It’s been quite a week in Donald Trump’s great post-impeachment vengeance crusade. The final vote in the Senate was just nine days ago — but he has hit the ground running. While the Democrats still seem to be paralyzed by the verdict they knew was coming, there seems to be the beginning of some institutional blowback gathering within the government.
We went through the strange and inexplicable John Bolton charade during the impeachment trial. The former national security adviser obviously leaked information about what he knew to the New York Times but has refused to come forward personally to tell what he knows for self-serving reasons, the most important of which being that he wants to sell his book. His revelations were interesting but proved to be irrelevant to the proceedings.
A couple of weeks ago former White House chief of staff John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, made a bit of a splash when he said publicly that he believed Bolton. This week Kelly really let go, criticizing Trump for his humiliating mistreatment of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and strongly condemning his recent pardons of accused war criminals. He isn’t the first former military official to do so. Former Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, resigned over that and reportedly the commanding officer of the Navy SEALs will retire early for the same reason. All of this suggests that there may be more dissension at the Pentagon over Trump’s inappropriate interventions in military matters.
But the institution that seems to be in open rebellion, at long last, is the Department of Justice, which Trump has been treating as his personal protection racket. This week saw four federal prosecutors withdraw from the Roger Stone case after one of the most nakedly political acts so far by Attorney General Bill Barr, which is really saying something. One of them resigned from DOJ altogether.
As I noted earlier, it appeared that Justice, following the sentencing guidelines, had asked for a sentence of seven to nine years for Trump’s old friend. When the president got wind of this he tweeted angrily that it was a miscarriage of justice. Lo and behold, the next morning the department announced that it would rescind that recommendation, which everyone naturally saw as a political decision. Trump tweeting his congratulations to Barr for doing so just came as confirmation of the obvious.
The rumblings from the legal community have become deafening, even from some people who are longtime Republicans and close associates of Barr:
Ayer worked directly under Barr in the George H.W. Bush administration.
Even Federalist Society members are anonymously admitting to the press that this all looks bad for Barr. That’s something no right-wing lawyer can ignore.
When you put together this latest blatant political interference with the fact that Barr had unceremoniously removed the U.S. attorney for the D.C. district, which has been handling Stone’s case as well as others of interest to the president, including the case of former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, it apparently became impossible to overlook the corruption any longer. That former U.S. attorney, Jessie Liu, whose nomination to a post in the Treasury Department was abruptly withdrawn on Wednesday — almost certainly at Trump’s direction — resigned from the government on Thursday.
It seems clear that a true insurrection was brewing in the department because late on Thursday, Barr went to ABC News and admitted that he had personally made the decision to intervene in Stone’s sentencing recommendation, claiming he did so before Trump had tweeted out his feelings on the issue. He seemed to think that was the main issue that concerned people (which it wasn’t), and went on to complain about the president’s tweets making him look bad:
Nobody believes that Bill Barr needs a presidential tweet to know what he’s supposed to do. Everyone in America knows that Trump believes he and his cronies are above the law, and that he wants to put his enemies in jail. And no one has been more accommodating to Trump’s wishes than his attorney general, which is why the Washington legal community is up in arms.
You can see why Trump may have thought that tweeting about Justice Department business was fine in any case. He’s been doing it for years. Just the other day, Barr himself was in the front row clapping and smiling as Trump spent an hour venting about impeachment and listing his enemies, including the “top scum at the FBI,” against whom he vowed revenge. He had no reason to suspect that Barr was concerned about “integrity,” a concept that is as foreign to Donald Trump as “compassion” or “dignity.”
Frankly, if it weren’t for the fact that even some of his own cronies were suddenly distancing themselves over his blatant fealty to Trump’s personal interests, Barr undoubtedly wouldn’t care either. He isn’t worried that his friends will see him as Trump’s Roy Cohn. He’s afraid they will think he is incompetent at getting the job done.
I don’t buy that this was all carefully choreographed by Barr and the White House, however. Barr may have signaled to Trump that he needed to make some kind of statement to calm the troops and Trump may have agreed. But there is no way that Trump OK’d Barr calling him a bully or telling him what he can and cannot do. In fact, while the White House issued a statement saying that Trump hadn’t minded what Barr said, it very pointedly said that Trump would keep tweeting because he has freedom of speech like everyone else.
I suspect Trump is furious over this. Lou Dobbs of Fox Business, one of Trump’s most loyal media mouthpieces, certainly was, turning angrily on Barr only a day after praising him extensively. It is simply not believable that Trump has suddenly developed the emotional maturity and strategic intelligence to accept a subordinate publicly insulting him and challenging his decisions in order to advance a larger agenda. Having that happen on the same day that he heaped praise on Barr in an interview with Geraldo Rivera had to sting.
This is the first rift between Trump and his attorney general, and it will be interesting to see what happens next. According to the Washington Post, Trump has been raging for weeks, demanding that Barr lock up his mortal enemies, including James Comey and McCabe in particular. The New York Times has reported that Barr’s hand-picked special counsel, John Durham, is looking to charge members of the intelligence community in his investigation of the origins of the Russia probe, and that those might include former CIA director John Brennan.
Will Barr try to smooth things over with Trump by taking such rash actions? Can he get away with that, with DOJ staff in active rebellion? After months of toadying and appeasing and giving the president everything he wanted, Barr is now walking a familiar Trump tightrope. As John Kelly knows, that doesn’t tend to end well. We’ll have to see if Barr is more skilled at balancing on it than all those who came before him.
Update: The DOJ announced this morning that they will not criminally charge McCabe. Do you think this guy is happy about that?
Trump has repeatedly complained about FBI Director Christopher A. Wray in recent months, saying that Wray has not done enough to change the FBI’s culture, purge the bureau of people who are disloyal to him or change policies after violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
He has also tweeted many times that he thinks Comey should be charged with crimes, and he was particularly upset that no charges were filed over the former FBI director’s handling of memos about his interactions with Trump. An inspector general report faulted the former director for keeping some of those memos at his home and for arranging for the contents of one of the memos to be shared with a reporter after Comey was fired in 2017.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz referred Comey’s handling of the memos to prosecutors for possible criminal prosecution, but lawyers quickly determined it was not a close call and did not seek to build a case.
That sent Trump into a rage, according to people briefed on his comments. He complained so loudly and swore so frequently in the Oval Office that some of his aides discussed it for days, these people said. Trump repeatedly said that Comey deserved to be charged, according to their account.
“Can you [expletive] believe they didn’t charge him?” Trump said on the night of the decision, these people said. Trump has also wanted charges filed against Comey’s former deputy, Andrew McCabe. A separate inspector general investigation concluded that McCabe lied to investigators about his role in authorizing disclosures for a Wall Street Journal story in October 2016 about internal FBI tensions over an investigation of the Clinton Foundation. A grand jury in Washington seemed poised to make a decision on the case last year before fizzling into inaction.
Trump’s anger over the lack of charges against FBI personnel flared again in January, prompted by two unrelated developments, according to people familiar with the matter.
First, prosecutors updated their position in the case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, saying a sentence of some prison time would be appropriate. Around the same time, The Washington Post reported that U.S. Attorney John Huber in Utah — tapped years earlier to reinvestigate several issues related to vague allegations of corruption against Hillary Clinton — had quietly wound down his work after finding nothing of consequence.
Those two developments further enraged the president, according to people familiar with the discussions. These people said that while the public debate in recent days has focused on leniency for Stone, the president is more upset that the Justice Department has not been tougher on his perceived enemies.
In the president’s mind, it is unacceptable that people such as Comey and McCabe have not been charged, particularly if people such as Stone and Flynn are going to be treated harshly, these people said.