Government

Bill Barr May Have Retired As Attorney General, But He's Still Working Hard To Degrade The Office

Embarrassing the country in the private sector is more lucrative anyway.

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Bill Barr left his position as Attorney General in December of 2020, and yet he still manages to disgrace the office 18 months later. Just look at this mook brazenly declaring how proud he is that he turned a law enforcement agency into an organ of rank partisanship.

Were you under the impression that a prosecutor’s job was to investigate violations of the law and secure convictions? Well let the former top law enforcement officer in the land disabuse you of that notion.

I’m very proud of John Durham. And I do take responsibility for his appointment. I think he and his team did an exceptionally able job both digging out very important facts and presenting a compelling case to the jury. And the fact that he — while he did not succeed in getting a conviction from the DC jury — I think he accomplished something far more important, which is he brought out the truth in two important areas. First I think he crystallized the central role played by the Hillary campaign in launching, as a dirty trick, the whole Russiagate collusion narrative and fanning the flames of it. 

First of all, crafting a media narrative is not a prosecutor’s job, although, having witnessed Barr try to spin the Mueller Report as exonerating Trump, it’s not exactly surprising to hear that he thinks the DOJ’s primary objective is to be a hype man for the GOP.

Are you one of those old-fashioned geezers who thinks a prosecutor’s job is to win convictions? Were you under the impression that Special Counsel John Durham brought an exceptionally weak false statements case against attorney Michael Sussmann and then fell right on his ass as predicted when the jury took just six hours to acquit?

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Au contraire, mon frère!  It’s “far more important” for the US government to spend upwards of $4 million slagging Hillary Clinton and pretending that she was somehow responsible for the FBI investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

Here on Planet Earth, Sussmann’s report about the weird pings between a server in Trump Tower and Russia’s Alfa Bank had exactly nothing to do with the FBI opening its Crossfire Hurricane investigation. For one thing, that inquiry was already ongoing when Sussmann walked in the door to present his accurate(!) report to James Baker. And it’s wildly disingenuous for Barr to pretend otherwise when he knows damn well that Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos got the ball rolling when he bragged to an Australian diplomat that Russia was about to release stolen Democratic emails to help Trump. And then it did.

If Trump had just been able to hold still and let the thing play out, instead of demanding a loyalty oath from James Comey, he’d probably have been just fine. Instead he fired the FBI Director and then had Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein cook up that ridiculous memo saying with a straight face that Comey had to go because he’d said mean things about Hillary Clinton when announcing his decision not to throw her in email jail. Yet here’s Bill Barr claiming that a prosecutor’s actual job is to say nasty things about people charged with no crime. Weird, huh?

But Barr wasn’t finished making shit up.

“I think he exposed really dreadful behavior by the supervisors and the FBI, the senior ranks of the FBI, who knowingly used this information to start an investigation of Trump and then duped their own agents by lying to them and refusing to tell them what the real source of that information was,” he went on. “And that was appalling.”

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Once again, none of that ever happened. The Sussmann case concerned only the Alfa Bank server allegations, which had nothing to do with the genesis of the Russia investigation. And anyway, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the Russia investigation was appropriately predicated.

But what can you expect from a guy who got the AG job by writing a mash note expounding his on theories unlimited presidential power; lied about the Mueller Report; ratf*cked the prosecution of Michael Flynn; undercut line prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone; tried to Saturday Night Massacre the SDNY in an apparent attempt to protect Rudy Giuliani; dispatched riot police to American cities based on nonsensical claims about Antifa supersoldiers flying around the country wreaking havoc; flogged preposterous lies about rampant election fraud and the dangers of mail-in ballots; and even took the Fox airways to whine about a “jihad” on hydroxychloroquine by evil Democrats bent on depriving COVID patients of totally ineffective treatments.

And yet, no matter how low you put the bar for ethical conduct, Bill Barr still manages to belly flop under it. What an absolute disgrace to the profession.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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