Really. The Washington Post is insane. Here’s their lead story this morning: “Barr-Trump relationship facing its gravest threat yet.” Really. They have to be delusional. It’s the only explanation that seems plausible.
Let me start with some assumptions. Donald Trump, of course, is a pathological liar. That makes him the legitimate head of the new Republican Party. I know Republicans spew frantic and laughable lies about their child-king every few minutes, hoping to distract us as they disembowel every democratic institution that stands between them and total authority. Trump’s direct reports, unsurprisingly, grovel and shout their squishy flattery with an eldrich pathology that would make H.P. Lovecraft proud.
Even in the middle of that Constitutional devastation, Attorney General William Barr has been a special case. Trump treats most of his cabinet as disposable, but he treasures his AG. It’s easy to understand why: Barr has the power to protect Trump. Better, Barr immediately demonstrated his personal loyalty by lying about the Mueller Report. And, unlike Jeff Sessions, Barr is unrestrained by most morality or ethics. Barr has always believed that the President should be king (so long as he’s a Republican king). Unless Trump is an idiot, he knows Barr is actively subverting the entire Department of Justice, along with those nagging investigative FBI bits, into Trump’s personal service. So even Trump, unless he’s a birdbrained halfwit, can see Barr is making the DOJ Trump’s attack dog.
(All right, yes, President Stupid is a savage and ruinous simpleton. But he still knows what side of his bread is buttered.)
From the beginning of his run as AG, Barr has demonstrated very specific interests. Attorneys General usually act at department-wide levels. AG Sessions, for example, wrote the policy requiring the DOJ to prosecute every case for the maximum fines and incarceration, with no exceptions. He was Trump’s man that way. Most AGs never touch specific prosecutions. They run big, complex departments, after all. Think about managing roughly 100,000 complex prosecutions a year. Besides the ethical problems with meddling in individual justice, AGs simply don’t have the time. They assign high-level actions and leave prosecutorial decisions to the US Attorneys. If there are problems at that level, Barr has an entire group — the Inspectors General — to investigate.
And yet, AG William Barr seems to have spent a shocking amount of his discretionary time on specific individual cases: Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe, Russian counterintelligence, Election interference, American foreign policy in Ukraine, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, James Comey, and I forget who else. And we still don’t know what happened to the counterintelligence issues that Mueller spun off to the FBI.
The reasoning seems obvious. Most people believe that Barr is helping Trump’s friends and punishing Trump’s enemies. It isn’t a difficult conclusion. The only individual cases Barr touches have close connections to his boss.
But the Washington Post seems less interested in corruption. Their biggest question is whether the Trump/Barr ‘relationship’ is going downhill. Has Trump turned away from his most powerful fixer? Has Barr betrayed Trump by not manufacturing a better McCabe prosecution?
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m more concerned about the accelerating corruption of the American rule of law. The end of America is more immediate than whether Donny will ask Billy to the Prom.
