Shall we talk further about Barr? His father was OSS, and thereby was plausibly the man who ushered Epstein into the covert world. Barr’s own first job was for seven years at the CIA, it’s where he first got into law and politics. As Attorney-General for Bush 41, he’s said to have impeded investigation of BCCI, and he definitely made the case for pardoning several Iran-Contra figures. After the cold war, he settled into civilian life in the telecom and media sectors for several decades, until Trump brought him back.
The whole first stage of Barr’s career coincided with the establishment of a new system of political oversight of CIA activities, and then the growth of an alternative, informal, unsupervised network whose epitome was Iran-Contra. (Today’s generation might think of it all as similar to the post-Snowden turmoil surrounding NSA, though many details are very different.)
My point is that Barr has inside experience, managing the legal fallout of extralegal covert activities with discretion. Of course, it’s a long way from getting rogue operators a presidential pardon, to having the ultimate rogue operator die in jail before he can make it to court, but those long years were precisely the period of time during which Epstein’s operation ballooned out of control. Perhaps it required the chaos of the Trump years, and the work of old hands like Barr, to finally bring him down.
Shall we talk further about Barr? His father was OSS, and thereby was plausibly the man who ushered Epstein into the covert world. Barr’s own first job was for seven years at the CIA, it’s where he first got into law and politics. As Attorney-General for Bush 41, he’s said to have impeded investigation of BCCI, and he definitely made the case for pardoning several Iran-Contra figures. After the cold war, he settled into civilian life in the telecom and media sectors for several decades, until Trump brought him back.
The whole first stage of Barr’s career coincided with the establishment of a new system of political oversight of CIA activities, and then the growth of an alternative, informal, unsupervised network whose epitome was Iran-Contra. (Today’s generation might think of it all as similar to the post-Snowden turmoil surrounding NSA, though many details are very different.)
My point is that Barr has inside experience, managing the legal fallout of extralegal covert activities with discretion. Of course, it’s a long way from getting rogue operators a presidential pardon, to having the ultimate rogue operator die in jail before he can make it to court, but those long years were precisely the period of time during which Epstein’s operation ballooned out of control. Perhaps it required the chaos of the Trump years, and the work of old hands like Barr, to finally bring him down.