“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” That was President Trump’s
famous lament after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation. But in Sessions’s eventual replacement, William P. Barr, Trump may have done even better — by his standards — than Cohn, the notoriously unscrupulous defense lawyer.
As Barr prepares to
testify before the House Judiciary Committee for the first time as Trump’s attorney general, he has instead come to resemble another disgraced lawyer of the past: former attorney general John Mitchell, whose misplaced loyalty to President Richard M. Nixon outweighed the duty he owed to the Justice Department and the country.
Mitchell
lied incessantly about Nixon’s role in Watergate and other misconduct, no matter the consequences — which in Mitchell’s case eventually included
disbarment and prison. Barr’s long series of distorted, dishonest and false statements in defense of the president may not land him in criminal jeopardy, but they are familiar steps on that same crooked path — steps that the Judiciary Committee should press Barr to explain.
They begin with Barr’s
misleading declarations about the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in the interregnum before its release, including minimizing powerful evidence of obstruction of justice. A Republican-appointed federal judge
ruled that Barr’s statements were “distorted” and showed a “lack of candor.”
I was preparing to serve as an impeachment counsel to the House Judiciary Committee at the time. As I write in a
new book, my colleagues and I were astonished that Barr would sacrifice his reputation to protect Trump. Yet that episode turned out to be just the start of Barr’s service in defense of the president.
When a whistleblower later came forward to report that the president had pressed Ukraine to interfere in our elections, Barr’s Justice Department advanced a
fanciful legal theory that the complaint did not have to be provided to Congress despite an express statutory instruction to the contrary. The federal Council of Inspectors General
found that was “wrong as a matter of law and policy.”
Some of Barr’s most troubling behavior has come in two cases where there is evidence of an obstruction of justice conspiracy involving the president: the Justice Department’s move to ask for a
lighter sentence than recommended by career prosecutors for Trump’s political adviser Roger Stone and its decision to seek
dismissal of the case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn, notwithstanding Flynn’s guilty plea.
This disturbing record is startling to those who have known Barr. Before signing on with Trump, Barr, who served previously as attorney general under George H.W. Bush, was known as a staunch conservative and a fierce
advocate for strong presidential power — but also as an
institutionalist who would protect the Justice Department’s reputation. Unlike Mitchell, he did not have a long-standing personal or political relationship with the president he served. (Nixon and Mitchell had been law partners, and Nixon
tapped Mitchell to be his campaign manager in 1968.) Yet Barr’s assiduous work on Trump’s behalf — distorting both facts and law to support the president — has overtones of Mitchell as attorney general.
As Barr appears before the House Judiciary Committee, these are important areas of inquiry:
On the Mueller report, the committee should compare Barr’s now notorious
summary to what is actually in that document. A judge
found that Barr engaged in “a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump.” Barr should be pressed to explain why he failed to disclose that Mueller
lacked “confidence … that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice.”
On Ukraine, the committee should pin Barr down on what he knew about the decision to keep the whistleblower complaint from Congress. What was Barr’s involvement? Did he discuss the effort to suppress the complaint with the president or other White House officials?
The committee should also question Barr on his changing accounts of his
role in the assault on peaceful protesters at Lafayette Square, examining his contacts with Justice and White House officials who said Barr ordered the actions. It is also imperative to address Barr’s role in the recent “surge” of
federal law enforcement into Portland, Ore., and other cities.
On Flynn and Stone, the committee should probe Barr’s involvement and what conversations he had with the president, the White House or the handpicked prosecutors who moved to dismiss the Flynn charges and reduce the Stone sentence. Barr must also be asked how he can defend the later Stone clemency when he himself
called the case “a righteous prosecution.”
Sadly, that’s not all. Barr should also be confronted about his
statement that former Manhattan U.S. attorney Geoffrey Berman — who was overseeing several investigations potentially implicating Trump — quit. Berman’s sworn account
establishes that was not true. And a
whistleblower has
testified that investigations at the Antitrust Division have been infected with Trump’s partisan agenda.
Barr should answer for all of that — and
more. And he should keep in mind how history remembers John Mitchell, dragged down alongside the president he sought to protect.
