The history of my writing about William Barr’s appointment as Attorney General includes a big wrong guess and, later, a strategic recommendation that wasn’t tried.
My wrong guess derived from my finding it difficult to imagine that Barr’s intentions in seeking the AG position for this criminal President would be to be his accomplice— not with him near the end of his career, not with him being largely respected, not with him having a legacy and a reputation (and children and grandchildren) to think of. So I wondered if Barr had perhaps “snookered” Trump into thinking he’d be his “Roy Cohn” when his real intentions were more honorable. Of course, once in office, Barr quickly proved me wrong.
When Barr’s handling of the Mueller Report — blatantly violating his oath of office to defend a lawless President against the rule of law — I wrote about “How Impeaching Barr Would Be a Good Strategic Step Toward Getting Trump.” The idea was two-fold: first, that Barr’s conduct clearly warranted his removal by Congress; and second, that the process of exposing what Barr had done would be a vehicle for exposing Trump’s wrong-doing (i.e. the “multiple felonies” of obstruction, and other misconduct outlined by the Mueller Report), thus laying the groundwork for the more important impeachment — that of the President himself — to follow.
Whether that strategy was sound or not, the impeachment card has already been played and I can’t see anyway that it would be a good idea for the House to pursue impeaching Barr or anyone else between now and the election.
But meanwhile, speaking of the election, Barr is at it again: to wit, Barr’s announcement this week that no investigations into any candidates/campaigns in the 2020 Elections could be pursued without the written approval of the Attorney General.
On MSNBC last night, former federal prosecutor John Flannery argued strongly that Barr’s assuming complete control over whether any such investigations are conducted rings a loud alarm bell. Whether or not such a policy would be appropriate in abstract — and he didn’t much like that impingement on the independence of U.S. Attorneys around the nation — having Barr assume such control compounded the current jeopardy to our upcoming elections in view of
it just having been proved that this President, now running for re-election, sought to cheat in the 2020 election by enlisting the help — indeed, by extorting the help — of a foreign nation; and this Attorney General has demonstrated in numerous ways already, in his brief time in that office, that his priority is not the impartial rendering of justice but making himself a weapon and a protector for this President’s use.So the question arises: what can anybody — more particularly, what can the House Judiciary Committee, which has the oversight role over the Department of Justice — do about this?
I do not claim to know what kind of powers are wielded by the House Judiciary Committee over the Attorney General, by virtue of its oversight role. But I can imagine they might include the following, which — if they are within their powers -- I would commend to the consideration by Committee Chairman Gerry Nadler and his excellent Democratic colleagues on the Committee:
1) Requiring that all such applications for Justice Department investigations, submitted to the Attorney General (from federal prosecutors or the FBI) be automatically forwarded also to the House Judiciary Committee; or at least
2) Requiring that the House Judiciary Committee be informed immediately of all such applications that are blocked by the Attorney General.
Perhaps there are other, better ways that the House Judiciary Committee can assure that this latest move by Barr will not be an instrument in the corrupting of the 2020 election, which is central to the integrity of the American constitutional order.
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Some offerings:
Having spent the previous forty years investigating the forces that have shaped the human world over the millennia, I have felt compelled since 2004 to turn my full-time attention to understanding and calling out the destructive force that has taken over the political right in America over the past generation.
Here are a few articles, written in the past several years, that expressed something important to me about how our situation is to be understood and about the experience of living in times of such darkness and danger — times of a downward slide of American democracy and of a rise in the power of a political force that consistently works to make our world more broken.
“Cry the Benighted Country” – on the way the balance of power between the forces of “good” and “evil” (or life-serving vs. life-degrading, or constructive vs. destructive, or wholeness vs. brokenness) can shift in a society, and how over the past generation we have witnessed an adverse shift in America. “When Evil Rises Among a People” – on the painful and frightening experience of watching people who had seemed good and decent get transformed into something that serves “Evil.” (It starts with a stunning scene from Cabaret.) (And one piece to which I’m quite attached, representing a much-needed break from dealing with all the darkness of these times, is “The Sacred Space of Lovers.”)A compendium of op/eds that I’ve written weekly to challenge the conservatives, among whom I live, can be found here. And a compendium of op/eds I’ve written to challenge Liberal America to see this battle for what it is -- and to fight it as it needs to be fought -- can be found here.
In 2019, in an effort to convey the Big Picture of the dynamics driving the story of our species -- generally, and that also illuminates specifically the meaning of the current American “Trump Crisis” -- I published a series of three op/eds under the banner “WHAT SHAPES OUR WORLD.” The three pieces – each dedicated to one big idea – were:
Evolution: A Most Elegant and Illuminating IdeaHow the Rise of Civilization Brought the Reign of PowerGood Battling Evil