Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
Attorney General William Barr speaks at the Securities and Exchange Commission, October 3, 2019.
In June 2016, Bill Clinton found himself on the same airport tarmac as Attorney General Loretta Lynch. The former president, one of history’s most irrepressible schmoozers, bounded aboard Lynch’s plane and proceeded to bend her ear for 20 minutes about such topics as their grandchildren, their mutual friend Janet Reno, and the history of West Virginia coal.
Despite the fact that Clinton and Lynch did not discuss anything remotely related to the Justice Department investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails then in progress, this conversation then became fodder for approximately one zillion stories in mainstream news organizations, posts on right-wing blogs, and hours of shouting on Fox News. The consensus from all observers was that it was dangerously inappropriate at a minimum, and perhaps outright unethical, for an attorney general to have even a casual conversation with the husband of a politician who was under investigation, particularly in the midst of a political campaign. The nation’s chief law enforcement official simply had to be above even the appearance of political favoritism.
Three years later, the current attorney general of the United States is jetting around the world in pursuit of preposterous conspiracy theories meant to absolve Russia of blame for its attack on the 2016 election, an attack whose purpose was to help Donald Trump get elected president. At the same time, William Barr is overseeing an investigation whose purpose now appears to be to discredit the counterintelligence investigation into that Russian meddling. If you want to know what a thoroughly corrupted Department of Justice looks like, this is it.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that Barr is corrupt in the sense of taking payoffs or using his office for personal gain. He is, however, the linchpin of a project to enable Donald Trump’s corruption, a project he’s carrying out with an absolutely stunning level of commitment.
Last week we learned that the investigation Barr ordered into the origins of the FBI’s 2016 investigation of Russia, which is being run by John Durham, a U.S. attorney from Connecticut, has now been officially designated a criminal probe, expanding Durham’s powers. This left many legal observers scratching their heads, because no one can figure out what sort of crime was supposed to have been committed.
But what’s even crazier is that Attorney General Barr is using the full resources of his office—not to mention his own personal time—to pursue an absolutely bonkers conspiracy theory that bubbled up from the depths of the right-wing fever swamp. It says that despite copious evidence, the consensus of American intelligence agencies, and the extensive documentation contained in the indictments brought down by Robert Mueller, Russia didn’t meddle in the 2016 election at all. In fact, the theory goes, the whole thing was a false flag operation in which the Obama administration recruited the help of Ukrainians to make it appear that Russia was the guilty party, and Vladimir Putin is the innocent victim of a slander. And also, there was a server at Democratic National Committee headquarters that would prove Putin’s innocence, but it was spirited away and now may be sitting somewhere in Ukraine.
You may think that no person whose wardrobe does not include an extensive collection of headwear made of tin foil could possibly believe that. And you’d be right. But the people who do believe it apparently include the president of the United States and his attorney general.
In pursuit of evidence, Barr has traveled to Italy to personally press the Italian government for evidence that a professor at an Italian university who told a Trump campaign adviser that Russia had damaging information on Hillary Clinton was actually a plant meant to entrap the Trump campaign and frame Russia. He has pushed President Trump to get other foreign governments to work with him in his quest to prove the conspiracy theory. So it’s no surprise that when Trump was putting the screws to the president of Ukraine, he instructed the Ukrainian to talk to two people about the bonkers DNC server theory and digging up dirt on Joe Biden: Rudy Giuliani and Bill Barr.
Underneath Barr’s investigation is the implication that when the FBI learned of Russia’s activities—a comprehensive online effort to boost Trump, repeated contacts with Trump personnel, hacking into Democratic email systems to find damaging information and then arranging for its public release through Wikileaks—the bureau should have said, “This all seems fine; no need to investigate.”
It’s not precisely clear whether Trump understood when he hired him that Bill Barr offered the perfect combination of establishment credentials, lack of scruples, and devotion to the idea that the president can do whatever he wants (throughout his career, Barr has promoted a vision of unfettered presidential power so extreme that many of his fellow Republicans find it radical). It was probably enough that Barr wrote a kind of audition letter in June of 2018 dismissing much of the Mueller probe as illegitimate. Trump may even have heard that Barr once told The New York Times that “I have long believed” there was more reason to investigate conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton than “for investigating so-called ‘collusion’” between Russia and the Trump campaign.
But Trump, who has tried to corrupt every institution of government, has not been universally successful. In a few cases, agencies like the Federal Reserve have resisted his efforts. With Bill Barr he finally succeeded in making the Justice Department put Donald Trump’s political interests above the interests of justice.
And Barr is just getting started. I can tell you with some confidence what will happen when John Durham completes his investigation. Whatever Durham finds, the attorney general will present it to the public with his own narrative, just as he did to Robert Mueller’s report on the Russia scandal. Barr’s narrative will be full of dark insinuations of a nefarious conspiracy and vague allegations of misconduct. It will be greeted with front-page headlines, not to mention days of round-the-clock triumphalism on Fox News, as Trump’s advocates gloat that the anti-Trump Deep State conspiracy has finally been exposed.
And then a few days later we’ll discover—again, just as we did with the Mueller report—that Barr has completely misrepresented the evidence. There was no Deep State conspiracy, just a bunch of people with varying opinions about Trump who did their jobs regardless of what they thought of him. Russia did mount a campaign to help Trump get elected, and it was not only appropriate but completely necessary for the FBI to investigate it.
That will all be ignored by Trump himself, his media cheerleaders, and his rabid supporters. Barr will have given them what they need, regardless of the truth. And then Barr will turn his attention to the Democratic nominee for president. If there isn’t a Justice Department investigation of that nominee (whoever it is) announced some time in the summer or fall of 2020, with as much publicity as possible so as to maximize the political damage, it will be an absolute shock.
If you don’t think Barr would do that, all you have to look at is what he’s doing now.
