The attorney general’s theory of executive power places presidents above the law.
One of the stranger aspects of the Donald Trump era is the open competition for the president’s affection. From Fox Business’s Lou Dobbs saying that Trump’s presidency is “the most accomplished… in modern history” to the president forcing his Cabinet secretaries to praise him on camera to his former fixer Michael Cohen once declaring that he would “take a bullet” for his former employer, it seems like each of the president’s myrmidons is daily attempting to outdo the others in employing Soviet-style hyperbole in praise of the president.
If there’s a comfort in this spectacle, it’s in the recognition that this is performance, that it’s a schtick, and that its ubiquity is a marker of the president’s deep insecurity. It is not a projection of strength, but one of weakness. The performativity of the spectacle suggests that at least some of these people recognize they are doing a bit. Others seem to have been corrupted by their proximity to Trump. Career civil servants such as Rod Rosenstein, who swore oaths to uphold the Constitution, have somehow been reduced to shuddering with fear at the thought of being fired in a tweet, begging the president for the opportunity to ensure that the law bends to his will.
It should be clear from Wednesday’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee that William Barr, the attorney general of the United States, is something else entirely. Barr is no flunky. He is a hardened ideologue who believes that the president he serves is largely above the law. Barr seems genuinely committed to defending the imperial prerogatives of the office against shortsighted liberals who would weaken the presidency in a delusional quest to remove a Republican from office. As he put it in his 2017 memo attacking the special counsel’s investigation, “crediting” the belief that the president could have committed obstruction by his official acts “would have grave consequences far beyond the immediate confines of this case and would do lasting damage to the Presidency and to the administration of law within the Executive branch.”
Benjamin Wittes: The catastrophic performance of Bill Barr
Barr is not protecting Trump because he thinks Trump is the most accomplished president in modern history, because he fears Trump, because the real-estate mogul has some psychological hold on him, or because he has been corrupted. Barr is defending Trump because Barr is a zealot.
In March, Barr released a letter summarizing the long-awaited conclusions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election. That letter mischaracterized Mueller’s conclusion that the Trump campaign took advantage of, and benefited from, Russian interference, only quoting the part of Mueller’s report that found that Trump-campaign officials’ conduct did not amount to a prosecutable crime.
Barr also misleadingly framed Mueller’s discussion of obstruction of justice in order to reach a conclusion that Trump did not obstruct—even though Mueller all but suggested that Trump would have been indicted if the Department of Justice did not have a policy against prosecuting a sitting president.
