(Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Bill Barr is headed to rehab.
No, not for drugs or alcohol — this is Reputation Rehab, and the first step is admitting you have a problem. The second step is finding a journalist who’ll let you tell your story without calling you on your bullshit, and thanks to ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan D. Karl, the former attorney general is well on his way.
In a teaser for his upcoming book, Karl writes in The Atlantic that Barr “has been widely seen as a Trump lackey who politicized the Justice Department. But when the big moment came after the election, he defied the president who expected him to do his bidding.”
Which is an interesting way of saying that the Barr huddled up with Senator Mitch McConnell, and the two of them decided that they’d have a better chance of maintaining Republican control of the senate if Trump stopped screaming nonsense about rigged elections and started telling Georgians to get out and vote for Senators Loeffler and Perdue.
When Barr told the AP on December 1, 2020 that “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” it was it was in no wise an attempt to de-politicize the DOJ, as he’d like to spin it now. He was trying to manage his mercurial boss to benefit the Red Team.
To McConnell, the road to maintaining control of the Senate was simple: Republicans needed to make the argument that with Biden soon to be in the White House, it was crucial that they have a majority in the Senate to check his power. But McConnell also believed that if he openly declared Biden the winner, Trump would be enraged and likely act to sabotage the Republican Senate campaigns in Georgia. Barr related his conversations with McConnell to me. McConnell confirms the account.
“Look, we need the president in Georgia,” McConnell told Barr, “and so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now. But you’re in a better position to inject some reality into this situation. You are really the only one who can do it.”
Hey, remember when Loretta Lynch had a ten-minute kibbitz with Bill Clinton on the tarmac, and it was the scandal of the century? But now Bill Barr is trotting out this wildly inappropriate conversation with the most powerful Republican in congress about wielding the executive branch to benefit the GOP in the January 5 Georgia run-offs, and Barr is supposed to be the good guy here?
AYFKMRN? Bill Barr, who spent months flogging lies about fraudulent ballots, breaking with Justice Department policy to allow pre-election investigations of bogus vote fraud claims, going so far as to hang Pennsylvania election officials out to dry over a clerical error that was immediately detected, wants to be the hero in this story?
“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr told Karl. “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”
Which is fun story to tell a reporter six months later when you’re trying to launder your reputation, but conveniently omits Barr’s own role in promoting the lie that mail-in ballots were especially prone to fraudulent manipulation and the use of DOJ resources to investigate charges that the attorney general knew were “all bullshit.”
Meanwhile, Mister Unitary Executive Theory who spent the past three years defying congressional oversight and arguing in court that presidential communications were shrouded in a magical cloak of executive privilege has come to the belated realization that blabbing about your conversations with the president is fine, actually if you really, really want to take control of your own narrative.
“Did you say that?”
“Yes,” Barr responded.
“How the fuck could you do this to me? Why did you say it?”
“Because it’s true.”
The president, livid, responded by referring to himself in the third person: “You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump.”
Such heroics! Although perhaps slightly undercut by his subsequent boast that “This would have taken a crackerjack team with a really coherent and disciplined strategy. Instead, you have a clown show. No self-respecting lawyer is going anywhere near it. It’s just a joke. That’s why you are where you are.”
If only Trump had hired competent lawyers, he might have been able to steal the election! But instead he hired Sidney Powell, whom Barr worked with hand in glove to blow up the Michael Flynn prosecution. And Rudy Giuliani, for whom Barr set up a special intake system at the DOJ to launder what turned out (to the surprise of exactly no one) to be a Russian influence operation to damage Joe Biden’s electoral prospects.
Well, he may have used the DOJ to help these two clowns before, but by December of 2020, Bill Barr had seen the light. So right after that meeting, he handed in his principled resignation and refused to be associated with the assault on democracy being waged by a maniac in the White House. Right?
HA HA.
No, Barr promised White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that he would stay “as long as I’m needed,” although he assures Karl that he immediately regretted it. And his regret was so powerful that he didn’t leave until three weeks later, using a letter so larded with praise that it would make Kim Jong Il blush as a bribe to avoid being trashed by Trump in a tweet. Such a brave patriot!
This man thinks you are stupid. He thinks if he comes out against Trump’s excesses now and blames the former president’s bad advisors for leading him astray, he can somehow weather the eleventy-seven insider accounts that are about to flood the bookshelves and salvage his reputation as a good and noble conservative.
Don’t be stupid!
Inside William Barr’s Breakup With Trump [Atlantic]
Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
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