Dirty but not dirty enough for Trump, by Josh Marshall

February 19

I’ve just been reading through the Times story that dropped this afternoon. You should definitely read it. The one big news break is the reference to Trump trying to get Matt Whitaker, former possibly acting Attorney General, to put Geoff Berman, US Attorney in Manhattan, back in charge of the various investigations of Trump and his associates emanating from that office. Besides that the real value is how it pulls together so many different strands of Trump’s campaign of obstruction now going back over two years. It ends with Bob Barr taking over as Attorney General. This brought my attention back to something I’ve discussed a few times in recent weeks: Barr’s own history trying to abuse his power as Attorney General in the final weeks before the 1992 presidential election on behalf of then-President Bush.

I mentioned this over the weekend. You can actually see the full story, or at least my write-up of some key details in this piece in Salon that I wrote way back in 2002.

The relevant point is that Barr acted in bad faith but was also careful to do so in a largely defensible way. He was smart. He wasn’t clumsy or stupid. He was careful simply to push harder than he otherwise might have in taking actions that were in themselves, at least arguably, legitimate. He actually went out of his way, when calling subordinates and asking them to hurry up and start an investigation against then candidate Bill Clinton, to say explicitly some version of: ‘Let’s be clear, I’m definitely not asking you to start any investigation you wouldn’t otherwise be starting.’

It’s been something of a mystery to me why Barr even took the job. After all, he’s in his late 60s, at the height of the DC conservative legal establishment, a very wealthy man. Does he really want or need to tie himself to President Trump? I’m not quite sure why the answer to that question was Yes. But the past should be prologue. He’s there to help the President but I doubt he’ll do anything that gets his hands really dirty.

So what should we expect?

I’ve been trying to take stock over the last few days of the rising number of investigations and legal perils swirling around the President. You have new investigations from Capitol Hill into what have been until now fairly secondary scandals or mysteries, stuff like Flynn’s scheme to build nuclear power plants across the Middle East. There’s a deepening investigation into the Inaugural Committee that Tom Barrack was in charge of. Barrack seems to have been tied up in that nuke plant effort with Flynn, as I noted here. Barrack was also the connection that brought Manafort to the Trump campaign, the guy who kept his deputy (Rick Gates) employed in various capacities down until the day he was indicted. There’s also the blossoming investigations out of New York. There’s a lot.

My own best guess is that there are two many different lines of inquiry, both from within the criminal justice system and from Capitol Hill, for someone like Barr to do too much about. But I’m pretty sure he’ll do his best to do so where he can.

Here Whitaker is probably a good guide.

He quite clearly got plucked out of nowhere and put in charge of the Justice Department because Trump thought he’d do his dirty work. He turned out to be willing but not able. He quickly got caught up in his own scandals and had enough trouble protecting himself to worry about protecting Trump. As I’ve argued before, he was really in over his head with Rosenstein, Mueller, et al. What’s most notable about Trump asking him to put Geoff Berman back in charge of the Manhattan investigations isn’t really the ask. Of course he asked. Trump can’t stop trying to interfere. Criminality for Trump is characterological. What’s notable is that it at least seems that Whitaker didn’t act on Trump’s demand. These things are simply more complicated than Trump seems to get. Berman had already recused himself. He’d need to formally un-recuse himself and Whitaker would need to tell him to do it. That wasn’t going to happen. In the end I suspect we’ll see something similar with Barr. Whitaker was a nobody and a second rate player. Barr is neither. His heart will be in the right place, or rather in the wrong place. But Trump will want and demand more than he’ll be able to provide.

I’ll try to follow up next with an overview of the various emerging investigatory threads.