Flynn, Barr and the shallow state
President Trump and his supporters popularized the notion of an American “deep state” defined as a federal bureaucracy with less than total allegiance to the whims of a particular chief executive — as if that were a bad thing. In Attorney General William Barr, Trump has found the personification of what might be called the shallow state: an official who perceives his duties as beginning and ending with the president’s personal and political interests.
Barr’s shallowstate machinations sank to a lowwater mark last week, when his increasingly compromised Justice Department dropped the successful prosecution of Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, for no evident factual or legal reason. The attorney general and his minions are doing their best to unravel the department’s own case against Flynn and others for one reason and one reason alone: The president wants them to.
Flynn, a former military man fired by the Obama administration, infamously advocated the extrajudicial incarceration of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton by leading the 2016 Republican National Convention in a chant of “Lock her up!” His own prospective punishment, by contrast, was a result of due process.
In January 2017, less than a month into Trump’s term, Flynn lied about the nature of his preinaugural conversations with Vladimir Putin’s ambassador to, among others, FBI agents investigating the administration’s relationship with Russia. This crime, which Flynn would acknowledge in court twice, made him the shortesttenured national security adviser in U.S. history, a valuable witness for Special Counsel Robert Mueller and a lasting preoccupation for the president, who unsuccessfully lobbied thenFBI Director Jim Comey to drop the case against him — an instance of potential criminal obstruction considered by Mueller.
Three years later, the president has at last found a ranking law enforcement official who not only takes such orders but likely has no need to receive them. While Flynn had been trying to withdraw his guilty plea since he hired a new defense team last year, his probability of success appeared scant without the unprecedented cooperation of the attorney general of the United States.
Barr has been building up to this for a long time, having penned a memo arguing that the president could not be guilty of obstruction of justice well before he was returned to the job he first held under President George H.W. Bush. When Mueller filed his report documenting potentially criminal obstruction by Trump, Barr delayed its release while issuing a supposed summary that so flagrantly mischaracterized its conclusions as to provoke a written objection from the buttonedup special counsel.
Barr has since taken a series of steps to unravel the meticulous work of Mueller and his predecessors. He has accused federal authorities of “spying” on Trump’s campaign; appointed prosecutors to reinvestigate the Russia inquiry and related prosecutions; intervened to keep former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort out of New York’s notorious Rikers Island jail; undermined his own prosecutors to seek a lighter sentence for Trump adviser Roger Stone; and dropped the case against two Russian companies charged with funding interference in the 2016 election.
Barr told a Senate committee last year that “we have to stop using the criminal justice process as a political weapon.” Indeed, and it will take a new attorney general to do so.