Barr operates more as a Trump’s attorney than the nation’s

Carl P. Leubsdorf, Tribune News Service

At times, Jeff Sessions proved a pleasant surprise as attorney general by resisting some of President Donald Trump’s most outrageous demands. By contrast, his successor, William Barr, has been a distinct disappointment.

That conclusion partially reflects the incorrect expectation that Barr, who held the same post under President George H. W. Bush, was an establishment moderate like Bush who would champion the historic independence of the Justice Department.

Instead, Barr has operated more as Trump’s attorney than the nation’s, undertaking a range of questionable acts from his premature misrepresentation of Robert Mueller’s report on Trump’s 2016 campaign to his incessant pursuit of Trump’s conspiracy theories of how the probe began.

This week, Barr got something of a comeuppance from within the very department he runs when its inspector general, rejecting his stated view, concluded the FBI acted properly and without political bias in deciding to begin a counter-intelligence probe of the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties with Russia. The IG also rejected Barr’s claims the FBI spied on the campaign.

Barr, taking a stance likely to please his presidential patron, promptly disagreed with the findings, insisting the FBI began its investigation “on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken.”

He got some backing when US Attorney John Durham, whom he named to probe the broader question of whether US intelligence agencies acted improperly in launching the Russia probe, also questioned the IG’s conclusion, though the FBI director named by Trump, James Wray, accepted it. Barr reiterated in an interview Tuesday with NBC News’ Pete Williams that “very flimsy” evidence was used to start the Russia probe, adding that Durham’s investigation would be far more inclusive than the IG’s. Earlier this fall, Barr gave an insight into his own beliefs that showed they were more in line with the GOP’s religious conservatives and Trump’s view of unrestrained executive power than with the traditional conservative view of a limited federal government.

At Notre Dame Law School, he called for a resurgence of religious and moral education as one way to counter the forces of “militant secularism,” which he blamed for such things as “the wreckage of the family” and “an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic.”

And at the Federalist Society, a prominent conservative legal group, he portrayed the American Revolution as more a struggle against “an overweening parliament,” than against King George’s “monarchial tyranny,” defending the primacy of a strong executive against “the knee-jerk tendency to see the legislative and judicial branches as the good guys protecting society from a rapacious would-be autocrat.”

This was hardly the William Barr official Washington expected. When Trump named him to succeed Sessions last year, news accounts stressed his service under Bush and his establishment credentials as a prominent Washington corporate lawyer. When Trump named Barr, Democrats were chiefly concerned if he would let Mueller complete his report unimpeded, given his prior criticism of the political makeup of the special counsel’s legal team, and commit to making his report public.

Ten days later, The Wall Street Journal reported Barr submitted an unsolicited 20-page memo to the Justice Department the previous June, contending Mueller’s probe of potential obstruction of justice was “legally unsupported.”

That may have been one factor that attracted Trump to Barr and signaled the president might get the kind of supportive attorney general he had long sought, someone who could be “my Roy Cohn,” a reference to the Joe McCarthy acolyte who did Trump’s legal bidding for many years.

Trump’s initial Cabinet included some members with questionable qualifications and others — like Secretary of Defence James Mattis, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Sessions — who sometimes stood up to the president’s demands for unquestioning loyalty.

Their replacements are, for the most part, less independent, none more so than Attorney General William Barr.