NOTE: I published nearly this same diary five weeks ago, and it received very little traction at the time. I’m publishing it again as it seems maybe slightly more salient now. A few grammatical and tense edits have been made, but the story is the same. Also, please note that I’m not saying this is proof or evidence of intentional scumfuckery. But it certainly doesn’t seem right.
It appears as though The Neverending Swampland Sagajust recently spawned another chapter: CNN and other outlets are reporting reported that the son-in-law of brand spanking new United States Attorney General William Barr has been was brought over to the White House counsel’s office from the US Justice Department where he will now, and I quote from the White House website, “advise the President, the Executive Office of the President, and the White House staff on legal issues pertaining to the President and the White House”.
Well, now, ain’t that convenient?
Tyler McGaughey and his wife, Barr’s youngest daughter Mary, both left the Justice Department a week month ago where they’d been working (Mary as point person for Trump’s invisible attack on the opioid crisis, which apparently involves overturning President Obama’s “overly lenient” policy of not immediately handing out life sentences to every black teenager caught with a marijuana joint), which even Walter Shaub, the man who directed the Office of Government Ethics under Obama, admits is a good thing to “...avoid the bad optics that could come from the appearance of them working for“ AG Barr. But I doubt I and Shaub are alone in wishing that McGaughey and his wife would just, you know, find work in the private sector. Or something.
Let’s summarize our journey:
1) Trump spends years—maybe decades—getting himself in some deep legal do-do.
2) Trump is elected President, and through his own incompetent actions he invites a Special Counsel to look into his many misdeeds.
3) William Barr spontaneously and for no reason other than his admiration of the President pens an entirely unsolicited love letter to Trump detailing over 20 pages how he’d do his damnedest to save Trump’s ass from the Special Counsel if only he was in the position to do so.
4) Trump “randomly” selects Barr as his nominee for US Attorney general for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Barr penned an entirely unsolicited love letter to Trump detailing over 20 pages how he’d do his damnedest to save Trump’s ass from the Special Counsel if only he was in the position to do so.
5) Barr is shoved through the process by Trump’s Loathsome League Of Lickspittles And Lackeys in the Senate to become AG almost completely unnoticed by members of the MSM who were otherwise urgently busy fulfilling their journalistic duties by spending hours discussing Very Important Subjects such as Kamala Harris’s choice of rap artists and AOC’s single-handed destruction of American Capitalism through her selfish socialist desire to not firehose billions of tax dollars directly into Jeff Bezos’s living room vault.
6) Barr’s son-in-law McGaughey leaves the Justice Department by the front door while being praised for his selfless act. He is then hurriedly ushered over to the White House where he is rushed in through the back door under cover of darkness and placed in the WH counsel’s office where he can “advise the President, the Executive Office of the President, and the White House staff on legal issues” such as, one would assume, the Mueller investigation, which is now was overseen by McGaughey’s father-in-law, but which, we’re likely to be assured, probably won’t be wasn’t the sole topic of conversations at every dinner.
It almost goes without saying at this point, but I’ll say it anyway: if Barack Obama were under investigation for, I don’t know, wearing a tan suit, and he hired Eric Holder’s son-in-law as White House legal counsel, the Right would be apoplectic. Hannity’s head would be spinning so fast he’d either take flight or auger himself into the ground (depending on the direction of rotation). McConnell would immediately convene a dozen Special Counsels and Committees. And Fox would air a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week bottom-third Chyron screaming about the death of democracy. But here? It’s just another dollop of feces plopped atop the giant shit sandwich that has long been the one and only item on the menu at Trump’s La Trattoria Del Traditore, one that’s barely noticed and little remarked upon.
Something smells terrible here, and as it turns out it wasn’t just the remains of yesterday’s half-eaten Reuben in my garbage can. I threw that out already. But the stench lingers, and strengthens.