What is Jerry Nadler really up to when it comes to William Barr?

| 9:40 pm EDT April 29, 2019
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After House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler revealed that he’s bringing in a hired prosecutor to question Attorney General William Barr during this Thursday’s hearings, Barr responded by publicly threatening not to show up at all. This has led some pundits to conclude that Nadler blew it by revealing his hand in advance – but Nadler appears to be working on this from a deeper playbook.

If Jerry Nadler’s big move was indeed to hit William Barr with the hired prosecutor, and that was the extent of Nadler’s strategy, then you could argue that Nadler should have kept it a secret so that Barr couldn’t back out. But if Barr really is going to back out for this reason, then he’s been looking for a reason to back out all along – and even if he didn’t know about the hired prosecutor, he’d have found some other excuse not to show up.

For that matter, there are Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee who are former prosecutors. Thursday’s hearing was going to go poorly for William Barr no matter what, and bringing in a hired prosecutor for a sustained Q&A session would only have made it worse for Barr by a matter of degrees. Who knows if Barr will show up or not, but it’s hard to imagine his decision will have much to do with this particular development.

On the other hand, there have been times when Jerry Nadler – and more particularly some other Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee – have almost sounded like they’re hoping William Barr won’t show up. After all, this would make Barr look terrible in the eyes of the average observer, as if he and Trump have something ugly to hide. It would bring more attention and more controversy to Barr’s handling of the Mueller report, and it would allow Nadler to take whatever steps against Barr he wants, as far as contempt of Congress goes. It would also give House Democrats an excuse to immediately move on to cooperative witnesses like Robert Mueller and Don McGahn, and the TV audience for those hearings would be massive.

So we’ll see what’s really up Jerry Nadler’s sleeve. He comes across as too smart and calculated of a guy to have come up with a gameplan that merely consists of bringing in a hired prosecutor and nothing more, and then failing to keep his big surprise a surprise. There has to be more coming from Nadler. We just don’t know what it is – and that means William Barr doesn’t know what’s coming either.