Barr sinks deeper into moral quicksand
Rank and file show spine, but he’s still Trump’s man
Attorney General William Barr’s recent rollout of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report left me glued to a keyboard. That was all I could do to vent my anger at Barr’s naked attempt to bury Mueller’s verdict on a White House scandal so massive it makes Watergate look like a Mister Rogers episode.
Just this week, we learned that Mueller complained in a March letter to Barr that Barr’s four-page summary failed to accurately express the “context, nature and substance” of Mueller’s 448-page report and created “public confusion.” The revelation compounded the crash damage that already had the Department of Justice on moral life support. Then Barr threw himself even deeper down the rabbit hole with defensive testimony Wednesday to the Senate Judiciary Committee:
❚ He dismissed Mueller’s letter to him as “a bit snitty.”
❚ He claimed it was not obstruction for the president to order former White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller and then tell McGahn to lie about the order.
❚ He insisted that Trump’s public comments urging witnesses to stay strong and not flip do not constitute obstruction. I, and most prosecutors I worked with, would disagree.
❚ He said he couldn’t think of a way to test the Office of Legal Counsel’s opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted. I have a suggestion: The president gets indicted by one of the state or federal agencies investigating him and he challenges the indictment in court, based on the OLC opinion. The courts will rule, and then we will know.
Despite the quicksand that threatens to consume the DOJ whole, on Saturday night I got an email that caused me to reflect on the good done by so many law enforcement agents and attorneys in the DOJ family. The email announced the retirement of an agent I worked with in the 1990s in Detroit.
We spent two years of 12-hour days building a wiretap case against members of a violent drug and murder-forhire gang. The agent was smart, worked tirelessly and always did the right thing — whether it helped or hurt our case.
I had not seen the agent for decades, so I Googled him to see how his career had progressed. Turns out, Thomas Brandon had been leading the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives since the Obama administration. Before retiring this week, he had criticized President Donald Trump’s budget cuts and testified in support of a bill, opposed by the White House, that would give the FBI more time to perform gun background checks. There are still people at DOJ who will do the right thing. And Tom Brandon is not alone.
It took steeled spines for prosecutors at the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office to all but name the U.S. president as an unindicted co-conspirator in a campaign finance fraud scheme involving Trump’s longtime personal attorney. As long as Trump is in power and Michael Cohen is vomiting his secrets, they will not be ascending to higher DOJ positions. And surely they have contemplated the possibility they could be relegated to Social Security fraud duty, until Mar-a-Lago once again becomes just another overpriced golf club.
The same is true of DOJ law enforcement. Last year, the FBI arrested Cesar Sayoc, a Trump cheerleader who pleaded guilty to mailing 16 pipe bombs to Democrats and Trump critics, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and California Rep. Maxine Waters. That Sayoc’s hit list mirrored Trump’s rhetorical targets did not deter the agents who investigated and arrested Sayoc.
There might be no saving the ship when the captain plots a course into the iceberg. Even so, we must be careful not to attribute the attorney general’s lack of moral compass to the agents and prosecutors who work in the trenches. They carry the burden of bringing justice to the murder, terrorism, child pornography and public corruption cases that cross their desks every day.
Their dedication remains unchanged. In a time when the word “unprecedented” has become commonplace, there is comfort in knowing some things stay the same.