Now we know what Bill Barr has been doing in Italy this week – and it’ll send him to prison

Last week Attorney General Bill Barr made a point of telling the AP that he was “surprised and angry” that Donald Trump released the Ukraine whistleblower complaint, which implicated Barr in the criminal conspiracy to alter the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Now we’re getting a sense of why Barr was so disturbed by this: it was just the beginning.

This afternoon the New York Times reported that according to two U.S. officials with knowledge of the phone call, Donald Trump recently called the Prime Minister of Australia and urged him to work with Bill Barr to dig up dirt on the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. This was a bizarre and pointless effort on Trump’s part at rehashing a past scandal, and it helps further establish a pattern in which Trump illegally tried to use the weight of the presidency to push foreign leaders into doing his personal bidding. But this may actually be a bigger story for Bill Barr – and this is only the half of it.

This Australia bombshell means that when Donald Trump asked the president of Ukraine to conspire with Bill Barr to alter the outcome of the 2020 election, it wasn’t just a one-off or impulsive thing. Instead, this establishes a pattern in which Trump repeatedly asked foreign leaders to conspire with Barr. This means that Barr really must have been in on it.

Also, just now, the Washington Post reported the real reason Bill Barr is in Italy right now: he’s meeting with foreign nations in an attempt at drumming up phony scandals about Donald Trump’s political adversaries. It’s also not the first time he’s traveled to Italy in the name of such criminal conspiracies with foreign nations.

With Donald Trump’s downfall and ouster now potentially coming at any time, and no one in his orbit being able to count on the increasingly erratic Trump handing them a pardon on his way out the door, everyone involved in this scandal is looking at being criminally indicted and being sent to prison after Trump is gone. Bill Barr now looks like he’s front and center in that regard. Unless he cuts some kind of recusal or resignation deal with the House impeachment inquiry, Barr is going to prison.