Trump Found His Roy Cohn in Deep State Fixer Bill Barr

In protecting President Trump, Attorney General William Barr is meeting the president’s demand for a loyal legal fixer in the radical right mold of the canny, connected and immoral Roy Cohn.

That is the not-so-hidden backstory of the radical gutting of American Constitutional government now underway to expand and cover up the Team Trump’s corruption.

The future president is shown at right (photo by Sonia Moskowitz/Altimeter Films) with Cohn, his one-time mentor, attorney and Manhattan nightlife companion before Cohn’s 1986 death from AIDS.

Cohn, who was ultra-right wing politically, was also a closeted but active homosexual, according to widespread reporting through the decades that illustrates his hypocrisy. Cohn had also been disbarred for fraud at the end of his career despite his legendary legal ability and high-level connections, including representation of seemingly eminent officials and institutions, including church leaders.

Fast forward to March, where Trump is shown below at left congratulating Barr at the White House upon Barr’s joining Team Trump as Attorney General.

Trump last week gave Barr unprecedented power to declassify, upon his own initiative, U.S. intelligence, as reported by the New York Times and elsewhere in such stories as Trump Gives Attorney General Sweeping Power in Review of 2016 Campaign Inquiry on May 24.”The directive gives Mr. Barr immense leverage,” the Times reported, “over the intelligence community and enormous power over what the public learns about the roots of the Russia investigation.”

Congruent with Barr’s view on near-unlimited powers for a president under the fascist “unitary executive” theory of the Constitution, Trump’s delegation of power could be an effort implement his vision of a Justice Department mobilized to prosecute his enemies, apparently including intelligence analysts and law enforcers who have dared raise suspicions about Trump Team foreign alliances and funding relationships.

Potentially lost in the blizzard of other news is the historical fact that such efforts by the Nixon administration prompted so much public outrage and legal liability as to form one of the building blocks for the impeachment that drove Nixon from office in 1974.

Barr’s Rise To Power, Again

With that background, our column today focuses on Barr’s disgraceful past as a fixer, cover up artist  and world-class hypocrite spouting high-minded rhetoric about “rule of law” while abusing his power in service of corrupt goals and masters. The Mueller Report and its revelations provide our news peg, underscoring the importance of this historical inquiry at this point, but are not themselves our focus today. The Justice Integrity Project publishes daily updates of such developments in our sections summarizing general news, Trump Watch and Deep State.

For this more in-depth column, we start by citing Trump’s repeated complaints about the Justice Department, as quoted in a documentary film, Where’s My Roy Cohn?, which has been described as a “thriller-like expose” released in January.

A year previous, on Jan. 4, 2018, the specific concept that Trump wanted a fixer in the mold of Roy Cohn to run the nominally independent U.S. Justice Department became prominent also with publication of a New York Times story by Michael S. Schmidt. It began:

“President Trump gave firm instructions in March to the White House’s top lawyer: stop the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, from recusing himself in the Justice Department’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s associates had helped a Russian campaign to disrupt the 2016 election.

Public pressure was building for Mr. Sessions, who had been a senior member of the Trump campaign, to step aside. But the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, carried out the president’s orders and lobbied Mr. Sessions to remain in charge of the inquiry, according to two people with knowledge of the episode.

Mr. McGahn was unsuccessful, and the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him. Mr. Trump said he had expected his top law enforcement official to safeguard him the way he believed Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general, had done for his brother John F. Kennedy and Eric H. Holder Jr. had for Barack Obama.

Mr. Trump then asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” He was referring to his former personal lawyer and fixer, who had been Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s top aide during the investigations into communist activity in the 1950s and died in 1986 (emphasis added).

In the film clip, and as amplified in a Vanity Fair article, Where’s My Roy Cohn? Digs into One of the 20th Century’s Most Evil Men, Trump bemoaned (with his emphasis on the “my”), in effect, not being able to use the the Justice Department as a kind of personal legal team.

A weirdly evocative still photo from the documentary shows Cohn and Trump (at right below, both in headdress) during one of their gala evenings on the town together.

In the structure of the column unfolding below, we next touch briefly on the kind of criminal undertakings common for Trump and Cohn during the future president’s early years in business.

We then move to Barr’s concurrent rise as a loyal legal apparatchik for ultra-right-wing politicos during the 1980s.

Barr’s work most notably served the Bush family and its allies, who became heavily involved in organized crime during the Iran-Contra scandals of the 1980s, according to multiple sources. These included Republican operative and former Reagan-Bush aide Roger Stone, author of Jeb! and The Bush Crime Family (2016), a remarkably detailed account of the family’s corruption and deviance, as recounted by an insider notorious for his own dirty tricks. 

Before undertaking that history, however, we must note at the outset the shocking failure of society’s watchdogs during recent years to refresh public recollection about Iran-Contra. That’s especially harmful when so many of the malefactors are still prominent. These include Barr, the recent National Rifle Association President Oliver North and Presidential Special Envoy to Venezuela Elliott Abrams.

Barr, who was U.S. attorney general from 1991 to 1993 in protecting President George H.W. Bush from corruption investigations, had sought the Trump post with a unsolicited 19-page memo to the Justice Department last year arguing for expanded presidential immunities.

Not surprisingly, the embattled Trump then chose Barr to replace Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who had angered the president by failing to protect him from the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller into claims of 2016 Trump presidential campaign wrongdoing and cover up.

Barr went on to lie at news conferences in spinning his redacted version of Mueller’s 448-page report before anyone in Congress or the public could see it.

Trump’s designation of new powers for Barr is an invitation for Team Trump to cherry pick information to weave a story that Trump is the victim of “spying” and other unfair practices during the 2016 campaign, with scant rebuttal possible because Team Trump controls much of the classified documentation and has vowed minimal cooperation with Congress or other oversight bodies.

The rest of the public can safely assume — based on past practices and the indictment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on May 23 on spy charges for releasing classified documents — that Team Trump will seek to thwart to the full extent of his considerable powers that anyone independently investigates the classified materials at issue.

Cohn’s Corruption

Trump’s desire to replicate his relationship with Cohn using a U.S. attorney general necessarily requires at least a brief summary of Cohn’s deeds and his shared experiences with Trump. 

Cohn’s legal brilliance, ruthless tactics and diverse alliances enabled him to work closely as a radical right political operative with such ostensibly different institutions as the FBI, organized crime, the Catholic Church and big business.

Cohn represented three of New York City’s most powerful Mafia families, as shown at right, at the same time Cohn represented Donald Trump and his father Fred Trump. This editor reported on the mob during this era and once interviewed Cohn regarding his representation of Carmine Galante, then head of the Bonanno Mafia Family.

Good relations between the mob and a New York City builder and New Jersey casino operator like the younger Trump would have been absolutely vital in the era before federal racketeering prosecutions in the mid-1980s broke omerta, the Mafia’s code of silence, and the larger power of the mob.

Relevant also is that mob leaders had a number of relationships with both “legitimate” businesses and government officials in those days because of mutual goals, such as assassination or other regime change, smuggling and vice operations.

Thus the late Air Force Col. Fletcher Prouty, the top Defense Department liaison to the CIA for covert operations, entitled his breakthrough 1973 memoir The Secret Team to show how what he called “The High Cabal” of U.S. and U.K. oligarchs deploy operatives widely and covertly to manage events and information flow. 

Covert action, in the U.S. and worldwide in spy operations by major nations, might involve elimination of undesirable government leaders, money-laundering to enhance government operational budgets without the prying eyes of legislators, and prostitution rings to create more revenue for operatives and their underworld assets and to enhance blackmail potential that assists spy operations, among other goals.

Money-laundering is a key skill for all major crime operations because the money has to re-enter the financial system without triggering scrutiny. Condos and casinos are especially popular as conduits.

The helps explain much of the current investigative focus on Trump’s financial records as well as his mob connections regarded as relevant to Trump’s construction projects, casino gambling and colossal bankruptcies. Major biographies focused on such topics include Trump by Wayne Barrett (1992), TrumpNation by Timothy O’Brien (2005); The Truth About Trump by Michael D’Antonio (2015); and The Making of Donald Trump by David Cay Johnston (2016), fleshed out by innumerable investigative and tabloid reports.

Russian, Asian and European mobsters would replace the Italian-American hoodlums in Trump’s orbit during more recent decades, according to more current researchers who include David Corn and Michael Isikoff (Russian Roulette, 2018); Craig Unger (House of Trump, House of Putin, 2018); and Wayne Madsen (Trump’s Bananas Republic, 2018, and the daily Wayne Madsen Report). Madsen created a chart showing more than thousands of relationships between Team Trump (Trump, his family and such key campaign and administration figures as Paul Manafort and Wilbur Ross) with Eastern European or Asian entities.

Barr’s Rise To Power

While Trump’s career captured headlines, companies, condos and casinos in the 1980s, Barr was ascending the federal government’s ranks as a diligent bureaucrat the U.S. Justice Department.

Barr’s father, a veteran of the World War II Office of Special Services, the precursor to the CIA, was an educator long associated with Columbia University as a professor and with two elite private schools for girls as headmaster.

The elder Barr hired the future notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein to teach seventh-grade girls at Manhattan’s Dalton School, researcher Wayne Madsen has reported. Ironically, the younger Barr and his Justice Department is under pressure to reopen the suppressed federal investigation of Epstein, a Trump friend, on charges that Epstein molested scores of teen girls in Palm Beach and Manhattan and that Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta bagged the case, thereby benefiting the wealthy Epstein and his powerful friends, who have included Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew of the United Kingdom’s royal family, and Alan Dershowitz. That kind of hiring could mean nothing aside from coincidence — or it could call for official scrutiny. But, as ever, one must wonder who scrutinizes the scrutinizers in a political environment when suspicions of cover-up are widespread?

In the early 1970s, the younger Barr obtained a graduate degree from Columbia in foreign affairs and then worked at the CIA as an analyst, including during the pivotal year of 1976 when CIA Director George H. W. Bush rallied the agency against Watergate-era congressional investigations and reforms in order to reassert the agency’s long secret power to undertake covert activities that historically included propaganda, regime change, infiltration of groups, creation of scandals, assassinations and revolutions. 

We cited the credible books on these topics in our series last December, “Poppy Bush’s Seed and Bitter Harvest: Half Truths / History (Part 4),” on the life, corruption and other legacy of President George H.W. Bush, who served as Barr’s patron at the CIA in 1976 when Bush was CIA director (as shown in the file photo at right).

One pivotal moment during this era came when longtime CIA operative David Atlee Phillips refused to answer questions during the House Select Committee on Assassinations’ probe into potential CIA involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, according to then-Deputy Committee Counsel Robert Tanenbaum, who then resigned in protest along with his boss, Richard Sprague, when House leaders dared not require Phillips and the CIA to answer questions.

In 1975, Phillips, right, had retired from the CIA and organized AFIO (the Association of Former Intelligence Officers), which became a powerful organizing force on behalf of the spy agencies.

AFIO, while established as a non-partisan non-profit, helped also to show how former intelligence personnel could use means at their disposal to support agendas congruent with the GOP’s CIA-friendly Reagan-Bush 1980 Presidential campaign against incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter, a former Naval officer who supported reforms.

The Reagan-Bush campaign manager was William Casey, a financier and media executive who would lead the CIA as director for the first seven years of the Reagan-Bush administration, including during the “off the books” Iran-Contra smuggling operations that reached peak between 1983 and 1984 under North’s leadership from the White House. 

Barr & Reagan-Bush Justice Department

President Ronald Reagan, right, and Attorney General Edwin Meese, left, greeted in a White House 1983 meeting future Attorney General William P. Barr, a former CIA staffer who was then deputy assistant director of legal police at the Justice Department (Reagan Library photo)

The Washington Post published on May 14 a useful account of Barr’s career in How William Barr, now serving as a powerful ally for Trump, has championed presidential powers by the experienced reporter Tom Hamburger.

“Embracing a theory that the Constitution grants presidents sweeping authority,” the story began, “Barr is part of a group of conservative intellectuals who have been leading the charge to expand the powers of the executive branch over the past four decades. The doctrine, which gained support amid a backlash against post-Watergate constraints on the presidency, is back in the fore as President Trump and Congress are locked in a bitter fight over the bounds of executive power.”

An even deeper look shows that Barr had been trained in the dark arts as a CIA intern, analyst and attorney in the 1970s. This was during the pivotal directorship of CIA Director George H.W. Bush (shown at left at the CIA).

Bush, during his a year-long appointment mostly during 1976, turned the agency away from post-Watergate reforms pushed by Congress and reasserted instead the agency’s its role as a decisive unelected “Deep State” force at the service of the nation’s most powerful private-sector oligarchs pursuing their covert adventures in the United States and abroad.

These power brokers are not necessarily presidents (unless their politics are congruent with those of the agency’s true masters in the private sector, as we documented in Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters).

Barr went on to demonstrate a career-long willingness — as did Roy Cohn — to use his unusual legal talent in all-out defense of powerful officials, especially in the radical right, even when their actions are unconstitutional, grossly damaging to the American public, or degenerate on a personal level.

One common denominator for those that Barr and Cohn have defended is, of course, the sinister business and crimes of Donald J. Trump.

More generally, both Barr and Cohn have extensive track records in hiding such crimes as massive money-laundering and tax fraud, which typically (and we can strongly suspect in Trump’s situation also) involve income derived from foreign-born mobsters and their dope dealing, arms smuggling, massive financial frauds and corrupt relationships with high-ranking officials.

The most visible disgraces in own Barr’s career, at least so far, involved his role as a high-ranking Justice Department official during the Reagan-Bush administration. Barr’s cover-up work at the Reagan-Bush Justice Department helped thwart investigations of the huge scandal known as Iran-Contra that reached fruition from 1984 to 1986.

Compelling evidence shows the covert crime spree was under the direction of Vice President Bush (although Bush denied it, most famously during an interview with CBS Anchor Dan Rather). Oliver North worked closely with Bush’s team, which maintained plausible deniability even while other evidence amassed of massive drug-running and arms-smuggling (in part through a small town airport located in Mena, Arkansas where the smuggler Barry Seal was particularly active until he was gunned down in 1986.).

Other evidence — including several congressional investigations and many federal prosecutions and books — indicates that the officially sanctioned crime spree was only partly to benefit the right-wing “Contras” in their CIA-assisted military activities against left-wing officials.

Al Martin’s memoir Conspirators and Daniel Hopsicker’s biography Barry and the Boys about Barry Seal are especially specific in showing that such massive operations, including Seal’s purported $5 billion in smuggled narcotics, could only have occurred with the help of high-level federal and state officials who were profiting along with their backers from the crime, even while honest law enforcers fought an oft-losing battle to stop it.

Other purposes included massive financial frauds involving major officials and banks, with taxpayers and gullible investors absorbing what Martin estimated as $350 billion in losses. He described how much of the loot went to well-connected insiders and their primarily (but not exclusively) Republican political backers, leaving a greatly empowered political class and a corrupt justice system.

And, sitting at the top, according to some accounts like Hopsicker’s Barry and the Boys was a billionaire banker, referenced mostly by underlings as “The Old Man” and reputed to be Jackson Stevens, who would go to become one of the largest contributors to both Bush and Clinton presidential campaigns.

For those Republicans who wonder why Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, left, and his financial backers were not prosecuted for Iran-Contra activities involving the Arkansas airstrip in Mena the answer could be fairly simple, albeit alarming: Iran-Contra was a covert “federal” matter during the Reagan-Bush administration, which appointed the U.S. attorneys and many of the judges and other federal authorities with relevant jurisdiction.

An especially interesting career path is that of current Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican. He was the Reagan-Bush U.S.attorney for the Western District of Arkansas from 1982 to 1985 during the height of Barry Seal’s and other CIA smuggling via Mena, which is located on the Arkansas-Oklahoma border. Hutchinson led the Arkansas Republican Party, was elected to Congress and then served as U.S. Drug Enforcement Administrator  during the Bush-Cheney Administration, which later named him as Homeland Security Undersecretary.

Hutchinson could surely argue, as have many, that he’s never been in a position to know enough to do anything about big-time crime allegedly involving the CIA and national security. So might many other officials, including 1990s Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and his ambitious Republican aide Brett Kavanaugh, the future Supreme Court justice under Trump. They surely knew that Mena clues would lead back to fellow Republicans and patrons. So they kept their “Whitewater” investigation of the Clintons far away from major crimes of the kind described here.

‘The Conspirators’

Al Martin claimed to be so much in the thick of Iran-Contra crime that he claimed to have written his book so that he would become prominent enoughso that he would not have to share the fate of what he estimated as 400 of his former Iran-Contra colleagues who died early from “suicide” or “accident” or “Columbian drug dealers.”

Martin described also how the careers of many congressional investigators, news reporters and whistleblowers were destroyed by a cover-up system that he alleged included Barr at or near the top of the Justice Department.

He cites a Mother Jones 1991 article called Shredded Justice by Mary Fricker and Steve Pizzo that mentions two names now much in the news. According to the Martin version:

[Bobby] Muller [sic] had said Barr would go around to the sixth floor of the Justice Department building. That’s where all the shredders are. And Billy would call himself “Billy, ‘I never saw a document I didn’t want to shred,’ Barr.”

As a reader warning, Martin is himself not above suspicion, either as a capable researcher or honest witness. As noted above, his book contains multiple misspellings of well-known figures, including Robert Mueller and former Clinton Associate Justice Department Attorney General Webster Hubbell, and others. Plus, Martin admits that he became a fraudster with numerous arrests following his post-military career.

But his book does contain accolades from former U.S. Rep. Bill Alexander (D-Arkansas), who led a major House probe of Iran-Contra using Martin as a witness. The spelling mistakes, all involving phonetically correct usage, might be because the book was dictated in a low-budget operation. Most importantly for current purposes, few sane people accuse powerful people of drug-dealing and murder in print without reason and without defamation litigation.

From other sources also, we know that beneficiaries of financial corruption include major corporations and top officials from both major parties. Among them were the Republican Bush family and the well-connected Democrats, including Washington luminaries Clark Clifford and his finance partner Robert Altman, both leaders at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) when it was exposed as huge money laundering operation for smugglers and fraudsters. Clifford ended his life in disgrace but Altman has bounced back to assume prominent positions.

Most of these facts, aside from the most recent, are amply documented in the public domain for those who dare read the material with a reasonably open mind.

William Barr’s Senate Confirmation Hearing

This editor attended Barr’s Senate confirmation hearing in January. Democrats challenged Barr’s independence, sometimes in blunt language. Republicans extolled his virtues before his confirmation along party lines.

As often the case, some of the most telling commentary was too disturbing for anyone to mention at an official proceeding, even to raise questions.

Thus it was a blogger, Wayne Madsen, a former Naval intelligence officer and longtime investigative reporter, who pulled no punches in a column on the Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), published the day Barr’s confirmation hearing began.  Pulling no punches, his column started this way:

Donald Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, William Barr, the former Attorney General under George H. W. Bush, has a sordid track record that would make him the envy of any criminal syndicate, including, obviously, the Trump administration.

After describing Barr’s key role in helping Bush arrange pardon of “The Iran-Contra Six” of high-level criminals Madsen noted the curious circumstance that a high-level U.S. Senator and former Senator investigating Iran-Contra crimes had died in separate airplane crashes, thereby helping also to thwart the Iran-Contra investigations:

Barr became Attorney General under Bush on November 26, 1991, six months after the back-to-back deaths of a sitting and former senator who were involved in investigating Iran-Contra and the October Surprise. They were John Heinz III, right, Republican of Pennsylvania, and John Tower of Texas, respectively. Tower’s nomination by Bush to be Secretary of Defense in 1989 was defeated by his one-time Senate colleagues over allegations surrounding Tower’s drinking and “womanizing.” When Bush discovered that Tower, who chaired the Tower Commission that investigated Iran-Contra, was coming out with a tell-all book about his experiences, Bush leaked the damaging information on Tower to media allies like New York Times columnist William Safire. Tower’s book is titled Consequences: A Personal and Political Memoir.

Heinz died in a suspicious plane crash on April 4, 1991 over Lower Merion Township, outside of Philadelphia. Heinz and the two charter pilots of his Aerostar PA60 aircraft were killed when it collided in mid-air with a Sun Company Bell 412 helicopter dispatched from the Sun Company’s plant in Chester, Pennsylvania to investigate a problem with the landing gear on Heinz’s aircraft. Coincidentally, on October 24, 1980, the U.S.-flagged merchant vessel, SS Poet, departed from the same Sun shipyard in Chester — where the Sun helicopter was based — laden with illicit U.S. arms for Iran.

A personal aide to Teresa Heinz Kerry, who married Senator John Kerry in 1995, told WMR that she believed foul play was involved in the death of her husband and that it involved his knowledge of criminal activity of Bush in relation to both the October Surprise and Iran-Contra. One of the chief Senate investigators of the money laundering involved in Iran-Contra and the related Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) scandal involving weapons shipments to Iraq and the scandal surrounding the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was Kerry. And two senators who Kerry worked with closely, included Heinz and Tower.

On April 5, 1991, Tower and his daughter and research assistant, Marian Goodwin Tower, were killed while flying on board Atlantic Southeast Airlines (ASA) flight 2311, which crashed while approaching the Brunswick, Georgia airport. The crash killed all the passengers and crew members.

Tower, left, and his daughter were attending a book party, sponsored by his publisher, Little, Brown & Company, at a resort on Sea Island. WMR learned that Marian was carrying copies of documents linking George H. W. Bush to various aspects of Iran-Contra. Little, Brown & Co., was a subsidiary of Time Warner. Time-Life, the firm’s previous incarnation, had deep connections to the CIA through its owner Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce.

Barr, as Bush’s Attorney General, not only helped Bush in his pardon of the Iran-Contra Six but he did everything in his power to stymie the Walsh investigation and efforts by Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, and House Banking Committee chairman Henry Gonzalez of Texas, to get to the bottom of Iran-Contra, the October Surprise, BNL, BCCI, and the Inslaw scandals.

WMR has learned from a relative of a victim on the ASA crash that Tower and his daughter, as well as four other passengers — a NATO official; a Department of Defense cyber-security expert; NASA physician, chemist, and Shuttle astronaut Manley “Sonny” Carter; and American College of Physicians president-elect Dr. Nicholas Davies — were all attending a secretive and classified meeting at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC) in Glynco, Georgia.

Bush not only wanted Tower and his daughter permanently out of the picture but plans for a second edition of Tower’s book and the secret FLETC meeting to be scrubbed. Bush’s willing accomplice in these acts of murder was William Barr, the man who will be undergoing questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), someone else with many skeletons in his closet.

Many books and congressional investigations focused on the Iran-Contra scandal and related frauds and money laundering. “Mainstream” books and news articles seldom raise the possibility of foul play, as do Madsen, Martin, Hopsicker and others in the small press sector.

One of the pioneering Iran-Contra reporters of the 1980s, former Associated Press and Newsweek reporter Bob Parry, alleged during a lecture before independent researchers at the National Press Club that the mainstream media lost much of its stomach for in-depth reporting in the late 1980s on topics associated with “national security” — and that’s why he founded an independent web-based site, Consortium News.

Yet mainstream print and broadcast media are not just intimidated but are now economically ravaged by Internet competition. In that case, where are the watchdogs? 

Parry also wrote a book Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & Project Truth (1999) as one of his efforts, like many of his colleagues from Iran-Contra probes, to keep some of this history available to an increasingly jaded public.

At the Barr Senate confirmation hearing in January, not one senator, not even one of the Democrats, questioned Barr about his CIA past or Iran-Contra pardons during public questions of the nominee, as the Justice Integrity Project reported in Senators Fail To Grill Barr On His CIA Past, Iran-Contra Cover-up.

If, as so often, the U.S. senate cannot drill down on a nominee’s history who does that leave as society’s watchdog?

The courts? The Trump Administration, including the Barr Justice Department, are in the process of transforming the federal judiciary into their image. And, if Al Martin and a great deal of reporting is to be believed, the courts and Justice Department have a long tradition of fixers on the bench and at the department skilled at using legal acumen to punish designated targets harshly and avoid serious prosecutions of favored insiders. 

‘Where’s My Roy Cohn?’

That would seem to leave William Barr as well suited, at least by Team Trump, for his role presiding over the nation’s federal justice system interrupted only occasionally by interim federal court decisions on appeal to the Republican-led U.S. Supreme Court.

As noted more briefly above, film producer Matt Tyrnauer premiered in January his documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn? at the Sundance Film Festival.

“Roy Cohn personified the dark arts of American politics,” according to a film summary, “turning empty vessels into dangerous demagogues — from Joseph McCarthy to his final project, Donald J. Trump. This thriller-like exposé connects the dots, revealing how a deeply troubled master manipulator shaped our current American nightmare.”

Mob assistance to the CIA for repeated assassination attempts against Cuba’s leader Fidel Castro would inevitably require the assistance of fixers both in the private sector and in government. The late Air Force Col. Fletcher Prouty, the top Defense Department liaison to the CIA for covert operations, entitled his breakthrough 1973 memoir The Secret Team to show how what he called “The High Cabal” of U.S. and U.K. oligarchs deploy operatives widely and covertly to manage events and information flow. 

Roy Cohn and Bill Barr are part of this tradition. A distress signal is surely warranted at this point.  

One lesson from this overview is that readers here, like citizens everywhere, must assemble and digest information from varied credible sources even when we are continually bombarded by propaganda from ostensibly prestigious sources whose track record can be mixed, depending on the situation.

Read more and trust your own judgment.

Attorney General William Barr, center, flanked by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, right, and Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Edward O’Callaghan of the National Security Division are all Republicans and stand united for their version of justice. (Justice Department news conference on April 18, 2019 on release of the Mueller Report.)

Contact the author Andrew Kreig

Selected Additional Reading

LewRockwell.com, Opinion: George Herbert Walker Bush, Charles Burris, Dec. 1, 2018. George H. W. Bush is dead. Regime journalists across the nation are scrambling to compose obituary prose concerning the late president. Here are hard cold facts which will not be included in such puerile accounts.

“Former reporter for the Houston Post, Pete Brewton [right, now a professor of journalism and law at Texas Tech University], tells of one of the most momentous stories of the past 50 years and how it has been suppressed by the establishment media and the Congress. Pete’s book The Mafia, CIA and George Bush, shows the incredible complexity of the relationships in the operation of the destruction of hundreds of Savings and Loans at the hands of the CIA and the Mafia, stealing many billions of dollars in the process, and leaving the taxpayers to bailout the banks.

Big names at the state and national levels of power are involved, including Lloyd Bentsen, the Bush family, and power brokers in Houston. People such as Charles Keating and Don Dixon, who are mentioned prominently in the press in connection with the S & L debacle, were merely front men or “cutouts” for the main movers. Keating and his ilk only took millions; the CIA and the Mafia looted billions.”

In his classic book on power elite analysis, The Yankee and Cowboy War, researcher Carl Oglesby divided up the Post-WWII American ruling class into two internecine factions: the northeastern seaboard Yankees versus the Sunbelt nouveau riche Cowboys. The amazing political success of George Herbert Walker Bush was his uncanny ability to stand astride and have one foot firmly planted in each of these competing factions.

Essential to understanding the Bush legacy is the historical background of the 1980 October Surprise when key individuals of the Reagan/Bush campaign covertly met with top members of the Iranian government to prevent the release of the 55 Americans held hostage in Tehran before the November election, ensuring the defeat of Democrat incumbent Jimmy Carter. The hostages were released on the day Ronald Reagan took office. Critical arm shipments, materiel and military supplies soon began flowing to the Khomeini regime, years before the more widely known Iran-Contra Scandal, which almost brought down the Reagan administration.

Barbara Honegger worked as a researcher at the Hoover Institution before joining the Ronald Reagan administration as a researcher and policy analyst in 1980. She was the Director of the Attorney General’s Anti-Discrimination Law Review at the Department of Justice. After leaving Washington, she became the Senior Military Affairs Journalist for the Naval Postgraduate School.

While working for Reagan, she discovered information that convinced her that George H. W. Bush and William Casey had conspired to make sure that Iran did not release the U.S. hostages until Jimmy Carter had been defeated in the 1980 presidential election.

In 1987, Honegger began leaking information to journalists about the Reagan administration.

However, it was not until Reagan left office that Honegger published October Surprise (1989). In her book, Honegger claimed that in 1980 William Casey and other representatives of the Reagan presidential campaign made a deal at two sets of meetings in July and August at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid with Iranians to delay the release of Americans held hostage in Iran until after the November 1980 presidential elections. Reagan’s aides promised that they would get a better deal if they waited until Carter was defeated.

For more on the sordid backstory of epic criminality of Bush see the following volumes:

The Mafia, CIA & George Bush, by Pete Brewton; Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put It In The White House, And What Their Influence Means For America, by Russ Baker; American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, by Kevin Phillips; Secrecy And Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, by Robert Parry; American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan, by Peter Dale Scott (shown at right); Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA, by Terry Reed and John Cummings; and The Iran Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era, by Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter.

See also: George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin. Historian and investigative journalist Anton Chaitkin has worked in politics with Lyndon LaRouche since 1966. Author of hundreds of “scoops” on economic and political history, Chaitkin is History Editor for Executive Intelligence Review. He co-authored with Webster Tarpley George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, which helped defeat Bush’s 1992 re-election attempt.

Chaitkin’s 1985 book on American political history — Treason in America: from Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman — documented from “blue-blood” family archives the takeover of U.S. policymaking by agents and allies of the British empire. Chaitkin’s father, a New York attorney, fought in the courts to break up the Wall Street and London sponsorship of Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship in Germany. Many of the lawsuits were against international Nazi interests managed by Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of the two Bush Presidents.

Justice Integrity Project, Poppy’s Seed and Bitter Harvest: Half Truths / History (Part 3), Andrew Kreig, Dec. 13, 2018. This continues a Justice Integrity Project series on life and legacy of the President George H.W. Bush, who died on Nov. 30. He is shown below right in an official photo from his term as president from 1989 to 1993.

The material in this Part 3 covers his family life and career as he advanced from Texas politics to the national stage in Washington as a congressman, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, director of the Republican National Committee, U.S. envoy to China, CIA director and vice president to Ronald Reagan. The material is excerpted from this editor’s book Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters (2015 updated edition).

Justice Integrity Project, Poppy’s Seed and Bitter Harvest: Half Truths / History (Part 2), Andrew Kreig, Dec. 11, 2018. Because the corporate-owned media have published only partial truths regarding life of the late President George H.W. Bush the Justice Integrity Project is providing what’s most important about the rest of the story. The late, president, who died on Nov. 30, is shown below left in an official photo used during his term from 1989 to 1993.

The material in this series is excerpted from this reporter’s book Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters (2015 updated edition).
Presidential Puppetry charted the secret ties of recent presidents to the nation’s elite private sector power structure (including major media organizations), which sometimes work collaboratively with the CIA and FBI operational arms.

One of the book’s central findings was to document via more than 1,100 endnotes that all recent presidents between President Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump established covert ties to the CIA or FBI before they entered politics.

Justice Integrity Project, Poppy Bush’s Seed and Bitter Harvest: Half Truths / History (Part 1 of 4), Andrew Kreig, Dec. 9, 2018. The corporate-owned mainstream media have provided only partial truths regarding life of President George H.W. Bush, below left, whose death on Nov. 30 led to days of prominent coverage of his career and positive aspects of its lasting impact.

Our Justice Integrity Project excerpted prominently on these pages such accolades over the past week. Now it’s time for the rest of the story, which draws heavily from the three chapters about the Bush family in our 2013 book Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters, which documented the secret ties of America’s recent presidents with the power structure.

Presidential Puppetry by Andrew KreigExcerpted below is the introduction to our chapter “George H.W. Bush: Poppy’s Seed and Bitter Harvest,” which draws on the late president’s nickname “Poppy.” Immediately before that in the book is a chapter about his father, “Prescott Bush: Roots of the Bushes,” and his son, “George W. Bush: Shameless, Heartless and Selected — Not Elected.”

Source: https://www.justice-integrity.org/1659-trump-found-his-roy-cohn-in-deep-state-fixer-bill-barr