Bill Barr Was a Sick and Sadistic Kid Who Was A Fascist "High School Tormentor" and Bully, Classmate Recalls to BuzzFlash
November 21
Article from November 18, 1991, about Bill Barr being a right-wing tormentor and bully to Jimmy Lohman, his high school and college classmate emailed to BuzzFlash in confidence in December of 2019. At the time Barr was undergoing his first confirmation to be attorney general under George Herbert Walker Bush. Since December of last year, Lohman went public with the article and his recollections because he was furious at the duplicitous actions of Barr during the Trump interference in the Roger Stone case. (Screenshot)
MARK KARLIN, BUZZFLASH COMMENTARY
On Christmas Eve of 2019, we received an email from a longtime BuzzFlash reader, Jimmy Lohman. Jimmy made it clear that he didn’t want to go public yet (his change of mind is explained later) with his 1991 article eviscerating Bill Barr as an authoritarian who favored white collar criminals. “Does Barr’s passion for ‘law and order’ depend on the race and social standing of the alleged law breaker?” he asked presciently in the op-ed published by a Florida university.
(You can read the full version of the article in a larger format by clicking here.)
He reflected to BuzzFlash:
My experiences with Barr, while interesting certainly, seem so minor and trivial compared to what Barr is and has become at this point -- a man of historically evil proportions. When I wrote that 28 years ago, he was just a big time partisan hack and ideologue.
Lohman attended the elite New York Horace Mann school in the mid-60s and followed in Barr’s footsteps two years later as he attended Columbia University. Back in 1991, Lohman even recalled that Barr’s father was the infamous headmaster of the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan. Lohman wrote of Barr’s father that he was,
The principal of a snooty “East Side” private school that was wracked with a scandal involving alleged kickbacks in return for favorable college recommendations. As with most scandals [among the elite class], it went away, and the elder Barr moved on to be principal of another private school.
Of course, now we know that Barr’s father hired the infamous Jeffrey Epstein, who had no college degree.
However, Bill Barr is the focal point of Lohman’s article, nearly three decades old. An important point made by Lohman is that the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the George Herbert Walker Bush AG nomination out of committee unanimously, which Lohman regards with loathing, calling the Dems “listless". They were “a pathetic array of burn-outs who are so many light years from reality,” Lohman wrote.
Although there are now rumblings of rebellion against Barr, with some Democratic members of Congress calling for his resignation, there is largely still a DC contingency of Republicans and some DC Press Corps members who assume that Barr has “integrity” because he is a card-carrying member of the real “deep swamp,” even if it has become toxic under Trump.
For example, on February 20 a BuzzFlash article reported that, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy issued a fill-in-the blanks “defend the elite crook because he is one of the DC elite” statement:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Sen. Lindsey Graham, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy issued a joint statement Tuesday defending Attorney General William Barr as a "man of the highest character and unquestionable integrity" as the nation's top law enforcement official faces growing calls to resign over his interference in the sentencing of Trump confidant Roger Stone.
The trio of Republicans claimed that "outside groups" are responsible for demands that Barr step down and said the attorney general "has shown that he is committed without qualification to securing equal justice under law for all Americans."
This is the kind of reprehensible folderol that blankets DC like toilet paper. But Lohman is right, the affirmation of “integrity” for white collar toadies who are undermining integrity, is not limited to the GOP. Whether you support Joe Biden or not for president, he fully participates in this tradition of bestowing “integrity” upon anyone who is among the august leaders in DC. That is why Biden said he longed for the days when he could get along and respect Strom Thurmond.
Barr has had a career that indeed makes him a certified member of.the “deep state.” Since graduating from Columbia, he has occasionally worked at corporate law firms. However, many of his years have been spent in the government, working for the CIA, as Attorney General for two presidents, as Assistant Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General and advising politicians and elected officials.
Whenever he was in government, including the CIA, Barr cultivated the reputation of a cover-up specialist.
In the ‘80s and ‘90’s, he led cover-ups of two notorious banks acting illegally, including Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), and Barr’s failing to continue pursuing charges against BCCI.
As Attorney General under the elder Bush, he refused to investigate a scandal known as Iraq-Gate, which was connected with senior Reagan administration officials.
He reached his zenith, up to that time, when he advised President George Herbert Walker Bush to avoid being prosecuted for Iran-Contra, which may have even included the theft of the 1980 election through negotiations with the Iranian revolutionaries, that involved the selling of arms by the CIA to Iran to buy weapons for the Nicaraguan Contras. Barr counseled President Bush to pardon Secretary of Defense Weinberger, who was about to flip and testify against Bush and several other individuals associated with the illegal action. Barr once again covered-up a monstrously disturbing scandal and kept Bush out of jail after he left office.
As far as Trump, we all know that Barr closed up six investigations of Bush after he was sworn in, that he purposefully read his “DOJ” interpretation of the Mueller report to cover-up Trump’s apparent wrongdoing, that he refuted the findings of the DOJ Inspector General’s report that debunked Trump’s partisan lies about the FBI investigations of his campaign. That he issued DOJ policies that supported Trump’s defiance of complying with the investigation.
Barr has drafted a US Attorney, John Durham, to travel around the world with him to try find someone, anyone, who will support Trump’s discredited 2016 election conspiracy theories.
And there is so much more injustice rampant in the so-called “Department of Justice.”
Of course, the event that precipitated Lohman to publicly disseminate his 1991 article and thoughts about Barr are exemplified by Barr’s almost instantaneous carrying out of Trump’s midnight tweet to reduce Roger Stone’s sentencing recommendations. Barr has coordinated some Kabuki Theater with Trump to whine about Trump’s tweets and even have his staff anonymously claim that he might resign. That, however, is not going to happen because Barr’s history is not one of impartiality, but rather it is one of covering-up corruption for Republican elites. He is the very opposite of a man of integrity; his character protects Republicans, and in this case Trump, from justice.
In an article this week in the Independent, Lohman commented:
"I think that he just wanted to get in on it and have the power to reshape the world in his image," he continued. "And that image is some weird ass version of Catholicism, it's almost unlimited executive power, it's fascism."
Barr is the guy Lev Parnas says he fears the most, because when Trump appointed Barr, he weaponized the DOJ to be his own personal self-protection racket and vehicle for taking revenge on anyone whom he perceives as an enemy or a danger to him.
When Bill Clinton criticized Ken Starr in 1998 for turning a multi-year investigation into a vehicle for entrapping him, Bill Barr said Clinton was wrong “to have the improper purpose of influencing and impeding an ongoing criminal investigation and intimidating possible jurors, witnesses and even investigators." Just in case you had the remotest thought that Barr was not a hypocrite, and his belief in enhanced executive authority might be applied to a Democrat: It doesn’t, because this GOP consigliere only will cover-up for Republicans.
For Trump, however, all of this criticism is turned on its head, and Barr is fine with Trump’s ongoing tweets aimed at anyone who gets in his way. He just complains to be upset when Trump’s tweets appear to be pulling his strings like a puppet. Barr needs to do his dirty work without the puppet strings being visible. It’s all a choreographed dance with one aim: turning the DOJ into a cover-up agency for the “unitary-authority” of the Republican executive branch.
It’s a con game in a tweed suit from the master of cover-ups and tormentor of Jimmy Lohman; Barr is a master at inverting justice into injustice
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