Escape hatch.
I’m grasping for some too-clever-by-half angle here in which Barr steps aside at Trump’s request so that new acting Attorney General Lou Dobbs can declare the election invalid or whatever. But the truth is doubtless simpler and more mundane. Barr knows he’s likely to be humiliated over the next six weeks, either by getting “the full Sessions” from Trump’s Twitter feed or being ignominiously fired or both. So he’s thinking of telling Trump, “You can’t fire me, I quit.” If you believe WaPo’s sources he’s been thinking about doing this since shortly after Election Day, before he and Trump butted heads over the alleged rampant voter fraud that Barr’s deputies somehow can’t find evidence of. But even if that’s true, it doesn’t mean Barr’s not disgruntled. Remember that Trump was leaning on him and Chris Wray to deliver an October surprise by doing something, anything, about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the final weeks of the campaign. The president had also complained publicly about the fact that the Durham report wouldn’t be published until after the election, when it would no longer be of use to him politically. Maybe Barr’s reached his limit. From the Times: Attorney General William P. Barr is considering stepping down before President Trump’s term ends next month, according to three people familiar with this thinking. One said Mr. Barr could announce his departure before the end of the year… One of the people insisted that Mr. Barr had been weighing his departure since before last week and that Mr. Trump had not affected the attorney general’s thinking. Another said Mr. Barr had concluded that he had completed the work that he set out to accomplish at the Justice Department.
