Of course William Barr is right in his blunt assessment of Donald Trump.
“He’s like … a defiant 9-year-old kid who is always pushing the glass toward the edge of the table, defying his parents to stop him from doing it,” the former attorney general said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” when asked whether his former boss would “put the country at risk” if he’s elected again.
Since Trump’s recent indictment on 37 federal charges related to his alleged retention and mishandling of classified documents, Barr’s been making the rounds to bury the man he once treated more like a personal client than a president. Before he resigned as attorney general two weeks before the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection, Barr spent nearly two years as Trump’s chief enabler and wartime consigliere who settled scores and kneecapped anyone whom Trump perceived as a threat.
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When Trump weaponized the Justice Department, Barr sharpened himself into the most poisonous arrow in Trump’s quiver. But now he’s on a reputation rehab tour — one that predictably avoids any mention of all the ways Barr empowered Trump to ignore laws or norms that got in his way.
Because he’s being direct about the seriousness of the federal indictment, as well as Trump’s utter lack of character, there’s a tendency to give Barr more credit than he deserves. Yes, he’s refusing to give Trump a pass — this time. But that doesn’t mean Barr himself deserves a pass on how he willingly became what Trump always wanted — another Roy Cohn, the vicious New York lawyer (later disbarred) who mentored a young Trump in the duplicitous and ruthless pursuit of power.
Not long after becoming attorney general, Barr misrepresented the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into allegations of collusion between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. In an opinion criticizing Barr, a federal judge wrote that he “made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary.”
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Barr dropped DOJ’s criminal case against Michael Flynn, the disgraced former general and Trump’s first national security adviser, who pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators. After defying several congressional subpoenas, Barr was held in criminal contempt of Congress.
At a DOJ ceremony for police officers and prosecutors in 2019, Barr hinted that if “communities” protesting against police violence “don’t give that support and respect” he believed “law enforcement deserves,” they “might find themselves without the police protection they need.”
Then in the midst of demonstrations after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, it was Barr who personally ordered the violent dispersal of protesters in Lafayette Park near the White House. Closely trailed by Barr and members of his administration, Trump made the short walk to St. John’s Episcopal Church and held up a Bible in a bizarre moment that would have been hilariously stupid if it weren’t so alarmingly authoritarian.
But don’t expect Barr to talk about, explain, or apologize for any of that on his current redemption effort — especially not while he’s still defending his appalling actions during his DOJ tenure.
In a recent op-ed for The Free Press, a right-wing blog, Barr claimed Trump “has been the victim of witch hunts by obsessive enemies willing to do anything to bring him down” and that he “witnessed firsthand the unfair and venomous treatment he, and those in his administration, often received.”
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This is self-serving nonsense, and Barr knows it. But concerning Trump’s current legal woes, he added that the former president is in “a situation entirely of his own making” and that efforts to “present Trump as a victim in the Mar-a-Lago document affair is cynical political propaganda.”
“For the sake of the country, our party, and a basic respect for the truth,” Barr wrote, “it is time that Republicans come to grips with the hard truths about President Trump’s conduct and its implications.”
Barr is refashioning himself as the MAGA whisperer, the last Republican willing to put Trump in his place and liberate the party from his toxicity. In the process he’s trying to rewrite the first paragraphs of his own legacy as the henchman who allowed Trump to believe himself beholden to no law.
On “Face the Nation,” Barr called Trump “a consummate narcissist” and “a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s, his personal gratification of his, you know, of his ego.”
In a nation that loves to let powerful white men wash themselves clean without any admission of wrongdoing, the same should be said about Barr who, like his former boss, showed greater regard for power and his ego than the laws he solemnly swore to uphold.
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Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @reneeygraham.
