At 10 AM ET, Attorney General William Barr will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. There are sure to be fireworks. We have it live streaming after the jump.
As you probably know by now, yesterday, news broke that Robert Mueller had objected to Barr's description of the Russia investigation's findings. Some Democrats have called for his resignation or impeachment, given his sworn prior testimony to Congress that he didn't know what Mueller thought about Barr's summary of Mueller's Russia investigation report.
With three Democratic presidential candidates sit on the Judiciary Committee, this is sure to be a contentious hearing.
Share your thoughts and observations below. You can also watch the proceedings as they are live streamed by The Washington Post below.
(Barr caricature by DonkeyHotey via Creative Commons license.)
I was listening to Pod Save America today and Dan Pfeiffer was saying that the way to beat incumbents is with a change candidate, not one who harkens back to the way things were before the incumbent. He was talking about Senate races and the “big names” who have been recruited and lost (Phil Bredesen and Russ Feingold, e.g.) but it seemed so applicable to Biden, whether that’s what Pfeiffer meant or not.
However, if Biden can manage to be both a change and a nostalgia candidate, I might reconsider.
On an earlier thread I expressed my delight to see that at least one of the Dem candidates intended to focus on the totally unprincipled nature of the current administration: the lies, the subterfuges, the contempt for what used to be called American values. It’s ironic to note that BTW Republicans had always claimed to be more value-based than the Dems. No more. And the common excuse (the Dems did it before) is the argument of a three-year-old.
I neither expect nor hope that one of the elderly white males will win the primary but Biden’s focus on Trump et al should keep the spotlight on them while the younger candidates continue to talk about issues.
Just as Bernie Sanders was instrumental (IMO) in bringing the Dems back to their traditional focus on bread-and-butter issues, Biden might be the one to keep that spotlight firmly directed on the Trump-ians.
I was particularly bemused by Barr’s reference to Mueller’s letter as being “snitty, perhaps written by a subordinate”. The contempt for Mueller could not have dripped more copiously from his fangs.
Hope I’m not being too Pollyanna-ish, but I’m sensing that CNN is having increasing difficulty in getting credible conservatives to sit on political panels. Rick Santorum was absolutely priceless yesterday: His statement to the effect that “Republicans never spin” made the whole panel gasp and Dana Bash (I think) reminded him that he’d been in charge of “messaging, aka spin” for the RNC. Santorum immediately adopted his poker face which I’m starting to wonder about (botulism wrinkle-removing treatments perhaps?)