Since William Barr became Attorney General, I’ve written (I believe) three pieces calling for Barr to be impeached. The ways that Barr has disqualified himself are numerous:
What Barr did to protect Trump from the Mueller Report — misrepresenting it, delaying its release, withholding parts of it — gave sufficient reason for finding that he’d violated his oath of office and for his removal. Then the way he’s abused his powers to turn the Department of Justice into a shield to protect Trump’s allies and a sword to smite Trump’s rivals is, by itself, more than enough.
And then, most recently, as I suggested in a piece titled “A Possible Urgent New Reason AG Barr Must Be Impeached,” Barr’s actions and words gave good reason to worry that “Barr [might be] emerging as a key player in a virtual coup d’etat to maintain Donald Trump in power (in the event he is defeated in the upcoming presidential election).”
Throughout Barr’s time heading the Department of Justice, it has seemed that there’s virtually nothing that Barr would not do in the service of this lawless and corrupt President who is willing to sacrifice anything (like the Constitution) and anybody (like the hundreds of thousands Americans dead in this pandemic) to maintain himself in power.
But something seems to have changed.
One sign of the change is that Trump, in his escalating desperation, has been publicly castigating his Attorney General — Trump’s erstwhile criminal accomplice — for failing to take all the extreme actions Trump wants taken.
For example — as always, without providing any basis whatever -- Trump accuses both Obama (Trump’s hated predecessor) and Biden (Trump’s feared challenger, to whom Trump is losing) of “the greatest political crime in the history of our country.” Trump now declares publicly that he wants Barr to indict these rivals for those supposed unspecified “crimes,” and is frustrated that it has not happened.
And then there’s that investigation — employing a U.S. Attorney, John Durham — concocted to punish those who dared to investigate Trump’s connection with Putin’s Russian regime. Trump has wanted Barr to come up with some big (and likely phony) smear that would hurt Biden and help Trump in time for the Election.
But Barr has lately “told Republicans [the results of that investigation] will not be ready before the Nov. 3 election.” And, as the Washington Post reports, Trump has expressed his “disappointment” with Barr for failing to deliver the desired October Surprise to land a blow against Biden and Trump’s other enemies.
So what’s going on here?
At one level, perhaps it can be argued that, as Trump’s political position becomes increasingly desperate, Trump’s demands are becoming increasingly unrealistic. (Like the public call for indicting Biden and Obama.) As demands get crazier, even an unchanged AG Barr might understandably decline to make moves that cross a line beyond which he will not go.
But I suspect that something else may be happening, that it is not just the nature of the demands but Barr himself that is changing.
According to this interpretation, as Barr sees the coming collapse of the Trump power, as he sees the Bad Ship Trump sinking, like many rats before him who have had to deal with a sinking ship, Barr is abandoning ship.
Admittedly, the evidence for a major shift in Barr’s posture is sketchy. But between Trump’s publicly pressuring and complaining — subjecting Barr to the JeffSessions treatment -- there is some evidence pointing in that direction.
And it makes some sense for now being the time for such an abandonment, with Trump weakened in so many ways and running out of time to turn anything around. With Trump weakened — by a widening gap in the polls, by the nearly biblical justice of a Coronavirus outbreak striking the White House, by his own increasingly erratic behavior, and by Trump’s own physically depleted state as he seeks to recover from his own Covid infection — an opportunist like Barr might reasonably compute that he has more to lose by remaining tied to this toxic President all the way to a catastrophic end than by stepping back from his role as accomplice to the vanquished as a new group comes to power.
So admittedly, there’s no certainty about any such shift in Barr. But it certainly would be good news if this interpretation were valid. I.e., the nation would be safer if Barr has decided that any effort Trump might make to overthrow American democracy (to maintain himself in power) is doomed to failure.
(Of all the levers of power available to Trump to steal or overturn or disregard the election, it is those wielded by the Department of Justice under this worst of all U.S. Attorneys General that worried me most.)
Maybe Barr’s thinking that if he doesn’t want to spend his final years behind bars, he’d better stay out of the coup d’etat business.
We can apparently assume that Trump will be making desperate calls to others to commit crimes against our constitutional order. The more those calls fall on deaf ears — the more those calls reveal an isolated and impotent howling Trump, stranded by the abandonment of his Republican enablers — the better for the nation.