National Review Online
Tuesday, December 15, 2020
‘I cannot do my job here at the department with a
constant background commentary that undercuts me.” That was Attorney General
Bill Barr ten months ago, bemoaning President Trump’s penchant for spouting off
about ongoing Justice Department investigations and prosecutions. The tweets in
particular made it “impossible,” Barr said, for him to direct federal law
enforcement with the necessary appearance of non-partisanship.
The “background commentary” never ceased. On Monday, it
led to the president’s losing one of his most effective cabinet officials, one
who served Trump, the Justice Department, and the nation admirably — better,
obviously, than his boss will ever appreciate.
The attorney general’s public exasperation in February
over the president’s outbursts was rare, but the situation was all too typical.
He found himself caught between, on the one side, subordinate prosecutors who
were recommending a draconian sentence for Roger Stone and, on the other, a
willful president who wanted the case to disappear. Barr rejected both Trump’s
demands and the push by the prosecutors for a sentence befitting a mafia
leg-breaker. He recommended a sentence in exactly the 40-month range that the
judge, no Trump or Stone fan, ended up embracing.
This was a second tour of duty as AG for Barr, who served
President George H. W. Bush 30 years ago. He is smart and savvy in the ways of
Washington, so he knew what he was getting into. He ends his tenure right where
he’s been all along: whipsawed between a president’s unreasonable demands that
he politicize important investigations, and media-Democrat smears that he has
politicized the Justice Department merely by conducting those investigations.
The Russiagate investigation, which Barr assigned to
Connecticut U.S. attorney (and now special counsel) John Durham shortly after
taking the helm in early 2019, and the probe of Hunter Biden are entirely
legitimate and should be seen through.
There is no doubt that Russiagate involves serious
official misconduct — as attested by multiple DOJ inspector-general
investigations and, so far, the guilty plea of an FBI lawyer who falsified an
investigative document.
As for Hunter Biden and his associates, the media’s
shameful pre-election suppression of information about his shady dealings and
suspect streams of foreign income couldn’t bury the story or change the fact
that the Justice Department was on it — as should have been obvious from
reports that Hunter’s infamous laptops were seized months ago by a grand-jury
subpoena (which necessarily means there was a criminal investigation) and that
witnesses had been questioned by the FBI.
Still, during the campaign Trump whined that the Justice
Department and FBI were AWOL. They weren’t. Barr was ensuring that the Biden
investigation, like the Russiagate investigation, proceeded without political
interference or becoming political fodder in the run-up to a presidential
campaign.
Barr was the ideal attorney general for this toxic
environment. He is a constitutional scholar with a well-developed conception of
unitary executive power (the principle that the president runs and is
accountable for the actions of the entire executive branch, including its
law-enforcement components), at the same time he’s a staunch defender of
Justice Department rules and norms. He steered the department through the
Mueller investigation, preventing adventurous prosecutors in Mueller’s shop
from pursuing ill-conceived theories of obstruction of justice while, in the
interest of transparency, releasing the whole Mueller report to the public.
It was also appropriate for Barr to direct a Justice
Department review, conducted by an experienced career prosecutor, of the
investigation and prosecution of Michael Flynn. The resulting documents
revealed that there was no proper predicate for investigating Flynn.
The attorney general revived the principle that the Constitution
does not disappear in times of crisis or in reaction to fashionable trends. The
Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division filed lawsuits and amicus briefs
seeking to vindicate religious and economic liberties against draconian COVID
restrictions imposed by state governments. It defended the equal-protection
rights of biological women and girls to compete fairly — i.e., against each
other, not biological males — in sports. And as violent crime spiked this
summer, the Justice Department mobilized federal-state task forces to meet the
challenge.
Barr was long a Trump favorite, but it never ends well
with the president. After the election, Trump decried the Justice Department’s
alleged failure to investigate voter fraud (after Barr caught flak for
encouraging district U.S. attorneys to investigate any substantial allegations
of it). The president’s bluster moved the attorney general to assure the public
that the DOJ had indeed been investigating — it simply had not found compelling
evidence of fraud, certainly none that would alter the outcome of the election.
Between that and the “failure” to publicize the Biden and Russiagate
investigations, Barr’s days were numbered.
At 70, with an accomplished career already, Barr did not
need the gig. He consistently maintained that he would not be bullied by press
criticism, partisan attacks, or the president’s pressure campaigns. He came
back to serve an institution he reveres, and he leaves on his own terms with
his head held high.
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