Poor Stallman

7. Stallman haven't wrote any code himself.

Frustrated, Steele took it upon himself to the solve the problem. He gathered together the four different macro packages and began assembling a chart documenting the most useful macro commands. In the course of implementing the design specified by the chart, Steele says he attracted Stallman's attention. "He started looking over my shoulder, asking me what I was doing," recalls Steele. For Steele, a soft-spoken hacker who interacted with Stallman infrequently, the memory still sticks out. Looking over another hacker's shoulder while he worked was a common activity at the AI Lab. Stallman, the TECO maintainer at the lab, deemed Steele's work "interesting" and quickly set off to complete it. "As I like to say, I did the first 0.001 percent of the implementation, and Stallman did the rest," says Steele with a laugh.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#6_September_2020_(Republican_congresscritter_who_fanatically_defends_the_right_to_carry_guns) -- A Republican congresscritter who fanatically defends the right to carry guns says he would shoot any blacks that carry guns at a protest. Does this mean he advocates the right to carry guns only for whites? Does he now believe that guns should be prohibited at demonstrations? I'm in favor of that, as long as it applies to everyone. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/03/id-drop-any-10-you-gop-rep-clay-higgins-threatens-shoot-armed-black-protesters -- 'I'd Drop Any 10 of You': GOP Rep. Clay Higgins Threatens to Shoot Armed Black Protesters -- Thursday, September 03, 2020 -- The Louisiana lawmaker is a staunch gun rights advocate in an open carry state. >>236

8. Stallman is a big friend with Russia

*Navalny poisoning forces Merkel's party to ask: how do we hit back at Putin?* Here's a suggestion: switch to renewable energy as fast as possible. It's vitally necessary anyway, and it will eliminate demand for Russia's key exports (fossil fuels).

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#10_September_2020_(Justice_Department_taking_up_liability_for_damages) -- The wrecker has told the "Justice Department" to make the US take up the liability for damages, as well as defense costs in E Jean Carroll's lawsuit accusing him of raping her. -- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/08/trump-defamation-justice-department-e-jean-carroll-rape-accusation -- US justice department seeks to defend Trump in lawsuit tied to rape allegation -- Wed 9 Sep 2020 -- Attorneys seek to substitute US for Trump as defendant in E Jean Carroll case, meaning tax dollars could cover any payout -- Carroll is trying to get a DNA sample from Trump to see whether it matches as-yet-unidentified male genetic material found on a dress that she says she was wearing during the alleged attack

The US justice department is seeking to take over Donald Trump’s defense in a defamation lawsuit from a writer who accused him of rape, and federal lawyers asked a court on Tuesday to allow a move that could put the American people on the hook for any money she might be awarded. After New York state courts turned down Trump’s request to delay E Jean Carroll’s suit, justice department lawyers filed court papers on Tuesday aiming to shift the case into federal court and to substitute the US for Trump as the defendant. That means the federal government, rather than Trump himself, might have to pay damages if any are awarded. The filing complicates, at least for the moment, Carroll’s efforts to get a DNA sample from the president as potential evidence and to have him answer questions under oath.

Justice department lawyers argue that Trump was “acting within the scope of his office” when he denied Carroll’s allegations, made last year, that he raped her in a New York luxury department store in the mid-1990s. She says his comments – including that she was “totally lying” to sell a memoir – besmirched her character and harmed her career. “Numerous courts have recognized that elected officials act within the scope of their office or employment when speaking with the press, including with respect to personal matters,” the DoJ attorneys wrote. The White House echoed the argument. “Last year, the president vehemently denied allegations made by Jean Carroll about a supposed incident from some 25 years ago,” a senior White House official told the Guardian in a statement. “The president was acting within the scope of his office when he publicly responded to these false allegations.”

Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, called their argument “shocking”. “Trump’s effort to wield the power of the US government to evade responsibility for his private misconduct is without precedent,” she said in an email to the Guardian. Carroll told the Guardian by email: “Today’s actions demonstrate that Trump will do everything possible, including using the full powers of the federal government, to block discovery from going forward in my case before the upcoming election to try to prevent a jury from ever deciding which one of us is lying.”

It will be up to a federal judge to decide whether to keep the case in federal court and to allow the US to become the defendant. Carroll is trying to get a DNA sample from Trump to see whether it matches as-yet-unidentified male genetic material found on a dress that she says she was wearing during the alleged attack and didn’t wear again until a photo shoot last year. Her suit seeks damages and a retraction of Trump’s statements.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#7_September_2020_(Bully_wants_to_punish_journalist_who_reported_his_contempt_for_US_soldiers_that_died_in_wars.) -- The bully has repeatedly expressed his contempt for US soldiers that died in wars. Now he wants to punish a journalist who reported this. About the US soldiers that died or were injured in Iraq, the bully is half right. They were duped — by Dubya. He started the war >based on lies. All the US military personnel that Dubya hijacked to make the Bush forces were duped, and Dubya is guilty of an enormous crime, against them and against Iraqis. They deserve condolences for that, not contempt. They wanted to serve their country — it is not their fault that Dubya lied to them about what they would be doing. The bully has contempt for them because he is heartless. He lives by duping people; to excuse this, he believes that anyone who is duped deserves to be duped. Now he has mad veterans, many of who supported him, very angry. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/04/veterans-groups-condemn-trump-national-disgrace-over-reports-he-called-fallen -- Veterans Groups Condemn Trump as 'A National Disgrace' Over Reports He Called Fallen Soldiers 'Losers' and 'Suckers' -- Friday, September 04, 2020 -- "Donald Trump does not respect our men and women in uniform. He does not respect their families. He does not respect veterans."

Advocacy organizations representing millions of veterans across the United States voiced disgust and outrage late Thursday in response to reports from multiple news outlets detailing how President Donald Trump has repeatedly disparaged American soldiers killed or wounded in war as "suckers" and "losers" in private while publicly presenting himself as the unrivaled champion of the nation's service members.

The Atlantic, citing anonymous sources with direct knowledge of the president's comments, reported that Trump in 2018 canceled a scheduled visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris "because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead."

"This is not surprising, nor is it the first time President Trump has attacked veterans, but it is a new low, even for Trump." —Will Goodwin, VoteVets

"In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, 'Why should I go to that cemetery? It's filled with losers," according to The Atlantic. "In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as 'suckers' for getting killed."

The Atlantic additionally reported that during a 2017 visit to Arlington National Cemetery with then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, whose son Robert is buried there, Trump turned to Kelly and said, "I don't get it. What was in it for them?"

"Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America's all-volunteer force," the magazine reported. "But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices."

The president's reported comments, confirmed by the Associated Press and the Washington Post, were immediately condemned by advocacy groups, lawmakers, and individual veterans as further confirmation that Trump has nothing but contempt for former service members whose lives were taken or severely impacted by overseas wars.

Just so I’m clear: Nazis = very fine people Soldiers who died fighting Nazis = losers — Perry O'Brien (@Perry_OB) September 4, 2020

"This is not surprising, nor is it the first time President Trump has attacked veterans, but it is a new low, even for Trump," Will Goodwin, an Army veteran and director of government relations for advocacy group VoteVets, said in a statement. "There is no rhyme or reason for Trump to cruelly attack our nation's fallen heroes. And it is especially egregious given that he's the commander in chief of our Armed Forces."

"Donald Trump does not respect our men and women in uniform," Goodwin continued. "He does not respect their families. He does not respect veterans. And worse, he has matched his vile language with action. He has abused our military, has made our country less safe, and has put our men and women in uniform in harm's way for his own political gain."

The Union Veterans Council, a national labor organization, called Trump "a national disgrace" in the wake of The Atlantic's reporting. Alexander McCoy, political director of Common Defense, which represents millions of veterans across the U.S., also weighed in on Twitter:

Attn: my fellow @USMC vets. The President thinks the 1,800 fallen of the battle of Belleau Wood were “suckers.” Belleau-fucking-Wood. Vote accordingly.#MarinesAgainstTrump#VetsAgainstTrump — Alexander McCoy (@AlexanderMcCoy4) September 3, 2020

In a series of tweets late Thursday, Trump denied the comments attributed to him in The Atlantic, writing—falsely—that he never called late Republican Sen. John McCain a "loser."

Trump went on to write that he swears "on whatever, or whoever, I was asked to swear on, that I never called our great fallen soldiers anything other than HEROES," a denial that critics found thoroughly unconvincing.

"This is more made up Fake News given by disgusting and jealous failures in a disgraceful attempt to influence the 2020 Election!" the president added.

This is the person that thinks kneeling is 'disrespectful to our troops' right?https://t.co/8Ye6wIFP94 — Rep. Mark Pocan (@repmarkpocan) September 4, 2020

In a statement, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, whose late son Beau was an Iraq War veteran, said that "if the revelations in today's Atlantic article are true, then they are yet another marker of how deeply President Trump and I disagree about the role of the president of the United States."

"I have long said that, as a nation, we have many obligations, but we only have one truly sacred obligation—to prepare and equip those we send into harm's way, and to care for them and their families, both while they are deployed and after they return home," Biden added.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#6_September_2020_(Republicans_suing_to_stop_large_numbers_of_postal_ballots) -- Republicans are suing many states to try to stop them from sending out large numbers of postal ballots. Even if they lose the lawsuits, they will delay sending out the ballots. With that on one side and post office sabotage on the other, they can cause ballots not to be counted. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/03/fighting-against-voting-rights-everywhere-trump-rnc-sue-democratic-montana-governor -- 'Fighting Against Voting Rights Everywhere': Trump, RNC Sue Democratic Montana Governor to Restrict Mail-In Election -- Thursday, September 03, 2020 -- "This template lawsuit appears to be part of a pattern of lawsuits across the country by Republican Party operatives to limit access to voting during the pandemic," said Gov. Steve Bullock.

President Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee on Wednesday sued Montana's Secretary of State and Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock for giving counties the choice to hold the November election by mail, an expansion of a safe voting option during the Covid-19 pandemic that the lawsuit alleges—without evidence—would "invite fraud and undermine the public's confidence in the integrity of elections."

"I don't think it can be emphasized enough that Trump has been emboldened to the point that he sees democracy as his primary rival. He is asking Americans to reject it, and he's not waiting for an election to validate his thinking." Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics

In a statement announcing the lawsuit (pdf), the RNC called Bullock's initiative to improve voter access and safety during the ongoing deadly outbreak of coronavirus an "unconstitutional vote-by-mail power grab."

But many Republicans in Montana would likely object to that description of Bullock's directive, which "he issued after a request from county clerks statewide," NBC News reported.

According to the secretary of state's elections office, 42 out of 56 counties have already confirmed plans to conduct the November election completely by mail, and voting rights expert Stephen Wolf pointed out that "even many GOP counties" in the state "have opted" to mail ballots to voters ahead of the election.

In a statement, Bullock said:

This template lawsuit appears to be part of a pattern of lawsuits across the country by Republican Party operatives to limit access to voting during the pandemic. Voting by mail in Montana is safe, secure, and was requested by a bipartisan coalition of Montana election officials seeking to reduce the risk of Covid-19 and keep Montanans safe and healthy.

Marc Elias, a lawyer and founder of Democracy Docket, an organization advocating for fair elections, argued that the "GOP is fighting against voting rights everywhere."

BREAKING: Trump, RNC and NRSC sue to block Montana's vote by mail plan. The @GOP is fighting against voting rights everywhere. We @DemocracyDocket are fighting back. pic.twitter.com/xPipMyqS6Z — Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) September 2, 2020

For Wolf, Wednesday's lawsuit filed by the President's re-election campaign and the RNC cannot be understood outside of the context of Montana's "hotly contested Senate race" between current Gov. Bullock and Sen. Steve Daines, the Republican incumbent.

Montana has voted mostly by mail for years. In the primary, even *state Republicans* supported mailing every voter a ballot, & even many GOP counties have opted to do so for November. Trump & the RNC are freaking out here because Montana has a hotly contested Senate race https://t.co/VjCMLdy6A6 — Stephen Wolf (@PoliticsWolf) September 2, 2020

Given the large number of "split ticket voters" in Montana who might support Bullock over Daines regardless of which presidential candidate they prefer and because the outcome of this contest could determine the balance of power in the Senate, some think that the state's voters are key to a potential victory for the Democratic Party.

Trump and the RNC's attempt to limit Montana's recently expanded vote-by-mail option came within hours of Trump's felonious encouragement of voter fraud in North Carolina—where he told residents to vote twice—and Attorney General Barr's failure to acknowledge whether doing so is illegal, as Common Dreams reported earlier on Thursday.

"I don't think it can be emphasized enough that Trump has been emboldened to the point that he sees democracy as his primary rival," said Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, earlier this week.

"He is asking Americans to reject it, and he's not waiting for an election to validate his thinking."

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#7_September_2020_(Felony_of_incitement) -- When the wrecker called on his supporters to try to vote twice, which is a felony, he committed the felony of incitement. -- https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2020/09/03/trump-call-supporters-vote-twice-felony-inciting-felony -- Trump Call to Supporters to Vote Twice is a Felony for Inciting a Felony -- Thursday, September 3, 2020

Americans expect and deserve more from their President than statements urging his supporters to commit a felony by voting for him twice in the coming election. President Trump’s repeated requests to his followers to commit felonies are felony crimes themselves because he is inciting the commission of those crimes. And if the last several years have taught us anything, it is that some Trump followers will do virtually anything Trump recommends including taking unproven, unapproved, and potentially dangerous medications he has recommended for COVID-19.

The Department of Justice needs to make absolutely clear to the public that what the President is encouraging his supporters to do is to commit a felony punishable by jail time. This cannot be the cable news fumbling of Attorney General William Barr trying to not to offend the President by excusing his urging of Americans to commit crimes. States have laws and processes in place to ensure every eligible voter can cast only one ballot. The laws are strict though in places they are selectively enforced. Crystal Mason, a black woman in Texas, is still in jail serving a five-year sentence for voting in 2016 when she did not know she was ineligible in the state because of a prior felony conviction. By contrast, Terri Lynn Rote, a white woman from Iowa, received two-years probation and a $750 fine for a felony conviction for attempting to vote twice for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

What President Trump is suggesting his supporters do is not only nonsense, but it is also a felony meant to undermine the integrity of our elections. You cannot test election integrity rules by breaking them any more than you can rob a bank to make sure your money is safe.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#6_September_2020_(Police_officer_tried_to_stop_a_thug_from_choking_someone_and_was_fired) -- In 2009, a Buffalo police officer jumped on a thug's back to stop him from choking someone. She was fired, and lost her pension while one year from retirement. Now she is suing to demand her pension. -- https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/policy/criminal-justice/black-buffalo-cop-stopped-another-officers-chokehold-she-was-fired -- A black Buffalo cop stopped another officer’s chokehold. She was fired. -- June 10, 2020 -- Will Cariol Horne finally see justice 12 years after losing her job?

In 2006, Cariol Horne, a black Buffalo police officer, intervened when a white officer, Gregory Kwiatkowski, had a black suspect, David Mack, in a chokehold. Horne jumped on Kwiatkowski’s back to prevent him from harming Mack. In 2008, she was fired from the Buffalo Police Department for her intervention in that case and lost her pension.

Horne, who had been on the force for 19 years, was just one year away from earning her pension. The Buffalo Police Department investigated the incident and its final report said Horne’s actions put her fellow officers in danger.

“The police department didn’t believe her story, and they punished her severely,” Brenda McDuffie, president and CEO of the Buffalo Urban League, told City & State. “She lost her livelihood. I mean, which one of us who has any humanity, seeing someone choked to death, just like those officers (in Minneapolis) who should have said, ‘Get off his neck.’ ... Excessive force is something that we’re finally dealing with as a nation. But we had a woman in our community who stood up and she has suffered greatly.”

After she was fired, Horne worked several jobs to make ends meet. “It didn’t just affect me,” Horne told Spectrum News in 2016. “I have three sons that I have to worry about now. The message that they sent was clear: Even as a police officer, you don’t stand up against police brutality.”

On Tuesday, the Buffalo Common Council approved three resolutions in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the recent protests against police brutality. One of the resolutions will enforce the city’s “duty to intervene” policy, which mandates that officers intervene if they see another officer using excessive force. The council will also create a task force to review police policies, and the third resolution will ask the state attorney general’s office to determine how many days Horne would need to work to regain her pension.

Since her firing in 2008, Horne has become outspoken against police brutality and hopes to have legislation passed in her name that would protect officers who intervene when another officer uses excessive force and when reporting misconduct by fellow officers. According to McDuffie, a petition campaign is expected to unfold within the next few days to draw attention to the need for such legislation.

The Buffalo Police Department has been widely criticized since June 4, when 75-year-old protestor Martin Gugino was pushed to the ground by Buffalo police officers. In the video, Gugino walks over to a large group of officers, appears to say something and then is shoved and falls on the concrete sidewalk. As he lays motionless, he begins bleeding from his ear. One officer attempts to tend to him, but a fellow officer motions for him to keep moving. On Saturday, the officers who shoved Gugino, Robert McCabe and Aaron Torgalski, were charged with second-degree assault. They had previously been suspended without pay on June 4.

In response to the suspensions, 57 Buffalo police officers resigned from the department’s Emergency Response Team in protest, but they are still on the force. It is not uncommon for police officers in any city to stand in solidarity with their fellow officers, even if the offending officers are found to be in the wrong. “In case after case, police unions have defended deadly misdeeds committed by law enforcement,” Peter Suderman writes for Reason.

It’s this culture that McDuffie cites as one of the major reasons why Horne was fired in 2008. “She’s a woman, and a black woman, and she broke the wall of silence,” she said. “So basically (the department said) let’s get rid of her because she’s somebody that we can’t depend on to be silent in matters like this.”

The Buffalo Police Department has a history of police brutality and racial profiling, and lacks de-escalation training and transparency. The Buffalo Police Department did not return a request for comment. And residents have been asking Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown to reform the police department for years.

McDuffie hopes that Horne is finally “made whole again and feels that whenever that happens that there were people who were listening and people who didn’t forget (her).”

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#10_August_2020_(US_thugs_have_their_own_secret_criminal_gangs) -- US thugs are so lawless that we should not be terribly surprised to learn that they have their own secret criminal gangs. Also their own right-wing social media hate groups. -- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/police-protests-floyd-law-enforcement-today-rant_n_5ee3ef5fc5b699cea53196b4 -- alternative access: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.huffpost.com/entry/police-protests-floyd-law-enforcement-today-rant_n_5ee3ef5fc5b699cea53196b4 -- 06/17/2020 -- part 1: Inside The Dangerous Online Fever Swamps Of American Police https://dis.tinychan.net/read/anarchy/1587122567#reply_189 -- part 2: The Extreme Views Of ‘Law Enforcement Today’ https://dis.tinychan.net/read/anarchy/1587122567#reply_197 -- part 3: Old-School Message Boards Breed Hatred And Racism https://dis.tinychan.net/read/anarchy/1587122567#reply_202

part 4: Facebook’s Cop Communities -- Social media sites are another place where law enforcement officers can find each other and talk about modern policing — and, lately, post a torrent of false and unsubstantiated antifa-related information. In many large pro-cop groups and pages on Facebook, people have been gleefully exchanging videos of “antifa” protesters getting beaten, and threatening to publish the personal information of supposed antifa activists. Many such pages and groups claim to be operated by police, although it’s unclear how many members are actually law enforcement officers. A search for the term “antifa” in Back The Blue, a Facebook group with more than 60,000 members, yields dozens of recent results, including a blog post baselessly accusing Gugino of being a “professional agitator and Antifa provocateur” — another early example of police media circulating a conspiracy theory that the president would later share on Twitter to swift condemnation.

Posters in the Facebook group Law Enforcement Family, which claims to have been “developed by law enforcement officers” and has more than 53,000 members, perpetuate racist stereotypes about Black people and call cops who kneel with protesters “pussies.” Those in Brothers Before Others have been sharing entirely unsourced data about gang violence in Black communities and spreading debunked claims about antifa. U.S. Law Enforcement, a page that claims to be run “by several current and retired US Law Enforcement Officers,” has also spread false information to its nearly 500,000 followers. It posted a screenshot of a tweet from what appeared to be an antifa account claiming that antifa would “move into the residential areas… the white hoods…. and we take what’s ours.” But as Twitter quickly noted, a white supremacist group posing as antifa activists was actually behind that account. The U.S. Law Enforcement page has since acknowledged that the tweet was debunked, and suggested this happened because the Twitter account “may not have been ‘official.’” Yet it has not removed the false post from its page.

part 5: ‘We Can’t Have That In Policing Today’ -- American police officers have already been tied to the spread of extremist content on social media. A Reveal News investigation last June found that hundreds of active-duty and retired officers, from every level of U.S. law enforcement, had quietly joined private Confederate, anti-Islam, misogynistic or anti-government militia Facebook groups full of racist memes and conspiracy theories. The investigation was a rare glimpse at the culture behind the blue wall. As Reveal News noted, disciplinary records and investigations into police misconduct “are kept secret in a majority of states, meaning most American cops enjoy a blanket of protection that can cover up biases.”

But the recent unrest has provoked some law enforcement officials to openly broadcast their tolerance for police misconduct online, outside of these closed or little-known groups. In a Facebook post earlier this month, the Brevard County, Florida, chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police offered to rehire police officers from other areas who are charged with using excessive force against protesters. “Lower taxes, no spineless leadership, or dumb mayors rambling on at press conferences,” promised the now-deleted Facebook post, for which Brevard County FOP President Bert Gamin has claimed responsibility. “Plus.... we got your back!”

Certainly not all police officers believe the wild stories pushed by Law Enforcement Today and circulated on pro-police social media groups. But right-wing media and many police labor leaders are heavily invested in the idea of presenting police as hard-right defenders of law and order. Outlets such as Fox News and OAN often provide a safe space for former officers and labor officials to defend law enforcement’s conduct without challenge. One such voice has been police union leader Ed Mullins, head of the NYPD’s Sergeants Benevolent Association, who in February announced the NYPD was “declaring war” on de Blasio and accused the mayor of fomenting anti-cop sentiment. Mullins has recently appeared on Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity’s shows, as well as far-right outlets Newsmax and OAN, where he called for military support to quell the protests.

Levin, from the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, said police and city officials nationwide need to pay attention to what some cops are reading and writing online, and get a handle on it. “We can’t have that in policing today,” he said. “We’re now in an era where police are so detached from many segments of the community that they serve that we don’t have the luxury of having this kind of garbage being tolerated within departments.”

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-mar-jun.html#11_May_2020_(Attorney_General_Barr_has_dropped_the_case_against_Michael_Flynn) -- Attorney General Barr has dropped the case against Michael Flynn even after Flynn pled guilty. Barr prosecute and releases as the corrupter-in-chief orders. -- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/08/trump-attorney-general-william-barr-flynn-case -- Welcome to William Barr's America, where the truth makes way for the president -- Fri 8 May 2020 -- The justice department has announced it will drop its case against Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI – we know why

Welcome to law and order in the age of William Barr. Against the tableau of a raging pandemic and job market in freefall, on Thursday the justice department announced that it would be dropping its case against Michael Flynn, the president’s short-tenured national security adviser. The fact that Flynn had pleaded guilty and Donald Trump had previously accused him of lying to the vice-president no longer mattered. These days, Trump was claiming that Flynn had been exonerated and, after all, Barr was the president’s obedient servant. His tweets were Barr’s commands. To be sure, Barr had already been there before with Trump and decades earlier with George HW Bush.

Little more than a year ago, after Robert Mueller had relayed his conclusions to the justice department, Barr issued a summary that distorted the special counsel’s report and turned them into a wholesale vindication of the president. When Mueller complained in writing of Barr’s deceit, Barr became “pissed”, thought Mueller’s letter “nasty” and felt personally “betrayed”. Supposedly, the two men had been friends. But that wasn’t the end of his story. This past March, Barr also earned the ire of Reggie Walton, a George W Bush appointee to the federal bench. The judge “seriously” questioned Barr’s integrity and credibility. The court’s March 2020 opinion deployed words like “distorted” and “misleading” to drive the point home, not the language generally used to describe the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. To be sure, that was just another episode of Barr’s fealty to Trump. In February, Barr put his finger on the scale when it came to the sentencing of Roger Stone and overrode the recommendations of career prosecutors. For his valor, Barr won the president’s admiration. In a pre-8am tweet, Trump congratulated his attorney general and trashed Mueller, accusing him of lying to Congress.

Like Roy Cohn, Trump’s personal lawyer of yore, Barr had attended Horace Mann and Columbia. History can repeat itself, in more ways than one. In the early 1990s, when Barr was George HW Bush’s attorney general he repeatedly ran political interference for the man who hired him. Confronted with congressional demands for copies of classified documents and that Barr appoint an independent counsel to investigate Iraqgate, the extension of government credits to Saddam Hussein’s regime before its invasion of Kuwait, Barr pushed back hard. In a rebuke to congressional oversight, Barr refused to turn over the information. In a separate letter to the House judiciary committee, Barr denied the committee’s request for an independent counsel, tossing around such phrases as “not a crime”, “simply not criminal in any way”, “nothing illegal”, and “far from being a crime”. In essence, Republican presidents were legally off-limits, ditto their appointees.

But that wasn’t the end of Barr running interference for the elder Bush. After he lost his re-election bid to Bill Clinton, Barr successfully argued for the pardon of Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary, and others in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra scandal. Then as now, Barr was attorney general: “I favored the broadest pardon authority,” said Barr. He added, “There were some people just arguing just for Weinberger. I said, ‘No – in for a penny, in for a pound.’” Not every attorney general is the president’s handmaiden. Likewise, not every president is determined to ride roughshod over DoJ.

John Ashcroft, attorney general to George W Bush, refused to be steamrolled by the White House and declined to reauthorize “Stellar Wind”, a domestic surveillance program. At the time, Ashcroft was in a hospital intensive care unit. The fact that the president’s counsel and the White House chief of staff were hovering over his bed did not alter the outcome. Indeed, unlike Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, the younger Bush recognized that presidential pardons were not baubles. Bush commuted the prison sentence meted out to Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, after a jury had convicted Libby of obstruction of justice and perjury in connection with an investigation of unauthorized leaks of the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA officer. But despite Cheney’s repeated requests for a pardon he was rebuffed. At the time, Bill Burck, the deputy White House counsel, told the president: “You have to follow the law, and the law says if you say something that is untrue, knowingly, to a federal official in the context of a grand jury investigation and it is material to their investigation, that’s a crime.”

The favoritism and unfairness of the process “frustrated” Bush. Ultimately, the relationship between Bush and his vice-president took a permanent hit. As history would have it, Libby had represented Marc Rich, whose pardon further tarnished Clinton’s legacy. There is a coda. Trump subsequently pardoned Libby just as he pardoned Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff found to be in contempt of court. For Trump, l’état, c’est moi, and for Barr it’s pretty much what a Republican president says it is.