The misinformation:
William Barr's redaction of truth
Barr, previously hailed as the last institutionalist left alive in Washington, would burn up a weekend to consume the report, and release its findings in a breathtakingly short four! page! summary that would satiate critics of President* Trump, burnish Barr's sterling reputation, and calm the turbulent waters roiling the moats around House Trump. All would be well in the fullness of time.
Only it ... didn't turn out that way. What's been developing, or metastasizing, ever since in Washington and the nation has been a growing unease with Barr, President* Trump, and an increasingly brazen willingness to disregard the Constitution in the service of a single president. Barr, once the ostensible new adult on the block, has dug in his heels and refused to release the unexpurgated work product of Mueller & Co., in what looks more and more like a deal Barr has struck with Trump, a private transaction that has effectively secured for the presidential asterisk an attorney general of, literally, his very own.
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If that strikes you, after almost two years, as something of a leap into the improbable, you are not alone. Team Trump spiked the ball that weekend in what it thought was the end zone, on the days of presumed triumph in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and the possible role that government functionaries and freelancers played in that interference.
They proclaimed victory — "Hoax! No collusion! No obstruction!" — on the basis of Barr's early and strangely comprehensive determination that House Trump was in the clear on everything. The final determination would have to come after Barr had time to more fully read the report and decide on what needed to be left in, for Congress' eyes and the public, and what had to come out ... before either Congress or the public got to see it.
Barr, and by extension Trump, tore down the goal posts before the game was over. In the days to come, Barr would double down on his initial intransigence, finally announcing plans to release the Mueller report on Thursday, April 18, on Holy Thursday, just in time for the news vacuum of Easter recess, when lawmakers and government insiders would be out of town. When it was released, Barr had held the completed report, with and without redactions, for a total of 28 days.
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ONE OF the deeper, structural problems with Barr's stonewalling/slow-walking strategy, at least in terms of the public, was that Barr himself apparently doomed it to failure.
There was nothing to be defended, by Barr or Trump or anyone else, until the full report was released. The report's "conclusions" couldn't possibly satisfy the House Judiciary Committee or the public ... until the final conclusions are known.
Trump's in a trickier spot there, in a black hole of his own design. He can't talk about it without embarrassing the attorney general he's come to revere. If Trump hasn't read the full report, and it's a safe bet he hasn't, he can't possibly speak to the report's findings with anything approaching credibility.
The absence of the full unredacted Mueller report is problematic; the full report is still necessary. But the longer Barr takes to make the full report public, the more excuses and explanations he gins up before he releases the document, the more he undercuts the public's ability to believe — in him.
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“Since Congress alone has the power to take action against the president, if he has broken the law or abused his power—which is true if the Justice Department adheres to its policy of not indicting a sitting president, even if it is not settled law—Congress would by necessity need to see the evidence Mueller has gathered to determine if impeachment is warranted. If lawmakers weren’t able to see the report, then the president would effectively be immunized from accountability for wrongdoing while he is in office, putting him above the law.”
“This is a powerful argument in the battle that could ensue in the coming weeks. But it overlooks an additional constitutional basis that Congress has for reviewing the president’s conduct: Congress has a responsibility, rooted firmly in the Constitution, to safeguard the integrity of the justice system, including to prevent obstruction of justice. Therefore, Mueller’s findings are as much about whether President Donald Trump has stepped on Congress’ toes as it is about whether he broke the law.”
Rangappa again: “The full details of Mueller’s report will reveal if Trump used his power to undermine the efforts of the coequal branches to uphold the rule of law—and Congress has every right to find out.”
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ON APRIL 10, Barr made a bad situation worse. Testifying before the Senate Appropriations Committee, and without a shred of evidence to support a spurious claim, Barr said he thought “spying did occur” against the Trump 2016 campaign.
Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI official, won the metaphorical day when he said, on MSNBC, that Barr had “tossed a flash-bang grenade into the room at the behest of this president,” and was acting more and more like "a consigliere for a mob boss.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi similarly sounded the alarm. “It is dismaying that the chief law enforcement officer of this country is going off the rails.”
This followed the earlier fireworks. In a March 27 letter to Barr, Mueller faulted Barr’s March 24 four-page letter to Congress summarizing what Barr called bottom-line conclusions of the Mueller report — you know, the report that Barr never finished reading. Mueller, said Barr’s letter failed to capture the “context, nature, and substance” of the 22-month inquiry.
We shouldn't have been surprised by that reaction. How could Barr possibly offer credible “principal conclusions" of a report he hadn't read in its entirety? How could he expect lawmakers to accept it? Does he think the public would be that gullible? Four pages were just enough to distill what he knows about the report, via firsthand reading, and probably all he knows (or all he had the time to read over a weekend). And so, he couldn't let his mouth (the four-page précis) write a check his ass (the full report) couldn't cash.
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We also shouldn’t be surprised that any discontinuities with the official Barr/Trump narrative would be downplayed, or ignored altogether. Mueller, for example, noted “public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation” and strongly suggested the attorney general release the report summaries Mueller’s office had put together. Barr refused.
At an April 9 House hearing, Florida Democratic Rep. Charlie Crist asked Barr if he knew why members of Mueller’s team were frustrated with his March 24 letter. “No. I don’t,” Barr said, despite what Mueller told him, plainly and clearly, in the March 27 letter.
It all indicates that at long last, Trump has found his Roy Cohn, the adviser lurking just out of view willing to offer toxic counsel, no matter how it conflicts with Justice Department past practice, or with the truth.
Image credits: Barr top: via The Daily Beast. Barr lower: pool feed.
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