Bill Barr Texted Trump Lawyer Pat Cipollone ‘You Are a STAR’

• Bill Barr texted Trump’s impeachment lawyer saying, “You are a STAR.”
• He sent the text while Trump’s defense team was wrapping up arguments in his first impeachment.
• Barr repeatedly went to bat for Trump throughout his presidency before being forced to resign.

As President Donald Trump’s first Senate impeachment trial was close to wrapping up, then Attorney General William Barr texted Trump’s lawyer congratulating him on his performance.

“You are a STAR,” Barr texted Pat Cipollone, who was also Trump’s White House counsel at the time. That’s according to a trove of text messages the Justice Department released this week.

Barr sent the text to Cipollone on January 30, 2020, as Trump’s defense team reached the end of its argument against convicting and removing Trump from office.

At the time, the House of Representatives had impeached Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The charges related to his months-long effort to strongarm the Ukrainian government into launching politically motivated investigations targeting Joe and Hunter Biden in an attempt to damage Biden’s viability as a Democratic presidential candidate.

While demanding the investigations, Trump also ordered a hold on nearly $400 million in vital military aid to Ukraine and dangled a White House meeting that Volodymyr Zelensky, the newly inaugurated Ukrainian president, desperately sought.

At Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, the president’s defense team argued that the charges against him were unconstitutional and should be tossed out. Though Barr congratulated Cipollone on his performance, most observers pointed out that the defense team’s arguments were light on facts and heavy on hyperbole and misinformation.

Cipollone, for his part, claimed Trump’s impeachment was an “effort to overturn” the results of the 2016 impeachment and to “interfere” in the 2020 election. And Ken Starr, the former Whitewater special prosecutor who also served on Trump’s impeachment defense team, said impeachment should not take the place of the ballot box.

Throughout the trial, Cipollone and Trump’s other defense attorneys repeatedly equated impeachment with an attempt to overthrow a legitimately elected president. But the Constitution confers upon the House of Representatives the…