Despite the fact that William Barr had made public comments denigrating the Mueller investigation and clearly auditioned for the job with a spurious memo suggesting that it was almost impossible for a president to obstruct justice, he was confirmed as Donald Trump’s new attorney general with little difficulty. After what had happened with Jeff Sessions, it was understood that Trump would never again stand for an AG recusing himself from any investigation of the president. So everyone knew that Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election would be in the hands of someone who was unlikely to be an honest broker.
Nonetheless, most of us gave Barr the benefit of the doubt. I wrote about Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who had been a conservative supporter of Richard Nixon. He was coerced into taking the job by White House chief of staff Alexander Haig, who told him, “We need you, Leon” — assuming he would be loyal to the president. When Jaworski saw the evidence against Nixon, however, he was appalled and moved forward with the investigation. I thought maybe that could happen with Barr too.
I should have known better. Barr was a very political attorney general during George H.W. Bush’s administration, recommending pardons for all the guilty players in the Iran-Contra case, showing that he wasn’t going to be one of those weaklings who saw the Nixon pardon as setting a bad example for the country. I should have realized that this wasn’t a case of someone who’d spent too much time watching Sean Hannity and was slightly out of it. Barr’s been a rock-solid right-winger for decades.
View the complete April 5 article by Heather Digby Parton with Salon on the AlterNet website here.