In the years after Watergate, Justice Department officials — from both parties — worked hard to banish partisan cronyism from the department. Their goal was to make it the least political, most independent part of the executive branch.
“Our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose,” Edward Levi, Gerald Ford’s attorney general, said at the time. Griffin Bell, later appointed to the same job by Jimmy Carter, described the department as “a neutral zone in the government, because the law has to be neutral.”
Attorney General William Barr clearly rejects this principle. He’s repeatedly put a higher priority on protecting his boss, President Trump, than on upholding the law in a neutral way. He did so in his letter last month summarizing Robert Mueller’s investigation and then again in a bizarre prebuttal news conference yesterday. As
The Times editorial board wrote, Barr yesterday “behaved more like the president’s defense attorney than the nation’s top law-enforcement officer.”
Throughout his tenure, Barr has downplayed or ignored the voluminous evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing — his lies to the American people, his willingness to work with a hostile foreign country during a presidential campaign, his tolerance of extensive criminal behavior among his staff and his repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation. Barr even claimed that Trump “fully cooperated” with that investigation, which Vox’s
Ezra Klein notes is “an outright lie.”
Since he took office, Trump has made clear that he wants an attorney general who acts as first an enforcer of raw power and only second as an enforcer of federal law. In Barr, Trump has found his man. Together, they have cast aside more than four decades worth of Justice Department ideals and instead adopted the approach of Richard Nixon.
New York magazine’s
Jonathan Chait argues that Barr’s behavior is grounds for impeachment — of Barr. “The Justice Department is an awesome force that holds the power to enable the ruling party to commit crimes with impunity, or to intimidate and smear the opposing party with the taint of criminality,” Chait writes. “Barr has revealed his complete unfitness for this awesome task.”
“Barr’s summaries of Mueller’s findings, it turns out, didn’t just tighten up the findings. They misrepresented key points,” writes Vox’s
Laura McGann, who compared Barr’s letter and press conference to the actual Mueller report.
The Washington Post’s
Harry Litman points out that Barr’s deputy, Rod Rosenstein, has helped enable this behavior, which means that Rosenstein has also helped to undermine the post-Nixon Justice Department norms. “Rosenstein will be remembered not just for a lonely effort to stand up to an assault from Trump and congressional Republicans, plus his original, commendable decision to appoint Mueller, but also for stumbles in judgment along the way,” Litman writes.
The Atlantic’s
Yoni Appelbaum summarizes the Mueller report and argues that it is effectively an impeachment referral. The New Yorker’s
Susan Glasser and the
Lawfare team have also published summaries. For a very different view,
Christopher Buskirk argues in The Times that the Mueller report absolves Barr and Trump and makes only the media look bad.
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