Government

The Temptation And Corruption Of Bill Barr

Dance with the devil...

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Bill Barr is taking his ball and going home. After a week of public speculation culminating in a public announcement that he planned to stay through January 20, the Attorney General was fired last night. Oh, sorry, we mean he was allowed to submit this cringingly obsequious resignation letter and walk out the door with a modicum of dignity.

But just a modicum.

Barr may have spared himself the nasty Trump tweet, at least for the moment, but his reputation will be shredded forever. And rightly so.

From his unsolicited job application cum sonnet on the joys of unfettered executive power, to his public comparison of career prosecutors to Montessori preschoolers, the departing Attorney General has befouled himself and caused massive damage to the Justice Department.

There were the scandalous lies that everyone will remember, like claiming that Robert Mueller had exonerated Trump, when, in fact, deferring to longstanding DOJ policy that a sitting president can’t be indicted, the Special Counsel had amassed evidence of obstruction of justice and forwarded it to Congress for impeachment consideration. Or falsely claiming that U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman had resigned and trying to shoehorn S.E.C. Chair Jay Clayton into the position without bothering to go through Senate confirmation.

And Barr’s admitted ratf*cking of the Roger Stone and Michael Flynn prosecutions at Trump’s apparent behest won’t soon be forgotten. Ditto for ordering federal agents to teargas peaceful protestors in Lafayette Square so Trump could stage a photo-op in front of a church that wanted nothing to do with him.

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But it would be a shame if we failed to mention, as Barr drags himself out the door before whatever disgusting pardon binge is sure to come in the next weeks, what an absolute disgrace his tenure has been in every particular.

There was his farcical attempt to argue that the individual mandate couldn’t be severed from the Affordable Care Act and thus the whole law must fall, a position so extreme even Jeff Sessions wouldn’t go there, since it would result in millions of Americans instantly losing health insurance.

There was a blanket attempt to avoid congressional oversight, invoking nonsensically broad executive privilege to shield everything from census data to Trump’s tax returns.

Barr has prostituted the Department out as the president’s personal lawyer, in everything from congressional subpoenas for Trump Organization business records to a defamation case arising out of E. Jean Carroll’s rape allegation — an allegation Bill Barr insists the president made in his official capacity. He even sued Melania’s friend for writing a mean book about her!

Barr has politicized the Justice Department to fit the presidential whim, authorizing investigation after investigation of the origins of the Russia inquiry, smearing Inspectors General, and going on Fox News to throw mud on his own agency. Meanwhile, the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server persisted until October 2019, a full six years after she left the State Department.

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When the Ukraine whistleblower complaint alleging presidential misconduct came across his desk, Barr buried it in the Criminal Division and hid the information from Congress in violation of statute. He even set up an intake mechanism at DOJ for Rudy Giuliani’s smears of Joe Biden.

The AG was a constant presence on Fox News, where he spouted the White House message du jour. Whether it was excoriating Democrats for a “jihad” against hydroxychloroquine, lying about planeloads of antifa supersoldiers while downplaying the very real threat of white supremacists, defending police by talking about “black on black crime,” or lying about the dangers of voting by mail while simultaneously accusing Democrats of eroding public confidence in our electoral system, Bill Barr was on it.

And for his pains, he’s now being called “just another Deep State hack” by the president’s media allies. Because when it became clear that Biden’s lead was insurmountable, Barr committed the unpardonable sin of telling the truth that there was no evidence of widespread vote fraud. And he extended the same courtesy to Joe Biden’s son Hunter, i.e. not revealing an ongoing federal investigation, that Trump himself enjoyed during the entirety of the 2016 election. But he did ramp up federal executions in the meanwhile, so as to make the most of his last few days in power.

Good bye, Attorney General Barr, and good riddance. The Justice Department will recover, but your reputation … that’s shot for good.

Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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