With bureaucratic dexterity and bluff self-assurance, William Barr has effectively turned the Justice Department to face down Trump’s adversaries. riceid reports
Barr photographed in his office at the Department of Justice on December 3. Photo: David Williams for New York Magazine This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
“Immediately after President Trump won election, opponents inaugurated what they called the resistance,” Barr said. “They rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver to sabotage the functioning of the executive branch and his administration. Now, ‘resistance’ is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power. It obviously connotes that the government is not legitimate.
As attorney general, Barr is at once the nation’s chief prosecutor and the president’s highest-ranking legal counselor, an inherently conflicted role when the president is accused of wrongdoing. But over the past year, with bureaucratic dexterity and bluff self-assurance, Barr has effectively turned the Justice Department to face down Trump’s adversaries.
In fact, Barr could hardly have been more explicit in indicating what he believed and what he would do when the president sent him to the Justice Department. “I think it started picking up after Watergate,” Barr said in a 2001 interview for a University of Virginia oral-history project on the first Bush administration, “the idea that the Department of Justice has to be ‘independent.’ ” Barr thinks it is not just impossible but undesirable for prosecutors to operate independently of politics.
Barr turned his small office into an ideological engine room staffed by like-minded young conservatives and fought internal battles with the more-moderate factions of the Bush administration. Some senior officials referred to Barr and his deputy as “the bulldogs.” Barr was known for his infinite confidence, but he occasionally outsmarted himself.
In the final stage of the campaign, Barr was presented with an opportunity to exercise the kind of political supervision he believed prosecutors required. On a flight to a ceremony with other administration officials, a White House aide informed him, cryptically, of a rumor about a case down in Arkansas involving a savings-and-loan and Bill Clinton. Barr did some digging and discovered that the U.S.
Barr supported Jeb Bush in the 2016 primaries, but unlike many of his contemporaries, he never voiced opposition to Trump. However, he did watch, with growing horror, as the result of the election threw the Justice Department into disarray. Democrats blamed FBI director James Comey for sinking Hillary Clinton’s presidential run, in part, by mishandling the FBI’s investigation into her emails.
“Bill was always making fun of people in his meetings, and Mueller was a particular target of his fun,” recalls another former colleague. “Mueller would say things that were kind of stupid at times, and Bill would just mercilessly make fun of him.” Barr conceded that a president could obstruct justice through specific bad acts, like destroying evidence, but he said he otherwise had “necessarily all-encompassing” authority over law enforcement. “He alone is the Executive branch,” Barr wrote, citing a Supreme Court decision. “While the president has subordinates — the Attorney General and DOJ lawyers — who exercise prosecutorial discretion on his behalf, they are merely ‘his hand.
Barr’s favorable summary met with protest from Democrats and recriminations from Mueller’s office, which complained that the report’s findings had been mischaracterized. But the whole controversy served to blunt the force of the full report when it arrived weeks later. A furious House Speaker Nancy Pelosi threatened to hold Barr in criminal contempt, claiming he had lied to Congress about his dealings with Mueller over the report. Barr laughed off both the allegation and the symbolic action.
“I’ve had zero conversation with Ukraine,” Barr told me, reaffirming a statement the Justice Department put out in September, which also said Trump had never brought up investigating Biden with Barr. The Justice Department played an important role, however, in the effort to keep the contents of the call from becoming public after the fact.
In late September, as all of Washington was poring over the CIA whistle-blower’s complaint, Barr was in Rome, meeting with government counterparts, reportedly including the chief of Italy’s intelligence agency, to assure their cooperation with Durham. Barr has also sought assistance from Australia and Great Britain, and the department has said Durham talked to “certain Ukrainians who are not members of the government.
Barr’s critics contend he merely wants to keep asking questions until he finds the answer Trump wants or at least confuses the issue politically. In the darkest light, Durham’s investigation looks like a way for Trump to undermine the impeachment inquiry — which, after all, emanated from the CIA — while also holding the threat of punishment over those he has already purged, like Strzok, Comey, and Comey’s deputy Andrew McCabe.
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