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Rep. Adam Schiff is calling for an investigation into Attorney General Barr’s role in shutting down the SDNY investigation into Trump campaign finance felonies.

Adam Schiff Suggests Barr Covered Up Trump Felonies

Rep. Schiff said in a statement provided to PoliticusUSA:



The documents unsealed in the SDNY case against Michael Cohen demonstrate that Donald Trump was intimately involved in devising and executing a corrupt scheme to prevent his affair with Stormy Daniels from being revealed in the final weeks of the 2016 election. They show that contrary to his public statements for months afterwards seeking to distance himself from the payments that were made to Daniels, and another woman, Karen McDougal, he authorized the illegal payment of hush money, and coordinated doing so with his attorney, Cohen, and his Press Secretary, Hope Hicks.

The inescapable conclusion from all of the public materials available now is that there was ample evidence to charge Donald Trump with the same criminal election law violations for which Michael Cohen pled guilty and is now serving time in prison. Were Individual-1 not protected by the DOJ opinion prohibiting the indictment of a sitting president, he would be criminally charged as Cohen’s co-conspirator.

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Though Trump and those around him have sought to diminish the significance of the laws that were broken, the record demonstrates that Trump and his inner circle viewed the possibility of these stories coming out in the final days of a presidential campaign to be an existential threat to his candidacy, and their successful scheme to break the law to buy silence may have had a determinative impact on the outcome of the election. The available evidence therefore strongly supports the conclusion that Trump committed an election law crime in order to influence the election.

There are still a great many questions unanswered by the documents made public today, including Trump’s legal exposure when he leaves office, but the one of most immediate concern to me is the involvement, if any, of Attorney General Barr. Barr testified that he believes it was within the President’s power to stop any investigation into his own potential criminality if he felt an investigation was unfair. Barr has demonstrated there are no lengths to which he will not go to protect the President, and I believe it is of paramount importance to determine if he had any involvement in the SDNY’s investigation or sought to bring it to a close.

Criminal Charges Against Trump Will Come From The States

William Barr’s job as attorney general is not to be the people’s prosecutor, but to serve as Donald Trump’s clean up man. Any federal investigation involving Trump that Barr can get his hands on is in jeopardy of being silenced and shutdown. If Trump is to face criminal charges, which the odds are good that he will after he leaves office, those charges will come from a state attorney general. There are multiple state-level investigations into Trump’s operation in New York alone.

Rep. Schiff was correct. This president broke laws, and the attorney general’s role in the Trump cover-up operation needs to be investigated.

For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.

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