William Barr: Trump’s 2020 wingman

There’s a rather large — and growing — difference between the two situations, though. And that was on full display this weekend in an interview Barr gave to Fox News host Mark Levin.

Over the course of a lengthy discussion, Barr waded deeply into political matters far beyond regular Justice Department business. He attacked the president’s opponents — both real and perceived — and lodged the latest in a series of conspiracy theories about their true motivations.

The most well-publicized remarks from the interview came when Barr accused the political left of withdrawing from appropriate political discourse and becoming a “Rousseau-ian Revolutionary Party that believes in tearing down the system.” He said the left is interested only in “complete political victory.”

“They’re not interested in compromise,” Barr said. “They’re not interested in dialectic exchange of views. They’re interested in total victory. And that’s — it’s a secular religion. It’s a substitute for religion. They view their political opponents as evil because we stand in the way of their progressive utopia that they’re trying to reach.”

Barr elaborated, though, that “many of them are just cowards, who are mostly interested in getting reelected and are afraid of … a challenge from the left. So for them, it’s careerism. You know, ‘I sort of like my current gig and, I’ll do anything to stay here, and I won’t stand up for what is right. I won’t stand up for the country. I won’t stand up for our institutions.’ ”

So, in other words, the president’s opponents are either craven or extremists.

At another point, Barr ventured: “You know, that’s what turns them on, and it’s the lust for power, and they weren’t expecting Trump’s victory, and it outrages them.”

Law enforcement generally deals in the facts as they are known; here, Barr delves deeply into speculation about the true motivation of his political opponents.

Barr did much the same thing when it comes to Black Lives Matter. Levin teed up his line of questioning by noting that one of the movement’s co-founders said in 2015 that she and another co-founder were “trained Marxists.” Barr then took that ball and ran quite a bit further to describe the whole movement.

“They are a revolutionary group that is interested in some form of socialism, communism,” Barr said. “They’re essentially Bolsheviks. Their tactics are fascistic.”

At other points in the interview, Barr ripped a page out of Trump’s well-worn playbook: accusing their opponents of the same things of which Trump has been accused.

While Trump has laid waste to political norms left and right, Barr said of Democrats: “They’ve shredded the norms of our system to do what they can to drive him from office or to debilitate his administration.”

While Trump campaigned against his Hillary Clinton in 2016 by promoting “lock her up,” Barr said: “I think all political sides have gotten into the habit in this country of just sort of saying that their political opponents have done something terrible. They think it’s terrible. You know, ‘It’s enough for me to conclude he is terrible. Why isn’t he in prison?’ ” (At least in this case Barr acknowledged some culpability for his own party.)

At still another point, Barr elaborated on his increasingly vociferous criticisms of the Russia investigation, calling it “the doomsday scenario of abuse of government power, which is the party in power uses the police and intelligence services to tilt the field against their political opponents.” Barr himself has issued a misleading summary of the Mueller report, pre-spinning it in Trump’s favor. He has also intervened in a number of Justice Department cases on behalf of Trump’s convicted allies, and he has launched a controversial investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation, just as Trump requested publicly on numerous occasions.

In the same breath came one of Barr’s most remarkably political and partisan utterances, when he discussed how the media handled the Russia investigation.

“But the media was part of this,” he said. “And that’s to me probably the worst aspect of it. The so-called watchdogs of the system — they became attack dogs. They weren’t watchdogs. They had no critical — they didn’t use any critical faculties and facts, things that were clearly preposterous they took hook, line and sinker and they fanned the flames of this worse than anybody else.”

First things first: Just because the Mueller report didn’t find a provable conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia doesn’t mean there was no there there. Sometimes investigations don’t turn up proof of actual, illegal wrongdoing; that doesn’t mean they were illegitimate from the start. And the reporting on the Russia situation was overwhelmingly confirmed by the Mueller report. Barr seems to be conflating talking heads’ punditry with the actual “watchdogs” who reported out this story in detail and won Pulitzers for it (including at The Washington Post).

Finally, one way in which Barr has frequently and dubiously echoed Trump is in his cautions about voting by mail. Despite many states having employed it extensively for years and years, and there being little evidence of voter fraud, Barr has gone so far as to claim that foreign countries could use it to hijack the U.S. election. It’s the kind of speculation that fits neatly with Trump’s allegations but not with the evidence, which experts say provides numerous safeguards against such things.

Barr, though, doubled down yet again, saying: “Before [Trump was elected], the media used to refer to mail-in ballots as you know, fraught with fraud, or raising questions of fraud or integrity of the vote. It’s only after — it’s only recently that they’ve now made it doctrinal that, oh, there’s no issue with mail-in voting.”

(This is a vastly misleading summary. Mail-in ballots involve unique challenges, but the idea that any reporting said it was “fraught with fraud” is a stretch, to say the least.)

The comparison between Barr’s and Holder’s comments is worth delving into. Holder certainly took some controversial actions on behalf of the Obama administration. And calling himself Obama’s “wingman” was unseemly. The two men were personally close, but as Holder acknowledged in his confirmation hearing: “I understand that the attorney general is different from every other Cabinet officer. Although I am a part of the president’s team, I am not a part of the president’s team in the way that any other Cabinet officer is. I have a special and unique responsibility. There has to be a distance between me and the president.”

Barr has long placed considerably less emphasis on avoiding that appearance, echoing the president’s rhetoric and — just as often — his dubious talking points.

The big question ahead of the 2020 election is how else that might manifest itself. An attorney general wields significant power. Barr could bring that to bear in attempting to shut down states that try to expand mail balloting. He could also decide to inject the Durham report on the Russia probe into the waning days of the campaign (though he seemed to caution that indictments need to clear a high bar in the Levin interview).

What’s clear is that Barr hasn’t exactly striven to avoid the appearance or accusations of politically driven decisions. And that makes him worth keeping a close eye on over the next three months. This weekend’s interview drove that home.