Long before Barr did that the whole of the RW got on board with 2 different misinformation campaigns that would prepare the ground for such a brazen misdirection.
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They put a ton of effort into making people think the Russia investigations and the Steele dossier were the same thing. They knew they dossier could be discredited as not being rigorous enough to hang those sorts of allegations on and knew if they did that they would be able to discredit the entire investigation in the eyes of people who bought the conflation of the two things. But the investigation was never about the Steele Dossier. The FBI already had several lines of inquiry open before the dossier came to them and it played only a trivial role in directing or justifying any course they took. There are suggestions even that Russians gave this tactic to people in Trump world (Manafort) and the same people might even have made sure the most discreditable bits of the dossier got to Steele.
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A focus on collusion, despite Comey being very clear from as soon as the investigations became public that collusion was not a concern of the FBI and so was not the focus of the investigations. They knew that if they made everyone focus on collusion then no matter what the resulting investigations could demonstrate they would be seen to fail on its core intent and make it easier to wave away the actual findings. That is essentially how Barr, who knew collusion was not an FBI focus, approached his part in brushing the findings under the rug.
The latter of these is a fascinating case study because it only works if the media pick up on their collusion framing. But not only did they do it, it’s also how most democrats and even outlets like MSNBC spoke about the investigations. It is a fantastic example of how the RW is somehow able to set the framing of most political conversations.
