Bill Barr is bluffing
Attorney General Bill Barr has done a number of harmful, hideous, illegal, traitorous things and he’s ruined a lot of lives in the process. It’s important that we also acknowledge that Barr has spent a lot of time making threats he knows are impossible, and pretending to prosecute and indict people he wasn’t actually targeting at all, in order to con an increasingly gullible Donald Trump into believing that Barr is helping him more than he is.
Remember back when Bill Barr leaked that he was indicting Donald Trump’s nemesis Andrew McCabe? It was all a ruse, as McCabe proved when he went to court and ultimately forced Barr’s DOJ to admit that there never was an indictment or criminal case to begin with. Barr had only planted the false leak so that Trump would think Barr was indicting McCabe. Now Barr is pulling the same thing again.
Bill Barr is telling the media that he’s considering having the DOJ take legal action against governors, in order to force them to reopen their states prematurely during a pandemic. Various legal experts have already pointed out that this would go nowhere. The Tenth Amendment is clear, so the courts would never even consider ordering the states to reopen immediately. Even if the courts were willing to hear Barr’s case, it would drag on forever, well beyond the end of the pandemic, and he’d lose anyway.
Barr knows this. He’s bluffing. He’s putting this impossible threat out there because he wants Donald Trump to hear it. Barr wants Trump to think that Barr has a magic wand and that he’s using it to help Trump. You’d think Trump would learn after Barr ran the McCabe scam on Trump, but Trump is an idiot. Barr is in so deep, he’ll need a Trump pardon in the end to avoid prison, so he’s trying to con Trump into thinking he’s earning it. In reality, Barr is playing Trump for a fool.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report