What Barr Did Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by David Kurtz

What Barr Did
Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by David Kurtz / 4h
There is still so much to unpack.

We’ll have more later on what exactly Attorney General William Barr did by taking it upon himself to decide not to prosecute President Trump for obstruction of justice. But the enormity of the decision — and how much power it seized from special counsel Robert Mueller, Congress, and future prosecutors after Trump leaves office — was deliberately obscured by the notoriously misleading-in-hindsight Barr letter of March 24 and the delay in releasing the redacted Mueller report.

The Times’ Charlie Savage and its graphics team did a masterful job of comparing the Barr letter’s strategically misleading excerpts of the Mueller report to the actual Mueller report. You should give it a look.

Barr’s power grab to protect the president is breathtaking and would have been much more difficult to pull off politically if it had been done openly and transparently. Instead, as we all now know, it was slow-rolled over a period of weeks.

The March 24 letter remains, and may for all time be, Barr’s singular act of complicity in Trump’s corrupt presidency. But go back and read his first letter, the one from March 22 notifying Congress that he had received Mueller’s report.

It is steeped in the arcana of the Justice Department regulations establishing the special counsel and governing his conduct. It reads as if Barr is hewing closely to those regulations, neither wanting to do more than they allow, nor less. Cautious, prudential, sober. Where he deviates from the regulations, he wanted the public to know, he was doing so in the interest of greater transparency. He wanted credit for that.

Nowhere in the March 22 letter to Congress does Barr say — nor does he suggest or even hint — that he is about to disregard Mueller’s entire approach to the obstruction investigation and take that decision as his own to make. Barr portrayed himself as merely a conduit, a messenger as it were, relaying the Mueller findings to Congress.

Recall the first Barr letter was on a Friday. The infamous second letter, full of the misleading characterizations and misdirection that we now know concealed the substance of what was happening, landed two days later on a Sunday. In the intervening 48 some-odd hours, Barr stood those same DOJ regulations on their heads, disregarding the independence of the special counsel and upending Mueller’s careful approach to the obstruction question, which was itself constrained by the pre-existing OLC guidelines on indicting a sitting president.

In Barr’s telling, it was Mueller’s failure to make a call on obstruction that forced him to step in. We now know that wasn’t true. In Barr’s telling, the lack of an underlying collusion crime meant there was no motive for Trump to obstruct justice. We now know Mueller found substantial evidence that Trump had other motives to obstruct justice.  In Barr’s telling, Trump’s “sincere belief” that Mueller’s probe was undermining his presidency absolved him of the corrupt intent necessary to sustain obstruction of justice charges. We now know that Mueller assessed that same belief as itself motive for Trump to obstruct the probe.

Barr has been everything Donald Trump wanted in an attorney general. It will take the Justice Department years to recover.

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