Crooked Media - What A Day: Hill Billy

The thing about letting a corrupt attorney general evade oversight hearings for more than a year is that by the time he finally shows up, there’s what can only be described as a fuckton of corruption to address.
 

• Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee for the first time, Attorney General Bill Barr faced questions from Democrats about the steps his Justice Department has taken to discredit the Russia investigation, his intervention in criminal cases involving President Trump’s allies, the violent federal response to protests against police brutality, his baseless claims that mail-in voting opens the door to voter fraud, and his overall warping of the department into an arm of Trump’s re-election campaign. Among other things.
   
• Barr aggressively denied having done anything inappropriate, and in his opening statement accused Democrats of trying “to discredit me by conjuring up a narrative that I am simply the President’s factotum who disposes of criminal cases according to his instructions.” Here’s the best narrative Barr could conjure about why he overruled federal prosecutors and the Justice Department’s own sentencing guidelines to let Trump’s friend Roger Stone off easy: “Do you think it is fair for a 67-year-old man to be sent to prison for seven to nine years?” You love to see the most powerful lawyer in the country make arguments that can be dismantled with “OK, Boomer.”
   
• Defending the federal protest response, Barr claimed that “violent rioters and anarchists have hijacked legitimate protests to wreak senseless havoc and destruction on innocent victims.” (Barr also said he doesn’t believe systemic police racism exists, so who knows what he thinks these legitimate protests are about.) Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) came to his aid with a selectively-edited montage of violence at protests, which conveniently omitted the aggressive, unprovoked use of force by federal agents in Portland.

As Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) noted, Barr’s response to pro-Trump, armed anti-lockdown protesters was markedly different. And it turns out, Barr’s own role in exacerbating the U.S. coronavirus epidemic is a bit of a sore spot for him!
 

• Barr’s actions since COVID-19 reached the U.S.—giving the anti-lockdown protests an implicit thumbs up, threatening states over their public-health restrictions, and parroting Trump’s slogan that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease”—exclusively served Trump’s political interests. Here’s the reality he’s helped usher in: The U.S. death toll has surpassed the milestone of 150,000 people. Our New Tone president is back to retweeting hydroxychloroquine misinformation and attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci, who’s issued warnings of potentially worsening outbreaks in Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky. A “superb” response indeed. 
   
• With the country in a worse state of crisis than at any point since the pandemic began, Republicans are still in disarray over the stimulus proposal they’ve already unveiled. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell axed a provision for nearly $2 billion to rebuild FBI headquarters in downtown DC (which Trump wants to protect his hotel from competition from new commercial development), after GOP leaders objected. The bill still contains hundreds of millions of dollars to replace the Pentagon funding that the Trump administration raided to finance border-wall construction, famously a top priority for the millions of people who can’t pay rent. 

Bill Barr had no coherent defense for his politicization of the Justice Department, up to and including his role in attacking American citizens to distract from the administration’s failed coronavirus response, because there isn’t one: He’s done it all openly and unapologetically. The only question left is what you’re prepared to do about it. 

IT’S NATIONAL VOTE BY MAIL DAY! Yes, this holiday is real, and we hope you'll celebrate accordingly. Head to votesaveamerica.com/everylastvote to request your vote by mail ballot and to volunteer to call young voters in battleground states about voting by mail. It’s easy, convenient, and could make all the difference in November. 

President Trump plans to allow DACA recipients to renew their deportation protections for a year, and to continue to reject new applicants, which places his administration in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling requiring him to restart the program in its original form. The previous policy had been to extend eligibility for two years. The administration said it would still consider ending DACA following a lengthy review of the Supreme Court decision, which would conveniently put off any final decision until after the election. Trump hopes to avoid the political fallout of moving to end a hugely popular program (again), while pandering to his base by shortening deportation protections and targeting DACA-eligible individuals for deportation. Anyway, the Supreme Court never said “you can’t end DACA but feel free to arbitrarily chip away at its scope,” so that plan will draw its own legal challenges.

• Joe Biden has unveiled an economic plan to combat racial inequality that calls for expanding resources for entrepreneurs of color, providing relief from student debt, and investment in affordable housing and home ownership.
   
• The veepstakes is in its final days. We’ll know Biden’s running mate next week. 
   
• The American Federation of Teachers, one of the country’s largest teachers unions, has authorized its members to strike over unsafe school-reopening plans. 
   
• The “Umbrella Man” filmed smashing the windows of a Minneapolis auto parts store during the early George Floyd protests is suspected to be a white supremacist who was trying to incite violence, according to police. This is our shocked face.
   
• Twitter temporarily took away Don Jr.’s tweeting privileges after he shared a misleading coronavirus video. The video, published by Breitbart, featured a group of doctors making false claims about coronavirus cures and stating that masks are unnecessary to slow the spread.
   
• Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) ran (and later deleted) a Facebook ad targeting Jon Ossoff, his Jewish opponent, that accused Ossoff of trying to buy the election, and used an image that had been doctored to make Ossoff’s nose larger. Subtle stuff, here. 
   
• Folks, Trump reportedly announced and then canceled his plan to throw a baseball at a Yankees game without making any actual arrangements with the Yankees, because he was mad that a different team invited Dr. Anthony Fauci to throw a baseball.
   
• New York’s health commissioner has opened an investigation into a Chainsmokers concert held in the Hamptons over the weekend that plainly violated the state’s public-health restrictions, and which also featured a performance by the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, David Solomon, who is regrettably also known as DJ D-Sol. A cursed event from start to finish. 
   
• Former FBI agent Peter Strzok has a book on Trump and the Russia investigation coming out in September. 
   
• Deadspin’s former writers and editors who resigned in protest last year have reunited to form Defector Media. A phoenix from the ashes. A rainbow after the storm. A championship after a...bad game, earlier. We will let Defector Media handle the sports metaphors.

Census officials are concerned that the Trump administration and Senate Republicans are trying to rush the count for political gain. With nearly 40 percent of households still uncounted, last week the Trump administration asked the Senate Appropriations Committee to set aside funding in the next coronavirus stimulus package for a “timely” completion of the Census. At the same time, Census workers say the White House and Commerce Department have been asking how the bureau can speed up the process to finish up early—with the apparent aim of delivering key data for political reapportionment to Trump by the end of December, while he’s still safely in office. Census workers and experts agree that if the bureau is rushed to meet that deadline, the final totals will be egregiously skewed.  

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A new experimental blood test proved highly accurate at distinguishing between people with Alzheimer’s and those without it, and could soon be used as a simple, affordable diagnostic test.

Three HBCUs—Howard University in Washington, DC, Hampton University in Virginia, and Xavier University in Louisiana—announced they’ve each received the largest donations in their schools’ history.

EastWest Food Rescue, a new Washington state non-profit, has delivered more than 2.4 million pounds of discarded crops to over 160 food banks. 

In a nice little side benefit, face masks have thrown a wrench into facial recognition algorithms.