George Conway publishes op-ed scorching William Barr for enabling Trump’s tyranny
The Washington Post may as well hire George Conway as a regular member of their editorial staff, given how often the conservative Republican lawyer has been writing his anti-Trump screeds on their op-ed page of late.
Mr. Conway’s latest effort — entitled “There is no one to stop Trump now” — ties the very thorough efforts by Attorney General William Barr to use the formerly impartial Department of Justice to retaliate against the president’s perceived enemies to an almost forgotten incident last year when the White House Military Office convinced the Navy to hide the name of the destroyer the USS John S. McCain, named after the father and grandfather of one of Donald Trump’s most despised GOP foes since it would be docked in the port that Trump was going to be visiting.
“It was an incident involving this ship that, as much as anything else, captures how the Trump administration — and its attorney general — operates. It explains Barr’s intervention into the criminal sentencing of Trump’s longtime friend and adviser, felon Roger Stone, and much, much more,” Conway writes.
It wasn’t that Conway believes that Trump ordered the petty and vengeful gesture covering up the namesakes of the late Senator McCain. It’s the fact that it was done to please Trump without the president needing to utter a word that concerns the GOP attorney.
“President Trump didn’t need to say a word. It just happened. He didn’t even know, he later said. But he was hardly displeased. “I was not a big fan of John McCain in any shape or form,” Trump said. “Now, somebody did it because they thought I didn’t like him, okay? And they were well-meaning,” Conway recalls.
“Anticipating Trump’s narcissistic whims and desires in just this fashion remains the key to survival in his administration, and outside the White House proper, no one does it better than Barr. It’s thus entirely believable, as both Barr and Trump have said, that Trump never gave Barr any instruction about Stone’s case,” he explains.
Given that Trump’s own opinions about everything that crosses his path are available for anyone to read on his Twitter feed, it’s not difficult for his minions to anticipate his reactions whenever they have a decision to make on how to handle a situation involving something that he has already made his feelings known on quite clearly.
Thus, Conway explains how Attorney General Barr’s self-protecting plea to the president to cease his social media posts about active DOJ prosecutions was merely a request for Trump to quit making his interference so blatant.
“So when Barr announced this week that “I think it’s time to stop tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases,” and that the president’s statements “make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors and the department that we’re doing our work with integrity” — he wasn’t actually standing up for the Justice Department’s integrity, or its independence, or for the rule of law.”
“To the contrary, as his (and my) friend Fox News host Laura Ingraham put it, “Barr was basically telling Trump, don’t worry I got this.” In other words, don’t blow this by calling attention to all that I do for you. Don’t say the quiet part out loud,” Conway explains.
It is the “Never Trump” Republican lawyer’s conclusion that inspires the most frightening vision of the future of the Trump regime.
“But the president will never listen, and what Barr does for him will never be enough. Now having been acquitted by the Senate, Trump thinks he’s bulletproof, legally and otherwise. He now brags, as he tweeted on Saturday, that he is “‘the King’” who was targeted but not taken down. And, drawing on a story in the New York Times that suggested he is stained but unshackled, Trump boasted that he has indeed survived “’triumphant‘” and “’emboldened‘” and “’focused’” more than ever on prosecuting “’his case of grievance, persecution, and resentment.’”
“So Trump wants to say the quiet part out loud; he wants to say he’s got this. And there’s no one to stop him,” Conway concludes his op-ed.”
