Our DC and San Francisco-based associate solitary reporter, Susanna Sherman, is really, really good at finding out important things in life, such as how much Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Attorney General William Pelham Barr, weighs.
He’s shorter than Trump, and he took an oath as a lawyer in 1977.
Both ASR Sherman and associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones figure that Trump weighs in at about 237 pounds and that Barr comes in at about 210.
The swearing that Trump does on an hourly basis has to do with profanity. The oath Barr took in 1977 was the oath of a professional attorney. Barr works for the most litigious man ever to sit in the White House.
Barr worked for President Reagan and for the CIA, and he was the first President Bush’s Attorney General. While still a private citizen in the Trump Era, he wrote an unsolicited memorandum attacking the recent Congressional investigations into the close cooperation between Vladimir Putin and the 2016 Trump campaign.
That unsolicited legal memo is what got the hefty-looking Barr his present job.
Barr takes a view of executive power, under our Constitution, that exceeds what the second President Bush avowed, and Bush Two had lots of help in that from former Wyoming Congressman Dick Cheney.
In other words, Barr says that whoever sits in the Oval Office can do whatever he wants.
It’s called the “unitary executive power” theory of the presidency. See https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/06/constitutional-myth-3-the-unitary-executive-is-a-dictator-in-war-and-peace/239627/.
Barr works for Trump, and Barr’s boss keeps yelling about ObamaGate and Joe Biden and Michael Flynn, who just got a free pass from Barr; but yesterday, Barr, to his credit, said publicly that there will not be a prosecution before November 3 of either President Obama or former Vice President Joe Biden (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/18/barr-trump-obamagate-265037).
Which probably is not exactly what Trump would have liked Barr to say, but Trump Junior and Eric Trump are out there allright, trying ineffectually to rev up dad’s base; yet Barr did say that the investigations of his boss by the House of Representatives were a really bad thing. That means that for the next few days, Trump probably won’t fire Barr and put Ivanka in as his AG; the fact that Ivanka is not a lawyer wouldn’t matter to Trump, as he Demands Total Loyalty At All Times. Ask James Comey.
In orther news that did happen, Trump said that former Wichita Tea Party Congressman Mike Pompeo did the right thing by having a federal employee walk his dog (https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/18/politics/pompeo-wash-dishes-trump-investigation/index.html);
and
he wants Fox News to be even more loyal to him (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/18/trump-goes-after-fox-news-host-in-twitter-flurry-267390).
and
he’s proud to be taking a medication that his own science advisers have told him carries significant medical risks (https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/19/politics/donald-trump-hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus/index.html).