Particularly where Barr signs on to the absurd notion that the Steele Dossier could be a Russian disinformation effort meant to hurt Trump. The Mueller Report was 100% clear on who the Russians wanted to win the election. It wasn’t Hillary Clinton.
Let’s talk for a minute how batshit this is, given that this apparently will become the basis of the GOP counter-investigation effort which Barr has now signed off on:
Mueller was clear (and didn’t need to explain it to anyone that had a brain) that the wide-ranging effort perpetrated by Russia in 2016 which included stolen emails, disseminating the stolen emails, spread of disinformation via social networks, and the hacking of election systems, was enacted in order to elect Donald Trump President. And his campaign knew it.
Now we are to believe that despite all that, the Russians actually wanted Clinton to win, and to counteract the above effort they fed disinformation into a dossier that didn’t even come to light until after the election. Huh. I guess you could make an argument that Russia was attempting to discredit both candidates, you know, playing both sides, but that sure is an awfully uneven effort. How is this argument even remotely justifiable to anyone who isn’t a completely partisan Trumpist (ie Barr?)
And it gets dumber when you realize how much
real damage Russia could have done to Trump if they wanted to. They knew Trump was trying to put together a Moscow Tower deal when Trump was on TV nightly denying any Russian business. Why didn’t they say anything? And Moscow has denied every instance of collusion with Trump when it has come up, when they knew Trump's campaign manager was passing on polling info to them. Putin even snidely celebrated the Mueller findings (as reported by Barr.) If Russia wanted to hurt Trump with (dis)information, wouldn’t they be saying “Yeah, we colluded with Trump. Lots. Here. We have the signed contracts…” Heck, how hard would it be for them to produce audio of a pee tape?
Maybe much of the Steele Dossier turns out to be untrue (though some of it has been proven) but it was never meant to be the result of an in-depth investigation, and was not the basis of either the FBI investigation or the FISA warrants. It’s totally absurd, given what we know happened before the election and how Trump has treated Putin afterwards, to contend that Russia’s intention was to use the Dossier to hurt Trump.
Barr discredited himself in many ways today. Giving credence to a nutball conspiracy theory obviously cooked up to distract from Trump’s real wrongdoing was the worst of it.