don’t think the response though of going to the inspector general is sufficient, that’s going to take years. The inspector general was notably absent during the Trump administration and there has to be a systemic answer to this.

The problem is far too big for an inspector general’s investigation. They don’t have the resources, nor the prosecutorial firepower, they also don’t have the weightiness needed for this type of investigation. Weissman is saying it’s going to take much more, Congressional investigations and massive overhauls in DOJ, while prosecuting those who carried out the crimes, right on up to the top.

I think there can be hearings and I think Congress does have the power to require more out of the executive. So that I have no doubt that Merrick Garland is going to run a clean Justice Department, but that’s not the issue. The issue is what do we do when there’s no longer a Merrick Garland and somebody more like Attorney General Barr. And Congress can require the Justice Department to make showings that are much, much higher than what they needed to show here, factually, and getting the court more involved so that you have a greater check on the so-called unitary executive, which I think is the heart of the problem here.”

The “unitary executive” was Barr’s dream. It is a polite way of saying fascism-lite. Barr believed that the United States required a strongman leader, the descriptive word for a despot, an autocrat, a fascist, to force the far right’s will upon people in urban areas who will not vote to go along with some of the programs Barr – and Trump – wanted. It is far closer to a Putin-style of government than anything American.

Wallace how one could possibly get a subpoena for records of this many representatives (the first people that went after Trump in Impeachment I, the most hated):

“It would be — you would need to have substantial evidence. So to me this is something where there’s just an unusual failure because it reeks of being a fishing expedition, which is how you get to autocracy,

Precisely. And not to sound too self-important but we’ve been saying the exact same thing here for two weeks. Whatever one sees on the outside is generally the tip of the iceberg, one has to “be there” to truly understand. The people who were “there” are now starting to talk. The spying operation was leaked, not officially announced. (In fact, the department has yet to respond with anything official) They are talking now. We are just starting to get hints (a bit more of the iceberg) as to just how far this went. And, as everyone knows, an autocracy is another way of saying fascism.

Last point. In this context, a fishing expedition is another way of saying “looking for kompromat,” something that stops the enemy in its tracks for fear of being exposed. It all sounds like organized crime or a fascist takeover. Now the door is open and even the Republicans will likely not be able to keep it closed. Watch: (The YouTube introduction has Rachel but it quickly moves to Wallace’s interview)

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Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak