According to Matt Ford of The New Republic, Attorney General William Barr, who recently announced his resignation, did more damage to the rule of law than any other attorney general in American history. He transformed the Justice Department into a partisan cudgel for President Donald Trump, undercutting probes that might damage the White House and doling out special treatment for presidential allies who broke the law. He treated hypocrisy like a virtue and self-awareness as a vice.
Barr set out to dismantle the work of the Mueller
investigation. Earlier this year, the Justice Department’s upper ranks overrode
a sentencing recommendation by career prosecutors for Roger Stone, a close
Trump ally who was convicted of lying to Congress about the Russia investigation.
The second version of the recommendation all but pleaded with the judge for
leniency—a quality that Barr does not extend to people who aren’t friends with
Donald Trump. Under Barr’s watch, Justice Department prosecutors also tried to
withdraw their case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who
pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI to avoid prosecution on other charges. Trump
eventually intervened in both cases with the use of his pardon power, and may
ultimately use it to wipe away legal consequences for other allies over the
past four years.
Like the president and many other Americans, Barr
also appears to believe too much of what he sees on Fox News. He shares Trump’s
unfounded belief that widespread voter fraud exists, and followed the
president’s lead in sapping public confidence in the American electoral system
throughout the year. Barr claimed from time to time that a foreign power could
inundate states with fraudulent mail-in ballots, a scenario that election
officials and experts said would be easy to detect and logistically impossible
to carry out. In an interview with a Chicago Tribune columnist this
fall, Barr baselessly complained that “there’s no secret vote”
with mail-in balloting, and that elections could be decided by corrupt big-city
machines and bought-off mailmen.
It’s now axiomatic in conservative circles that
Democrats tried to sabotage Trump during the 2016 election and transition
period, and that the 2020 election was marred by some sort of systemic fraud
that deprived Trump of victory. Barr did not invent either of these conspiracy
theories, but he used the full weight and influence of the Justice Department
to give them credence at every turn. For all of Barr’s pieties about the decay
of the American republic, there are few in public life who have contributed
more to it.
It’s fitting, then, that what appears to have driven
Barr from his post was his failure to give Trump everything he wanted. There
was no October surprise against Joe Biden from the FBI this year like the one
that helped fell Hillary Clinton in 2016. Federal prosecutors found no evidence
to support Trump’s lies about widespread voter fraud, even though Barr
effectively gave them carte blanche to pursue it. That news turned both Trump
and the conservative base writ large against one of their most loyal foot
soldiers. Barr was more than happy to serve as the Tudor-era lord chancellor to
Trump’s Henry VIII–like presidency. But he forgot how that ended for Thomas
More and Thomas Cromwell.
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