If you believed that the Barr-Trump contretemps this week was all staged to make it appear to all the prosecutors and other Department of Justice staff that Barr is operating independently of the president and is a man of integrity, I think it’s pretty clear by now that it was just a one-day strategy:
I still maintain, as I did when it happened, that Barr may have told the president that he needed to buck up the troops but I doubt very, very seriously that Trump was happy with Barr’s lecture on the limits of presidential power, calling him a bully or saying that he shouldn’t tweet.
Remember, for Trump, substance is always irrelevant. He only cares that he is treated by his subordinates (which is everyone in the world except for Vladimir Putin) with the utmost deference, particularly in public. A minion asserting independence, even if it’s in service of the larger cause is infuriating to him.
When President Trump learned that the Justice Department was dropping a case against a former F.B.I. official whom he considered one of his longtime enemies, his immediate response was anger. As he flipped on the television Friday and watched how the story was being covered, that anger only mounted.
Since taking office, Mr. Trump has searched for an attorney general who would function much as Roy Cohn did for him as his personal lawyer and fixer in the 1970s — a warrior committed to protecting him and going after his foes. The president thought he had found that person in William P. Barr. But now, people close to Mr. Trump say, he is not so sure.
The president was cheered this week when Mr. Barr moved to reduce the sentence of a convicted presidential friend, only to be shocked when the attorney general publicly called on Mr. Trump to stop tweeting about it. And after his livid reaction to the Justice Department’s decision to drop a separate case, which he heard about without any advance notice, he learned that Mr. Barr was intervening more favorably on behalf of another presidential ally.
If Barr was seeking to reassure his troops while keeping Trump happy, he has probably failed at both:
Critics assume it is all a Kabuki dance, cynical theater meant to preserve Mr. Barr’s credibility as he executes Mr. Trump’s personal political agenda while pretending to look independent. And it is certainly true that, even now, Mr. Barr continues to demonstrate a willingness to personally take charge of cases with Mr. Trump’s interests at stake.
But insiders insist the tension is real, with potentially profound consequences for an administration that has redrawn the lines at the intersection of politics and law enforcement. Barely a week after being acquitted in a Senate impeachment trial, Mr. Trump is demanding that some of the people whose actions he believes led to his troubles be charged, convicted and sent to prison, and it is not clear that even Mr. Barr is willing or able to go as far as the president wants.
Nah. He’d be happy to do it. The problem is that he’s getting grief for it even from some of his own pals on the right who thinks the whole thing is being handled slumsily and want him to keep Trump corralled. Good luck with that.
In his only comment on the matter on Friday, Mr. Trump pushed back against Mr. Barr a day after the attorney general told ABC News that the president was making it “impossible for me to do my job” by tweeting about criminal cases and declared that he was “not going to be bullied.”
Mr. Trump cited another comment Mr. Barr made in the same interview affirming that the president had never actually asked for any specific actions in a criminal case. “This doesn’t mean that I do not have, as President, the legal right to do so, I do, but I have so far chosen not to!” Mr. Trump added. The “so far” in there, of course, hung online as a kind of sword of Damocles waiting to fall.
Only in the hours after that tweet did the news emerge that Mr. Barr’s department was dropping a case against Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy F.B.I. director blamed by Mr. Trump for his role in the investigation into Russian election interference. Two people close to the matter said the Justice Department did not give the president a heads up about the decision.
Then came the more welcome news for the Oval Office that Mr. Barr had ordered a re-examination of the case of Michael T. Flynn, the president’s former national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his contacts with Russia. The new review raised the question of whether Mr. Flynn will actually go to prison.
Mr. Trump has bitterly decried “what Flynn has gone through” while believing that Mr. McCabe has unfairly walked, people close to him said. The president on Friday was angrier about the decision not to prosecute Mr. McCabe than he was at Mr. Barr’s comments in his interview, the people said.
I predicted that too. Trump doesn’t care about Flynn. Flynn is no use to him and doesn’t know the kind of dirt that Roger Stone knows. The only reason he defended him after the guilty plea was because he could use his case to illustrate how “unfair” it is that his enemies are getting the same treatment.
He wants heads on pikes and he expects Barr to deliver them with enthusiasm. Barr has been juggling that edict with Trump’s other desire that his buddies be allowed to skate until now. The problem is that what Trump really wants is for his enemies, which includes numerous people in the Obama administration as well as all the law enforcement and DOJ officials who investigated him, to do time. Revenge and exoneration is what drives him.
I’m sure Barr is personally fine with all that. He believes in unfettered executive power and is willing to use it to defeat “the left” which he clearly sees as the enemy. But I suspect that the insurrection in the DOJ, combined with some criticism from Barr’s own Federalist Society teammates (mostly around his inability to control Trump) has made Barr belatedly recognize that Trump isn’t going to play along with any pretense of “integrity” because he doesn’t understand what it is so he can’t fake it. That raises the stakes tremendously.
Trump’s ranting publicly about all of it isn’t going to stop. And unfortunately for Barr, the DOJ appears to finally be rebelling against allowing Trump’s cronies to skate while persecuting former prosecutors and law enforcement officials for doing their jobs.
We’ve seen little integrity from top government officials so this may be the end of it. But if this is actually the beginning of a strong institutional push back from within the government, then maybe it can at least keep Trump and his henchmen off balance for a while.
Obviously, the only way to truly put an end to this madness is to defeat Trump in November. I can’t even contemplate what these people will do if he wins.