Bye-Bye,
Bill Barr
The mostly tarnished legacy of Trump’s mostly
complicit attorney general.
by MONA CHAREN
DECEMBER 14, 2020 9:35 PM
Some heads snapped when
Attorney General William Barr told the truth on
December 1. “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have
effected a different outcome in the election.” This was not the Bill Barr we
had come to expect. We were surprised again when we learned that Hunter Biden
has been under federal investigation for some months, that this was known to
Barr, and that he didn’t disclose it to President Trump for use in the
campaign. These are damning facts—if you’re working for America’s most corrupt
president. Contradicting Trump’s wild, absurdist fantasy of a
Hugo-Chavez-orchestrated/hammer-and-scorecard/Dominion plot to steal the
election that Trump had “won by a landslide” was bound to be a poker in the eye
for the chief executive. And to think that Barr had incriminating information
about Hunter Biden—the sort of thing Trump had gotten himself impeached
attempting to extort—and kept it under wraps? Well, Barr’s days were numbered.
Never mind that there
are only (praise God) 36 days left in the administration. Trump’s petulance
must be served above all.
Barr should be grateful
that he was offered the chance to submit a letter of resignation rather than be
fired by tweet (though, of course, there was a tweet).
And frankly, it’s hard to feel sympathy for the guy. Yes, those last two
unexpected spasms of basic ethics must be weighed in the balance when
considering his tenure, but Barr has much to answer for.
Unlike Omarosa, “the
Mooch,” Cohen, Lewandowski, and the other C-listers Trump surrounded himself
with, William Pelham Barr, attorney general under George H. W. Bush, former
CIA, former Verizon attorney, was as pure an embodiment of the Republican
establishment as you could find. Most of Trump’s hangers-on were con men and
frauds like their mentor. If those had been Trump’s only enablers, he wouldn’t
have gone far.
No, in order to seize
the Republican party and the White House, he needed the assistance of a few key
figures, people with credibility, if not quite gravitas. The first to extend
this was the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie. Sen. Jeff Sessions was the
second. Others followed. They laid their reputations on the altar of Trump and
watched them burn. It was the tribute he demanded. One of the more shocking
revelations of this low, contemptible era is how much these seemingly
self-respecting figures seemed to relish their servility.
Barr immolated his
reputation first by misrepresenting the contents of the Mueller report, telling
the world that the special counsel had found no collusion and therefore did not
recommend further steps including prosecution or impeachment. Responding to a
reporter’s question, Barr explicitly denied that “but for” the Justice
Department policy against indicting a sitting president, Mueller might have
recommended action. Mueller protested that
this is not what the report said, and when the redacted report was released, it
became clear to all that Barr had misled us
about that very matter.
We know that Barr’s
tolerance for deceit and disgraceful conduct had to be pretty robust because
he auditioned for
the attorney general job after watching his predecessor get flayed alive for
following ethics rules. This is a question for every one of Trump’s
post-Sessions hires. Sessions was a fool to endorse Trump in the primaries, but
at least he was an early adopter unable to learn from others’ mistakes. He also
turned out to have some standards. The rules said he needed to recuse himself.
So he did it. The fact that Trump not only resented Sessions for this, but
couldn’t fathom how someone could mold their behavior to anything other than
raw self-interest, or Trump-interest, told you everything you needed to know
about Trump. Trump’s selfishness is pathological.
Yet, there was Bill
Barr, batting his eyes and lifting his skirt in Trump’s direction.
Barr was a weird amalgam
of toady and totem. He constantly disregarded Justice Department precedent and
ethical standards in service to his chief. As Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith
recount in After Trump:
Reconstructing the Presidency, Barr appointed U.S. Attorney John
Durham to “investigate the investigators” in the Russia matter. That much was
not improper. What followed was. Against Justice Department norms and
regulations requiring department officials to remain mum about ongoing
investigations, Barr offered public comments about what Durham was finding. He
said the FBI had acted in bad faith. Asked if government employees had
committed treason, Barr implied something terrible by responding, “not as a
legal matter, no.” Regarding former FBI Director James Comey, Barr opined that
“I think Comey has cast himself as being seven layers above the
decision-making. I don’t think that holds water. The record will be clear that
that’s not the case.”
He criss-crossed the
world seeking evidence for what he must have hoped would be Durham’s deus
ex machina, redeeming Trump’s reputation in the Russia matter and
wreaking vengeance on his accusers.
He intervened in Roger
Stone’s case to decrease his sentence—a favor not offered to any non-Donald
Trump friend. He intervened in the Michael Flynn case as well.
But there were lines he
would not cross. He didn’t participate in the latest and most damaging of
Trump’s assaults on America’s democracy—the stolen election fraud. He pushed
back. And he didn’t hand over dirt on Hunter Biden.
Had he never joined the
Trump administration, Barr would be remembered as a completely honorable man.
As it is, his legacy is badly tarnished. Still, Barr had some standards. How
much worse could things have been if he had none?
Mona Charen is Policy Editor of The Bulwark, a
nationally syndicated columnist, and host of The Bulwark’s Beg
to Differ podcast. She can be reached at monacharen@thebulwark.com.