With Cohen In Prison, Attorney General Barr Has Become Trump's Personal Fixer

© NANCY  OHANIAN / USED WITH PERMISSION 

I sometimes find myself musing about how history will judge the cast of characters dominating the Washington stage these days.   

Part of that is because I'm not merely a member of the captive audience forced to watch this theater of the absurdly awful, but a journalist-historian who understands that impartial contemporaneous treatment of these characters by the news media (it's called "giving the benefit of the doubt") can metamorphosize into harsher judgments once historians, with the benefit of hindsight, render their own verdicts in the coming years. By that measure, history will judge that William Pelham Barr spectacularly destroyed his reputation by flying too close to the sun, or rather the black hole that is Donald Trump. 

If there is any confusion on this point, it is why Barr knowingly -- and certainly with malice of forethought -- became not just Trump's attorney general, but in a mere four months has become the worst attorney general of the modern era. 

This is quite a feat since since John Mitchell, the previous worst AG, went to prison for multiple Watergate scandal-related crimes and, as hard as he tried, did not politicize an office that the Constitution demands be scrupulously impartial to the extent Barr has in the brief time since he slouched out of retirement to replace the execrable Jeff Sessions, whom Trump had cashiered because he occasionally betrayed a semblance of a spine regarding the Russia scandal. 

Barr's frontal assault on -- and cavalcade of lies and obfuscations about -- Robert Mueller's report on the scandal has been extraordinary even by the standards of compliant Trump Cabinet officers like Steve Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross and Betsy DeVos. 

And make no mistake, Barr's whitewash of a report revealing deep criminality on candidate Trump's part has succeeded because the House Democratic leadership continues to dither over whether to continue investigating the president to a fare the well while trying to secure public testimony from the now-former special counsel or begin impeachment proceedings as an increasing number of Democrats clamor for taking that dramatic but necessary step. 

There is sense of growing urgency -- or at least there should be -- over the Dems' dithering.   

The House will be in session for barely two weeks before the July 4 recess.  It will take August off and come September the Democratic presidential race will further heat up and calls for letting voters, not Congress, decide Trump's fate inevitably will grow.   

Barr's audition to be Trump's "lawn ornament," as Charles Pierce viciously if exquisitely calls his relationship with the Black Hole in Chief, was telegraphed a year ago at a time when Michael Cohen, Trump's longtime personal lawyer and fixer, was blabbing to federal prosecutors and the president seemed increasingly isolated. 

In June 2018, in an apparently unsolicited mash note disguised as a legal memorandum on Mueller's investigation into obstruction of justice, Barr wrote deputy attorney general and future whitewash accomplice Rod Rosenstein that the investigation was "fatally misconceived" because it was within Trump's powers as president to fire FBI Director James Comey after repeatedly asking him to let go of the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.  So by Barr's reasoning, Trump could not have obstructed justice -- which Mueller indicates he may have done on at least 10 occasions -- because of untrammeled executive power. 

The memo should have disqualified Barr from having anything to do with the Russia scandal once he became AG just as Sessions' memory lapses over his meetings with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak prompted his own recusal, but it merely emboldened him. 

The lynchpin of Barr's whitewash is his deeply misleading account of what Mueller found, and I continue to suspect he has not even read the entirety of a report that he has been using as an arsonist would use a can of gasoline. 

"He did not reach a conclusion,” Barr has said over and over of Mueller.  "He provided both sides of the issue, and . . . his conclusion was he wasn't exonerating the president, but he wasn’t finding a crime either." 

Wrong. 

As Mueller stated in his 448-page report report and again at his farewell press conference, he was bound by a policy preventing him from charging the president with a crime, or even saying the president had committed a crime, and by implication it should be left to Congress to decide if the instances of obstruction were crimes.  In other words, through impeachment proceedings. 

Meanwhile, nearly 1,000 former federal prosecutors have stated in an open letter that the actions described by Mueller are criminal if committed by anyone other than a president shielded by an untested cannot-indict-while-in-office regulation. 

Moments after Mueller left the podium at the Justice Department last Wednesday, Barr sat down for an hour-long damage-control blowjob . . . er, interview with Jan Crawford of CBS News in which he grossly contradicts Mueller's findings with regard to Trump’s ties to Russia. 

"Mueller has spent two and half years, and the fact is, there is no evidence of a conspiracy," he said.  "So it was bogus, this whole idea that the Trump was in cahoots with the Russians is bogus."

As lies go, this is a whopper.  Because it was uttered by the attorney general, it is in a class of its own and one of the reasons that historians will eat Barr alive. 

Mueller was unable to establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russia because, as he put it, "some individuals invoked their Fifth Amendment right," or "provided information that was false or incomplete," or "deleted relevant communications."   

Think former campaign adviser Paul Manafort, who will be doing major prison time, and longest-serving Trump adviser Roger Stone, who also is likely to round out his career in an orange jumpsuit.   

Barr, of course, has not been content to merely misrepresent what Mueller found.   

He has picked up and run with Trump's mantra that the entire Russia scandal was a deep-state plot by Mueller and the FBI to overturn Trump's presidency as revenge for Hillary Clinton's "defeat" while incredibly likening the FBI's counterintelligence investigation of Trump to right-wing birther conspiracies. 

"I think if the shoe was on the other foot we could be hearing a lot about it," he told Crawford.  "If those kinds of discussions were held, you know, when Obama first ran for office, people talking about Obama in those tones and suggesting that 'Oh that he might be a Manchurian candidate for Islam or something like that.'  You know some wild accusations like that and you had that kind of discussion back and forth, you don’t think we would be hearing a lot more about it?" 

And then Barr got really crazy. 

"I think one of the ironies today is that people are saying that it's President Trump that's shredding our institutions.  I really see no evidence of that, it is hard, and I really haven't seen bill of particulars as to how that's being done," he added.  "From my perspective the idea of resisting a democratically elected president and basically throwing everything at him and you know, really changing the norms on the grounds that we have to stop this president, that is where the shredding of our norms and our institutions is occurring." 

Taking a page from Trump's own playbook, Barr hints that he has secret evidence to back up this wingnuttery.  Which we'll never see because it doesn't exist.   

But what is most terrifying about Barr is that it's become obvious that he believes his own lies, including his blanket exoneration of Trump and defiance of congressional subpoenas. And that as attorney general his responsibility is not to uphold the rule of law but to defy it.   

Click HERE for Mueller's full statement. 

Click HERE for a searchable version of the Mueller report. 

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal

and related developments.