Donald Trump famously said that he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not “lose any voters.” I don’t know about that. But I’m confident that he wouldn’t lose Bill Barr.
Execution privilege, Barr would probably call it. He’d release a statement or hold a news conference to say that Trump had a spastic trigger finger or was triggered by Adam Schiff or was set up by those dastardly Ukrainians, who are never up to any good. Such is the magnitude of Barr’s servility, the doggedness of his deference. He’s the president’s moral launderer. Trump does evil, and Barr washes him clean.
As attorney general, he’s supposed to be the nation’s lawyer. But he has bought into the autocratic delusion that Trump equals America, that national interest and presidential prerogative are inextricably intertwined. So he’s Trump’s advocate, come hell or high crimes, as surely as Pat Cipollone or Rudy Giuliani is.
On Monday, showing fresh contempt for the people who work under him in the Justice Department, Barr renounced a determination by the department’s inspector general that the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia was legitimate and that anti-Trump bias was not its animating force. He did this instantly.
And then, on Tuesday, did it again, with even less subtlety and more sanctimony. “It was a travesty,” he said of the investigation, and he was speaking not just of the sloppiness and haste of some of the FBI’s actions, with which the inspector general also took issue. He was dismissing the whole effort as rotten.
It was an eerie echo of his efforts last spring, when he sought to neuter Robert Mueller’s findings about the Trump campaign’s openness to Russian help and the president’s attempts to obstruct justice. Give Barr points for consistency. He has bought fully into the idea that the zeal of Trump’s detractors matters more than the presidents’ abuses of power.
But what of the Constitution? What of common decency? Barr isn’t concerning himself with those. To do so would call into question the honor of serving in this administration, the compliment of holding the job that Trump gave him. And he wants that compliment. That pedestal. He prefers to see himself as a holy warrior than as an unholy dupe.
To appreciate his perspective, you must travel back two months, to the University of Notre Dame, where he delivered a speech that garnered some headlines but not nearly enough of them.
You should read it. You should savor its grandiosity — it has references to the dawn of homo sapiens, the twilight of the Judeo-Christian order, Edmund Burke, James Madison — so that you can understand his current overreach, born of his certainty that he knows better than the rest of the body politic and is called to heal us.
You should note his remarks’ obsession with morality and you should try not to laugh, the same way you stifle chuckles when you’re reminded that Mike Pompeo is a putatively worshipful Christian and you try to square that with how he abetted the persecution of Marie Yovanovitch, leaves his State Department charges twisting in the wind and genuflects before a false prophet. In Trump he trusts.
You should dwell on the part of Barr’s jeremiad where he says that “men are subject to powerful passions and appetites and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbors and the community.” Ruthless? Roughshod? That’s Trump in an alliterative nutshell, but Barr seemed to be perversely oblivious to that. He was making a case for Trump’s presidency.
The wonder of this wretched moment has never been the existence and stench of a bad egg in the Oval Office. That’s hardly strange, given how ably shamelessness serves ambition. The wonder is how many other bad eggs the current president has assembled or hatched. The wonder is this fluffy, funky omelet of unscrupulousness.
All these supposedly godly men — Barr, Pompeo, Mike Pence, Ben Carson, Rick Perry and more — cluster around such a demonstrably godless one. They rationalize that Trump’s indulgence of certain religious factions absolves him of his sins. Barr is the principal agent of that absolution.
He’s also a paragon of hypocrisy, telling Pete Williams of NBC News that the FBI investigation of Trump’s campaign was an ominous abuse of government power for partisan aims. That description better suits the conduct for which Trump is about to be impeached. I don’t know how Barr kept a straight face.
Actually, I do. Since betrothing himself to Trump, he has had ample practice. In the Notre Dame speech, without any palpable sense of irony, he urged a “moral renaissance” and delivered this priceless line: “No society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity.” I agree.
In our society, impeachment is one of those means. The law is another. And if Barr could dig out his conscience from under all those layers of ego, he’d see that the rapacious individual in direst need of restraint is the one he’s letting roam free.
Frank Bruni
Frank Bruni is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times.
