Check this out:
If it was anyone else, I would think he was threatening to resign. But that’s highly unlikely. He has been Trump’s toadie every step of the way and everyone knows it. This shows that he’s starting to feel the heat. And he’s now asking for sympathy for the fact that he’s been Trump’s top henchman and is now being held accountable for it by his own department.
He’s trying desperately to clean up his mess. In fact, he says “he can’t do his job at the department” with all this “background” noise, meaning that the president publicly giving Barr orders and spilling the beans about all their authoritarian plans is making it hard for him to have the president’s back.
It’s possible this is all pre-cooked with the White House, but according to the NY Times’ Maggie Haberman on CNN there was no heads up to the WH staff. Maybe he and Trump put this together privately but it is very hard to believe that Trump would be ok with this. He is not a strategic thinker and he’s never once done anything as savvy as let someone insult him or tell him what to do in order to achieve a larger mutual goal.
Stay tuned to see if Trump claps back. I honestly don’t know. He must realize he’ll never have a more loyal assassin than Barr. But he is pure id and maybe this mild criticism will send him over the edge.