To some House Democrats, it’s almost as if Attorney General Bill Barr lives to troll them. Late Friday night, Barr sent his latest shockwave through the political world by announcing that the New York-based prosecutor who is conducting some of the most sensitive investigations into President Trump and his inner circle would be stepping down and replaced by a Trump appointee. That move came weeks after Barr reportedly personally oversaw the clearing of Black Lives Matter protesters from the White House with tear gas. Before that, his Department of Justice dropped the criminal case against Michael Flynn, the former Trump national security adviser who had pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russia in 2016. And before that, the DOJ prosecutors on Roger Stone’s case resigned en masse when DOJ brass scuttled their sentencing recommendation and forced a more generous one. Beyond that, Barr has ignored subpoenas for his testimony before House lawmakers, and he has indefinitely blown off a date—scheduled for March and later postponed to June—to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee. Bill Barr Has Pie on His Face, and One More Trick Up His Sleeve With John Durham’s October SurpriseThe attorney general’s pronounced and extremely extended middle finger has put House Democrats in a bind, caught between a desire from some to pursue the most aggressive options available to counter Barr—including impeaching him—and concerns from another wing of the party that is wary of the political costs of aggressively going after an administration they believe is headed for defeat in November anyway.Attempting to navigate this dilemma yet again is Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the Judiciary Chairman tasked most directly with overseeing the Department of Justice. Appearing on CNN on Sunday, Nadler dismissed the notion of impeaching the attorney general—an idea championed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and entertained by members of his own committee—as a “waste of time” because the “corrupt” GOP-held Senate wouldn’t remove Barr from office. Nadler told Jake Tapper that the committee would pursue other tactics, like advancing legislation that aims to decrease funding to his office. And on Monday, Axios reported that the chairman would move to subpoena Barr for testimony on July 2. But Nadler’s dismissal of impeachment landed poorly among some members of his own party, including members of Judiciary, who have said they would like to see the entire oversight toolbox on the table. Impeachment is a power Congress retains, though one it has used exceedingly rarely. But, these members argue, the times call for extraordinary reactions.  “It’s possible he’s going to keep engaging in outrageous conduct,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), a Judiciary member, told The Daily Beast. “We are going to keep investigating Bill Barr’s outrageous conduct and see what we uncover… I wouldn’t foreclose any options before we have even really started an investigation.”On a call Monday evening, staffers on the Judiciary Committee discussed options for how to move forward with respect to Barr. While some advocated for taking more aggressive actions for getting him in front of Congress, others said going after the attorney general would expend too many resources. In general, some Democrats close to the Judiciary Committee have come away with the impression that leadership at the committee and the caucus believe that they don’t have time to impeach Barr before November’s election.House Democrats are all too familiar with the challenge of conducting oversight of an administration that rejects it alongside a Senate that is run by a Republican Party that doesn’t seem particularly interested in it. But the brazenness of Barr’s recent moves, and of his disregard for House Democrats’ oversight in general, has put pressure on them to demonstrate they understand the urgency of the moment—if only for setting benchmarks about acceptable conduct.“Bill Barr is not on the ballot,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), an early supporter of Trump’s impeachment. “This is not about a presidential election, it’s about the rule of law… our oath of office just compels us to do our job. That job starts with the investigation. If it highlights impeachable conduct, we should follow that path, without fear or favor.”Bill Barr’s Above the Law. The Only Answer Is to Impeach Him. Many Democrats believe Barr's abrupt Friday night announcement about changes at the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York were a dangerous new low, even for an official whose conduct has alarmed them for over a year. Up to that point, Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney, had been conducting investigations that have rattled Trumpworld—including probes into Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, that have the potential to surface potentially damaging new information.After Barr announced Berman would be replaced with Securities and Exchange Commissioner Jay Clayton, a lawyer who Trump appointed, Berman shot back saying he wouldn’t leave office until the Senate had confirmed a successor. On Saturday, Barr announced that Berman was formally being fired by the president and that his deputy would take his place.After seeing the news break on Friday night, Lieu said that it crossed his mind immediately that SDNY must have been working on “one or more investigations or cases that Donald Trump does not want to come to light.” He and other lawmakers believe that Berman would be open to testifying before Congress about why he may have been sacked. Even prior to the latest episode, Nadler had scheduled a Wednesday hearing in House Judiciary about politicization at DOJ—which will feature two former prosecutors. The chairman floated on CNN that Berman may testify then, but no such appearance has been announced yet. “The most important thing is we immediately get to the bottom of what happened here,” said Huffman. “If it’s every bit as craven as it looks, people might take a second look at impeachment. Even though Chairman Nadler has been a bit dismissive of that, things have a way of changing if the facts present themselves so irrefutably.”The tensions that Nadler confronts over how to handle Barr are neither new nor novel. During the Obama years, House Republicans demanded the impeachment of then-Attorney General Eric Holder for what they argued was his failure to comply with oversight requests related to the investigation into the Fast and Furious gun running probe. Amid pushback from leadership, they ultimately settled on holding Holder in contempt of Congress.In the run-up to Trump’s own impeachment, meanwhile, it was members of the Judiciary Committee, along with the more progressive members of the caucus, who pushed for removal of the president while party leaders, and more vulnerable lawmakers, warned about the possible political costs. The Ukraine revelations in September ultimately shook that stalemate loose and launched the impeachment inquiry. But it seems like that internal caucus tension remains.Privately, a faction of the party has warned that the impeachment process showed that Democrats’ oversight efforts would amount to little until Trump was defeated, or they flipped control of the Senate, or both. Publicly, lawmakers like Huffman and Lieu say it would be reckless to rule any remedy out. “I know Congress doesn’t want to take it on, but it’s a really big deal,” said Molly Claflin, a former Senate Democratic staffer for the Russia investigation and now an attorney with the watchdog group American Oversight. “I know Chairman Nadler is saying impeachment is a waste of time, Democrats are tired, and that oversight space has shrunk because this administration doesn’t cooperate, but I believe this view takes a shortsighted view of the role of Congress.”“Congress is acting as if the end of the impeachment trial, or the election in five months, means the end of oversight into Trump,” she went on. “We may have four more months or four more years of Trump, but Congress has a responsibility to get to the truth.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Rep. Eliot Engel and President Barack Obama didn’t always see eye-to-eye on issues of foreign policy. The New York congressman, as staunch a Middle East hawk as there currently is in the Democratic Party, was the most high-profile House Democrat to oppose Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, the biggest foreign policy initiative of his presidency. Now, Engel, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is fighting for his political life amid a primary challenge to his left from Jamaal Bowman, a former high school principal. Obama administration alumni want him to know they haven’t forgotten his vote—and that they don’t especially like what he’s gotten done since. As some key figures in the party establishment, from Hillary Clinton to Speaker Nancy Pelosi to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, have lined up to support Engel, high-profile former Obama advisers, some of whom have immense sway with liberals nationwide through the popular podcasts from Crooked Media, have joined forces with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in an effort to eject him from the House. “Bowman is the kind of progressive, exciting young leader that Democrats should be electing,” said Tommy Vietor, co-host of Crooked’s Pod Save America podcast and a former Obama national security spokesman. “I also think that [the Foreign Affairs Committee] should be more progressive when it comes to oversight, fighting annexation [of the West Bank], supporting diplomacy like the [Iran Deal] and unwinding parts of the U.S.-Saudi relationship that allow for the continued humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen.”“We need fresh thinking on that committee,” Vietor wrote in an email to The Daily Beast. On a June 10 episode of “Pod Save the World,” co-hosts Vietor and Ben Rhodes, the former top Obama foreign policy hand, encouraged their listeners to check out Bowman. “Despite my briefings—I hope not because of them—he opposed the Iran nuclear deal,” Rhodes said of Engel. “He’s taken a pretty conventional line on issues related to Iran, Saudi, the Middle East more generally.”As Engel’s primary becomes the party’s next big proxy battle, virtually no one is projecting that if Engel loses on June 23—an outcome seen as increasingly possible in Democratic circles—it will be because of his hawkish foreign policy views. At a June 3 event in his district, Engel was caught on a hot mic saying he “wouldn’t be here” if he didn’t have a primary. In May, The Atlantic reported that he’d ridden out the worst of COVID-19 in his Maryland home, not in the New York City-area seat he represents, which was one of the hardest-hit places in the country.House Chairman Demands Briefing on Kushner’s Trip to Saudi ArabiaThe toppling of the Foreign Affairs Chairman, however, would reverberate far beyond his district. “There’s a pretty profound desire in Democratic foreign policy circles for a more progressive approach, and that’s not where Eliot Engel is or who he is,” a former Obama official told The Daily Beast. “He’s not bad—he’s not creatively moving us in the direction a lot of us would like to go.”Over his 31 years in Congress, Engel has become one of the eminent voices in either party pushing for a hawkish view on Middle East policy. In 2003, he supported the invasion of Iraq. In 2004, he led a group of lawmakers pushing for cuts in the U.S. contribution to the United Nations office that aids Palestinian refugees. In early 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave an address to Congress that Democratic lawmakers either boycotted or excoriated as an “insult” to them and to President Obama. Engel, however, called Netanyahu’s speech “compelling” and said he communicated “legitimate concerns.” When Engel announced his opposition to the nuclear deal later that year, he said that the agreement Obama had worked at “may in fact strengthen Iran’s position as a destabilizing and destructive influence.” He was one of 25 House Democrats who voted against ratifying it. That record has earned Engel the ironclad support of pro-Israel groups—several of which have rallied to the 16-term incumbent in an expensive last-ditch effort to save him. The political action committee for a group called Democratic Majority for Israel, for example, has dropped over $1 million in ads boosting Engel and attacking Bowman—including a Wednesday spot that hit the challenger over a years-old unpaid tax bill. At least two other pro-Israel groups have run ads in support of Engel on social media. “He’s been both a champion and a leader of pro-Israel efforts in the House,” said Mark Mellman, president of Democratic Majority for Israel. “He would be much missed and that’s why we're making a real effort to keep him in office.”Obama’s own views and vision on Middle East policy, meanwhile, earned him a famously icy relationship with the right-wing Israeli government and this constellation of American pro-Israel groups—such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has ties to the PAC now bankrolling Engel’s rescue. At their annual Washington convention one year during Obama’s tenure, AIPAC delegates had to be told not to boo the sitting president. Engel and Obama didn’t prioritize the same things when it came to foreign policy, according to a former Obama official, who said that the congressman’s opposition to the Iran Deal “colored private perceptions” of him through the end of the Obama presidency. “I think the important thing is what got Eliot Engel to that vote. It was the opposite of what President Obama stood for.” And that vote, the official added, “was not the first sour taste he left in the prior administration’s mouth.”As chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Engel has used his perch to contribute to Democratic investigations of President Donald Trump, from the Ukraine-driven impeachment inquiry to probes of Secretary Mike Pompeo’s handling of the State Department. That side of Engel’s record is the one more frequently touted by big-name endorsers such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the lead prosecutor of the case against Trump in the Senate impeachment trial.“Ever since Trump took office, Eliot has helped expose the abuses of his administration, and hold this lawless president accountable,” Schiff said in his endorsement of Engel. Bowman, for his part, has not made Engel’s foreign policy record a centerpiece of his campaign, though he has criticized the incumbent’s positions and has touted endorsements from progressive foreign policy groups that oppose Engel’s hardline stances. Ironically, if Engel were to lose, it’s possible he’d be replaced as chairman by another hawk, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), who also voted against the Iran deal and is currently the next most senior Democrat on the panel. Obama alumni insist that their enthusiasm for ousting Engel is nothing personal; many of them like him. “The real story here is he’s got this energetic, charismatic, young challenger who talks about a lot of the issues that are at the heart of today’s progressive agenda,” said a former administration official. “It’s not that he lost people on foreign policy, but despite being chairman… the Obama wonk foreign policy constituency is not lined up for him.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Steven Bannon’s platform to air COVID-19 conspiracy theories is distributed by a con man who has a long list of serious arrests dating back decades and a federal bank-fraud conviction. War Room: Pandemic is a podcast and radio program that appeals to a MAGA audience and focuses on the coronavirus, and is hosted by President Trump’s former chief strategist at the White House and by the former Nigel Farage adviser Raheem Kassam.It has covered COVID-19 and pushed false narratives about the virus, including giving weight to the unproven theory that it was somehow man-made.The hour-long broadcasts—which have been viewed by millions and which originally started as War Room: Impeachment in October, and then pivoted to the pandemic in late January—are part of a stable of Trump-aligned conservative news programs distributed by America's Voice News (AVN), a website and satellite TV network. AVN is operated by Colorado-based Robert Sigg, who has a criminal background and, in an unusual twist, has historically donated to Democratic political candidates and causes. Sigg operates AVN through another entity, Performance One Media LLC.   Revealed: The Family Member Who Turned on Trump Sigg’s arrest record dates back to the 1980s and includes arrests for domestic violence, driving under the influence, assault, battery, burglary, and drug offenses; the charges were later dismissed. Sigg also has a track record of white-collar crime; in 2006, he was convicted for his role in a $19 million mortgage-fraud scheme. At the time of his arrest, the FBI announced that Sigg and his fellow defendants were charged because of their “alleged roles in a scheme to obtain loans employing stolen identities, and then utilizing these loan proceeds to purchase substandard houses.” Sigg pleaded guilty to one count of bank fraud and a federal court sentenced him to time served and ordered him to pay more than $140,000 in restitution. His son Austin is also no stranger to law enforcement; he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the kidnapping and murder of a 10-year-old girl from Westminster, Colorado, in 2013.Although Sigg hosts a far-right news source, he has donated around $72,000 to the Democratic Party, its causes, and candidates, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the 2016 Clinton campaign, and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer. It’s unclear why he switched allegiances and jumped on the MAGA bandwagon.Sigg and AVN did not respond to repeated requests for comment. A spokesperson for Bannon didn’t answer questions as to whether Bannon knew of Sigg’s criminal background or association with the Democratic Party, or if the onetime executive chairman of Breitbart News would continue his association with AVN.“America’s Voice News has been one of a dozen of our strong distribution partners, which has allowed us to reach over tens of millions of views and over 10 million downloads,” the spokesperson said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “With a vibrant and diverse audience, the show is growing aggressively throughout the globe, including in China, where it is broadcast through the firewall in Mandarin.”The show is also broadcast on YouTube, John Fredericks Radio Network, Newsmax TV, and Salem Radio Network, and is available to download on podcast platforms. Bannon has plans to expand its reach further with Spanish-language and Portuguese versions of the show. The coronavirus pandemic, and the conservative backlash to public-health measures to curb it, have given AVN one of its most viral and controversial segments yet—an interview with anti-vaccine activist and Massachusetts Senate candidate Shiva Ayyadurai, who alleged that the science behind COVID-19 and the U.S. response to it is part of a conspiracy involving Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates designed to damage Trump’s re-election chances. Fauci, Ayyadura says, is “a guy who's embedded in the ‘deep state’” and is “highly embedded into the Big Pharma medical school education.”The segment went viral among QAnon fans and anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists, racking up six million views on YouTube alone before being pulled from the video-sharing platform. Among the biggest boosters of content from Bannon’s Warroom.org and America’s Voice News on social media is Bannon’s own political action committee, Citizens of the American Republic. Citizens of the American Republic (COAR) is a 501(c)(4) organization founded by Bannon. Its Facebook page is one of the most frequent amplifiers of America’s Voice News and War Room: Pandemic on Facebook. COAR advances the ideologies of “economic nationalism” and “America First.”Sigg is just the latest media executive who has paired up with Bannon since the latter’s 2018 split with the wealthy Bob and Rebekah Mercer, who bankrolled his tenure at Breitbart. More recently, Bannon, who was unceremoniously dumped from his role in the White House, has courted Guo Wengui, a Chinese billionaire who fled the People’s Republic following corruption allegations from Chinese officials and presented himself as a whistleblower and dissident upon his arrival in the U.S. Guo Media struck a million-dollar deal with Bannon to provide “strategic consulting services” and help raise the profile of Guo’s news company. Guo has been a repeat guest on Bannon’s show and, like Bannon, is a proponent of the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus escaped from a lab in Wuhan.On the Feb. 21 edition of War Room: Pandemic, Wengui was asked by Bannon about the origins of novel coronavirus and whether it came out of a Wuhan "wet market" or if it originated from a "biological weapons program."“I believe there is no doubt this is man-made, not from, you know, the seafood market, animal market,” Wengui responded. “This is truly ridiculous.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Former National Security Adviser John Bolton said in an interview with ABC News that aired Sunday night that the most important person in the White House was President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.“It varied from time to time,” Bolton said. “The sustained answer to that question… is Jared Kushner.”Bolton went on to say that Trump was generally uninformed and did not do his homework.“There was an unwillingness… to do systematic learning so he could make the most informed decisions,” Bolton said, adding that the president’s day didn’t “start until almost lunchtime.”“I don’t think he is fit for office,” Bolton said.What the Hell Is John Bolton?Bolton’s interview with ABC comes just two days before the release of his book, titled The Room Where It Happened. The Department of Justice last week attempted to put an injunction on the book and block its release. But the judge in Washington struck down that effort Saturday.Most of Bolton’s comments about the president seemed to focus on the president’s inability to study and understand foreign policy.“Trump was not following any international grand strategy,” Bolton said.Trump said he ousted Bolton from his position at the NSC in September in the midst of the Ukraine scandal and in the lead-up to the House impeachment inquiry. (Bolton now claims that he resigned.)Over the past week the White House has scrambled to contain the fallout from Bolton’s book and has tried to paint the former national security adviser as a disgruntled former official attempting to profit off of lies.In his interview with ABC’s Martha Raddatz, Bolton laid out a series of foreign policy events where he says Trump “did not understand” U.S. policy and instead thought that forging personal relationships with leaders would bring friendlier relations between two nations.“I think many of these foreign leaders mastered at ringing his bells,” Bolton said. Bolton said Trump tried to become close with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in an attempt to smooth relations between the two countries and come to an agreement on nuclear weapons.“I think Kim Jong Un gets a huge kick out of this,” Bolton said. “Nobody should misunderstand that a personal relationship is somehow equivalent to better relations between two nations.” Bolton said that during the Singapore Summit in 2018 Trump gave concessions to Kim in private talks.Perhaps no other foreign policy relationship was more concerning to Bolton than the one between Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Bolton said it was clear Putin had a hold over Trump“I think Putin thinks he can play him like a fiddle. I don’t think he is worried about Donald Trump,” Bolton said. “I can just see the smirk when he knows he’s got him following his line.”The former national security adviser said Trump’s callous indifference to establishing streamlined foreign policy eventually led to the breakdown of relations between the U.S. and Ukraine.“He directly linked the provision of [Ukraine’s] assistance with that provision,” Bolton said of Trump holding up the country’s military aid in exchange for President Volodymyr Zelensky pushing officials in Kyiv to open an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden.Bolton was called to testify in the House impeachment probe but declined Democrats’ outreach, saying “it wouldn’t have made a difference” if he had answered their questions. “Minds were already made up on Capitol Hill,” he said.Bolton said Democrats carried out “impeachment malpractice” and that the House Democrats should have taken more time to carry out the investigation. Instead, he said, they chose to “keep it narrow and move it fast.”If there was one incident that pushed him over the edge, Bolton said, it was Trump’s decision to invite the Taliban to Camp David on the week of 9/11. That’s when he decided to resign, Bolton said. But the president fired him first.“I should have striked preemptively,” Bolton said. “He and I had a one-on-one conversation in the afternoon and I said, ‘If you want me to resign I’ll do it.’ And we decided to talk about it later in the afternoon.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

* Attorney General fires New York attorney after bizarre standoff * Judiciary chair says he will cut $50m from ‘personal budget’ * Opinion: SDNY disaster suggests Barr is not so smart after allAttorney general William Barr “certainly deserves” to be impeached and removed but will escape that fate because Republicans who control the Senate are “corrupt against the interests of the country”, the chairman of the House judiciary committee said on Sunday.Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat, told CNN’s State of the Union he would instead take $50m from the attorney general’s “own personal budget”.On Saturday evening, after a near-24-hour standoff, Barr secured the exit of Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney for the southern district of New York.The prestigious district has pursued investigations and prosecutions of allies of Donald Trump including two of his personal lawyers, Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani.It also oversees the investigation of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, a Trump friend, and a case involving a Turkish bank which former national security adviser John Bolton has said Trump tried to influence as a favour to the Turkish president.Barr said on Friday night Berman, a Republican who donated to Trump in 2016, had agreed to step down. Berman said he had not.On Saturday, Barr invoked Trump’s authority to fire Berman, who accepted his fate. His deputy Audrey Strauss, a career prosecutor and donor to Democrats, will assume the role until the Senate confirms a replacement.Barr and Trump want that replacement to be Jay Clayton, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission who has never worked as a federal prosecutor. Barr had said the US attorney in New Jersey, a Trump ally, would fill the role in an acting capacity.On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, House intelligence chair Adam Schiff was asked if he accepted the reported explanation that Trump’s move to replace Berman with Clayton was “simply the president wanting to do a favor for a golfing buddy”.“I can’t accept that explanation,” Schiff said, “given the pattern and practice of both the president in seeking to use the justice system to reward friends, punish enemies, protect people he likes, and Bill Barr’s willingness to carry that water for the president.“Also, if you look at Berman’s statement, Berman apparently has the same skepticism. There’s a reason … he was saying ‘I’m not stepping down,’ that he wanted to ensure that these investigations continued … Berman clearly had a concern about why he was being pushed out.”Clayton’s firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, has represented Deutsche Bank, one of Trump’s largest creditors which is itself under investigation by the DoJ. On Sunday Republican senator Tim Scott told ABC’s This Week: “There is no indication that those investigations will stop.”Democrats have long claimed Barr acts more as a personal lawyer for Trump than the impartial chief of federal law enforcement. The attorney general, they say, has misrepresented the Mueller report and interfered in criminal cases involving Trump aides Michael Flynn and Roger Stone.Schiff also referred to recent removals of a number of independent government watchdogs.“Given the firings of these inspector generals,” he said, “given the way that Barr has sought to intervene in cases to help out people like Michael Flynn or Roger Stone, and to seek additional punishment for people like Michael Cohen” – who has turned against the president – “… you really have to question what’s really at the basis of this Friday night attempted massacre, and now, completed one.”That was a reference to the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, when Richard Nixon sought to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox and successive officials quit rather than do so. Nixon soon resigned, rather than be removed.Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren has led calls for Barr to be impeached but Nadler said: “He certainly deserves impeachment but that would be a waste of time.“We know that we have a corrupt Republican majority in the Senate which will not consider an impeachment no matter what the evidence and no matter what the facts,” Nadler said, saying such senators were “corrupt against the interests of the country”.Measures against Barr would include the budget cut, he said.When Trump was impeached, over attempts to get from Ukraine dirt on political rivals, he was acquitted in the Senate, which refused to call witnesses including Bolton, who is now publishing a book which includes allegations of more impeachable behaviour.One Republican senator, Mitt Romney, voted for new witnesses and to impeach Trump. Susan Collins of Maine voted for witnesses.Nadler, like other Democrats, has suggested Barr is seeking to impede investigations close to Trump. Asked which, he said: “I think it’s obvious that a number of investigations the southern district has been doing with reference to the president’s associates, Giuliani, the Turkish investigation, we’ve seen a pattern of Barr corruptly impeding all these investigations. So this is just more of the same.”Nadler said he expected Berman to testify, if not at a hearing this week which will feature DoJ whistleblowers.Preet Bharara, US attorney for the SDNY before Berman, whom Trump also fired, told CNN, for whom he now works, he did not think Berman would discuss ongoing investigations. He also condemned Barr’s conduct.“The attorney general of the United States made a public misrepresentation about whether or not Geoff Berman was stepping down from office,” he said.“It was clearly not the case, it was clearly a falsehood, and he tried to cover that up with a letter that spent time calling names against Geoff Berman and also retreated a little bit, allowing Berman to decide that the office was going to be left in good hands.”Barr accused Berman of having “chosen public spectacle over public service”.“Your statement also wrongly implies that your continued tenure in the office is necessary to ensure that cases now pending in the southern district of New York are handled appropriately,” the attorney general wrote. “This is obviously false. I fully expect that the office will continue to handle all cases in the normal course.”Bharara said he thought Barr’s conduct “shows there is an unfitness for office”.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr deserves to be impeached over the firing of a federal prosecutor whose office had been investigating President Donald Trump's personal lawyer but the effort would be a "waste of time," a leading Democratic lawmaker said on Sunday. Jerrold Nadler, the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee chairman who helped lead the Trump impeachment hearings last year, told CNN's "State of the Union" that the Republican-led Senate would block any effort to sanction Barr.

Maryland Senator Ben Cardin weighs in on John Bolton’s tell-all book on ‘CAVUTO Live.’

As Donald Trump returns to the campaign trail this Saturday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, some of his top political advisers are growing increasingly concerned that the president won’t be able to dig himself out of the hole he’s made for himself.Over the past two weeks, several of the president’s campaign lieutenants as well as individuals in his administration have reacted with mounting alarm as multiple polls have shown Trump dipping into the 30s against former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. In weeks past, various aides in the White House and on the Trump re-election effort had privately expressed cold comfort in the fact that with everything going on—a bungled response to a deadly pandemic, a massively crippled U.S. economy, protests across the nation, and a number of Trump’s own former top officials coming out against him—it was practically a miracle that the president’s poll numbers hadn’t sunk even lower.Early this month, one senior White House official told The Daily Beast that their “nightmare scenario” would be for the president to slip beneath 40 percent support in a sustained string of public and private surveys—thus signaling that a previously unshakable base was starting to grow a bit disillusioned. Trump’s consistent—though perhaps unenviable—standing in the low 40s had for years remained an illustration of his enduring base and iron Republican support. “Until then, I’m not a doomsayer,” this official said, referring to the nerve-racking 30s in national, and some state, polling.In the time since that comment, multiple polls have shown Trump sliding into the 30s. Asked this week about the change, the same White House official simply responded, “This is not where any of us wanted to be at this point [in the election], but there is still time… to make up the difference.”Trump Aides Know His Polls Are Terrible—And Tell Him OtherwiseSome advisers lay the blame for recent poll numbers squarely at the weeks-long news coverage of the mass protests against institutional racism and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd, and how Trump has responded to it. “When race is in the news cycle and dominating the conversation, President Trump’s numbers always go down,” said a source close to the White House. “That’s just a fact.”The source added that they hoped coverage of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s tell-all book about Trump would actually lead to a poll bump for the president, if for no other reason than it would mean less talk of racism, COVID, and social unrest.But Trump has had a knack for getting in the way of even the most well-crafted media plans, to say nothing of the ones his advisers hope play out. Even the announcement of the Tulsa rally was fraught with hiccups and missteps. His team had previously scheduled it for Friday, which meant it would have fallen on Juneteenth in a city that was the site of one of the country’s most savage massacres of Black people. Following a backlash, the president announced the date switch to Saturday. He subsequently claimed that he had made Juneteenth—which has long commemorated the end of slavery in the United States—“very famous” because “nobody had ever heard of it.” His White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, defended those remarks on Friday by noting a spike in Google searches.Stephen Colbert Slams Trump’s ‘Stupid’ Juneteenth ClaimTrump has also attempted to portray the economic damage caused by the pandemic as fleeting. But Republican operatives have expressed concern that his talk of a rocket ship recovery may effectively portray him as out of touch to voters who still feel left behind. And even his own team is uncertain about whether it’s an effective campaign play. Two of the four aforementioned officials told The Daily Beast that they were unnerved by the fact that they’d seen no polling evidence, in internal data or in multiple different public polls, that the news of higher retail sales and the addition of 2.5 million jobs in May had given the president the bump they had wanted and expected.“If the next [unemployment] reports get better and better, hopefully you’ll see a change then and noticeable impact,” one of these officials said, adding that right now far too many people are out of work and “hurting.”Hoping to give himself an additional boost on the economic front, Trump has continuously expressed a desire for additional, big-ticket federal stimulus—which some Republican officials believe would improve his chances. Top Democrats on the Hill, however, say they have not yet had any formal discussions with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about such a package (House Democrats have passed one of their own) and there is wide antipathy among aides about working with the White House unless it provides more insight into how it is spending the hundreds of billions of dollars that was already appropriated.“It is a top priority,” a senior House Democratic aide said of getting answers on where the Treasury Department’s funds have gone. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, have put off talk of another bill entirely. And even among Trump’s cadre of advisers, there is not much appetite for another stimulus bill.“The economic damage done by the coronavirus is a lot less than what was predicted months ago… It’s awful, but it’s much better in states like California, Texas, and Florida than what experts thought it would be,” said Art Laffer, the notoriously conservative economist who informally advises Trump. “People are even hedging their bets on if there’s going to be a second wave of the virus… The stock market is telling us this ain’t going to be a big deal. It’s nothing compared to Y2K or 2008… Those were really big downs in the market, and this is nothing compared to that. It started off really big, with a big drop… but then it came right back. That’s not the way it went in 2008 and 2009.”Absent a major economic measure or turnaround, Trump’s options for reversing his polling slide are slimmer. In an interview with Politico that was published on Friday, the president did express a degree of worry about his chances against Biden. But he couched his concern in baseless theories about the potential for rampant voter fraud in mail-in ballots. “My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits [regarding mail-in voting],” the president said. “We have many lawsuits going all over. And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think—I think it puts the election at risk.”Increasingly, Trump seems content to try and re-run the playbook he used in 2016 in hopes that it works again. Elsewhere in that Politico interview, he warned other Republican candidates—including those running to help preserve the party’s Senate majority—not to tiptoe away from him, no matter what his poll numbers look like. And in recent days his team has made another aggressive effort to troll Biden (much as they did Hillary Clinton) as physically and mentally unwell. The president has brought back top aides from his last presidential run and is turning to one of his most prominent surrogates from that race to help, as well. On Thursday, Politico reported that the Trump campaign had enlisted former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani—who as Trump’s personal lawyer launched a dirt-digging expedition into the Bidens that led directly to the president’s impeachment—to “spearhead a campaign to press for more debates this fall, starting earlier than usual and to have a say in choosing the moderators,” so that Trump can have more opportunities to publicly humiliate Biden, someone who the president seems convinced will crack under a one-on-one grilling.Asked on Thursday if he now has an official title on Trump 2020, Giuliani told The Daily Beast, “No sir I am just helping out.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday evening hit back at former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s depictions of the Trump administration’s inner workings in his new memoir with a scathing statement.“I’ve not read the book, but from the excerpts I’ve seen published, John Bolton is spreading a number of lies, fully-spun half-truths, and outright falsehoods,” Pompeo said. “It is both sad and dangerous that John Bolton’s final public role is that of a traitor who damaged America by violating his sacred trust with its people.”Pompeo joins President Trump and other White House officials in portraying Bolton as a liar ahead of the June 23 publication of his book, The Room Where It Happened. The book contains a series of damning allegations about the Trump administration, including that the president sought China’s help in securing victory in the 2020 election and routinely offered favors to dictators. The Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit to stop the book’s distribution. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin echoed Pompeo in a statement released Thursday: “John Bolton has put self-promotion ahead of the truth and of the interests of his country.”Trump went even further in a series of Twitter tirades, calling Bolton a a “wacko” and a “liar” who is just trying to make him “look bad.” Bolton, known for taking detailed notes during his tenure as national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, has faced criticism for writing a book about incompetence within the Trump administration but refusing to testify before the House during impeachment proceedings. News of his book first broke in January 2020, but prepublication review by the federal government, meant to redact classified information, delayed its release for months. Lawyers for the White House have said Bolton failed to complete the process, an allegation Bolton’s attorneys and his publisher denied.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

President Donald Trump “pleaded” with China’s Xi Jinping during a 2019 summit to help his reelection prospects, according to a scathing new book by former Trump adviser John Bolton that accuses the president of being driven by political calculations when making national security decisions. The White House was working furiously to block release of the book, whose China revelations carry echoes of Trump’s efforts to solicit political help from Ukraine that led to his impeachment. The 577-page book paints an unvarnished portrait of Trump and his administration, lending the most vivid, first-person account yet of how Trump conducts himself in office.