The Mueller Report: Lowering the Barr
The highly regarded Republican political consultant Rick Wilson contributed to the Trump genre of books about the man’s immorality, indecency, ignorance, and narcissism with “Everything Trump Touches Dies.” An exemplar of what Wilson meant is represented by Attorney General William Barr who, in a matter of months, plummeted from a man with a reputation as a devoted institutionalist committed to the rule of law and the Department of Justice to a prostrated PR flak for Donald Trump. Along with the right wing of the Republican Party, Barr appears to be, as Wilson puts it, “merrily on board with a lunatic with delusions of godhood.”
In fairness to Trump, Barr seems to have decided on his own to sacrifice reputation for fleeting power. He virtually auditioned for the job of Attorney General, a post he had held under President George H. W. Bush, with an unsolicited 19-page memo to the Department of Justice opining that a sitting president could not be charged with the crime of obstructing justice. Clearly music to Trump’s ears.
Despite Trump’s maunderings about how the Muller report exonerated him from both “collusion” and obstruction of justice, it did nothing of the sort. Sadly, Barr called a news conference to try to spin the report in Trump’s favor, stating nine times that Muller’s investigation did not find the Trump or his campaign had conspired or coordinated with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election.
He even vigorously defended Trump’s behavior in trying to obstruct the investigation by citing “substantial evidence to show the president was frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents and fueled by illegal leaks.” I wonder if he would defend someone who decided to rob a bank because he had been frustrated and angered by a bank’s refusal to extend him a home loan because the bank’s loan officer considered the applicant a poor risk.
I suppose I was personally offended by William Barr’s sullying of his office because in my days as a Newsweek correspondent in Washington, I covered the Justice Department and five Attorneys General — Richard Kleindienst, William Saxbe, Elliot Richardson, Richard Thornburgh, and Edward Levi. All had two things in common: All were Republicans and all were devoted to maintaining the Department of Justice as the nation’s arbiter in the rule of law, even in the time of Watergate and even in the face of occasional Nixonian efforts to have the department protect him from accusations of wrongdoing. For example, after the infamous Watergate break-in, the Nixon White House asked Kleindienst to try to persuade authorities to drop charges against the burglars. Kleindienst refused.
Richardson, of course, resigned rather than follow Nixon’s order to fire the Watergate special prosecutor.
What the Mueller report told us about this consummately corrupt man in the White House is that almost all the “fake news” was true; a hostile foreign power intervened in the presidential election hoping to install Trump in the White House; the Trump campaign was aware of Russia’s intervention and welcomed it. Russia succeeded beyond its dreams and once in power, Trump tried to block any inquiry into what had happened.
There were 140 contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, including handing over explicit polling data that could only help Russian hackers to disseminate their pro-Trump and anti-Clinton materials to the most likely receptive audiences. Trump is now extending his obstruction of justice efforts by trying to deny the constitutional obligation of Congress to exercise oversight of the executive branch.
Even though the Supreme Court has begun looking much more like a branch of the Trump administration lately, it is highly doubtful that any of the justices would possibly make a determination that Congress could not exercise its specific constitutional obligations. We can only hope that former Vice President Joe Biden, officially now a candidate for president, is right when he says we are living through an aberrant moment in American history — that, in effect, this, too shall pass. The sooner that emotionally unstable, indecent politicians like Donald Trump and sellouts like William Barr are consigned to the ash heap of history, the sooner our nation can return to a semblance of normality in which our leaders focus on jobs, health care, or education rather than on their own egos and efforts to enrich themselves and their families.