How bad is it?
Benjamin Wittes urged us to give Barr the benefit of the doubt until he’d had time to act; he now feels burned.
Where Barr has utterly failed, by contrast*, is in providing “honest leadership that insulates [the department] from the predations of the president.” I confess I am surprised by this. I have never known Barr well, but I thought better of him than that.
*By contrast with what he did with the report, which Wittes thinks was not too bad.
The core of the problem is not that Barr moved, as many people worried he would, to suppress the report; it is what he has said about it. I have spent a great deal of time with the Mueller report, about which Barr’s public statements are simply indefensible. The mischaracterizations began in his first letter. They got worse during his press conference the morning he released the document. And they grew worse still yesterday in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Barr did not lie in any of these statements. He did not, as some people insist, commit perjury. I haven’t found a sentence he has written or said that cannot be defended as truthful on its own terms, if only in some literal sense. But it is possible to mislead without lying. One can be dishonest before Congress without perjury. And one can convey sweeping untruths without substantial factual misstatement. This is what Barr has been doing since that first letter. And it is utterly beneath the United States Department of Justice.
What he’s been doing, Wittes says, is systematically translating Mueller’s “we didn’t find enough evidence to charge/convict” to “they found that nothing happened.”
In other words, Barr is not merely translating the absence of sufficient evidence for charges into a crime’s not taking place; he is translating the crime’s not taking place into an absence of misconduct in a more colloquial sense. He is also using the president’s specific talking point in doing so. This pair of mischaracterizations has the effect of transforming Trump into an innocent man falsely accused.
Barr amplifies this transformation with his third layer of misrepresentation: his adoption of Trump’s “spying” narrative, which states that there was something improper about the FBI’s scrutiny of campaign figures who had bizarre contacts with Russian-government officials or intermediaries. Barr has not specified precisely what he believes here, but yesterday’s Senate hearing was the second congressional hearing at which he implied darkly that the FBI leadership under James Comey had engaged in some kind of improper surveillance of the Trump campaign.
There’s a lot more, all of it valuable. Wittes doesn’t know if Barr knows he’s bullshitting us or if he actually believes that Trump is a great president maligned by sinister opponents.
Who could have predicted that a man whose prior stint as Attorney General was best known for lying to Congress and helping cover up the Iran-Contra affair, and who got the nomination from Trump after writing a sycophantic letter echoing exactly what Trump wanted to hear, would turn out to be a dishonest hack cover-up artists?
Ben Wittes seems like a decent, intelligent guy, and he’s quite knowledgeable on the subjects he covers. His writing has been useful and helpful throughout these last few years. But the dude seems incapable of reading people or learning from getting burned …. man, I’d really like to play poker with him for large sums of money, and I don’t claim to be a great poker player.
Then he’s a fool. There is indeed a mystery as to exactly why Barr has sold his soul to Trump, but the option that he thinks Trump a great president beset by foes on all sides beggars belief. He may not be the brightest lawyer to occupy the top of the DoJ, but he isn’t a DJT level idiot. No, he’s a shill. The only questions are for whom and why.
What we’ve seen Barr (and others in this Administration) do, is the logical extension of how those on the right especially (although not exclusively) have been drifting towards for decades. “No wrong doing” is being defined as “not criminal”. You can do an awful lot of unethical, horrible, destructive and dangerous things without actually breaking any criminal laws. A society that actually equates these two things is not functional and becomes a dog eat dog place where anyone with a shred of decency or lack of power/resource becomes food for those without any sort of ethical compass or compassion.
We don’t have laws that criminalise the sort of behaviour seen in this Administration, because in the past it has not been necessary. Decent ethical people have moved to prevent, correct or mitigate such behaviour in others previously. Now we are seeing these supposed gatekeepers defending such behaviour as “nothing wrong because not criminal”. Barr has literally outlined in his testimony before Congress how a foreign adversary can interfere in US elections and politics with impunity. He has outlined how political parties and activists can co-operate with foreign adversaries without punishment.
There are two ways out of this mess. Either society gives itself a good shake and wakes from the collective nightmare and reapplies proper standards of behaviour; or laws are introduced/amended to try to enforce proper behaviour. The latter step is never free of either loopholes or unintended adverse consequences and each time a problem is identified it becomes harder to identify both the technical fix and gain the cultural and political will to make it happen.
Conservative Never Trumper Charlie Sykes has more on Barr’s history here.