Ex-Bush official shreds Barr for serving Trump’s ‘authoritarian’ ambitions

MSNBC's Elise Jordan busted Attorney General William Barr's hypocrisy on surveillance.

The "Morning Joe" contributor and former White House official in the George W. Bush administration, where Barr also served -- and helped build the surveillance state before going on to work for telecommunications companies that turned over customer data to the government.

"There's so much hypocrisy in abundance, heaps of it, that's it hard to know where to start," Jordan said. "When you have Bill Barr lecturing about warrantless surveillance, that I believe as general counsel to Verizon, he worked hand-in-hand with the government to implement, yet now he's up on his pedestal, suddenly a libertarian crusader."

Jordan exposed the essential lie at the heart of Barr's complaints about supposed civil rights violations against Trump and his associates.

"You look at all the through lines of what's happening right now, and what connects is authoritarianism," she said, "the desire for authoritarian continuity among Donald Trump and all of his enablers. That's the through line. It's not a fight for liberty, it's not a fight for the rule of law."

"You see Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and what he's done at the State Department," Jordan added. "You see how State Department officials who are career servants speaking out, what happens when they speak out. You look at the Department of Defense and the war criminals that have been pardoned by this president, upending military discipline and the values that so many of our servicemen and women hold dear just because 'dear leader' says this is our value system now."