Bill Barr is playing Donald Trump again

| 11:00 pm EDT June 17, 2020
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We see it happening over and over again lately. Attorney General Bill Barr abuses his position to take corrupt action on Donald Trump’s behalf, but once the smoke clears it turns out Barr was merely blowing smoke. Barr seems intent on creating the appearance that he’s doing things to help Trump, when in reality Barr is largely just taking symbolic action. Now Barr is at it again.

Bill Barr has had the DOJ bring suit against John Bolton, with the supposed intent of blocking Bolton’s book from being published. But at this late date, Bolton doesn’t even have the ability to pull his own book back. If Barr were actually trying to keep this book from being shipped, he’d have named the publisher as a defendant. Further, the text of this lawsuit is so comically inept, it seems almost designed to get immediately thrown out by a judge. That way Barr can tell Trump that he took steps to block the book, but the mean old judge got in the way.

This pattern keeps playing out. Bill Barr leaked to the media that he was criminally indicting Donald Trump’s nemesis Andrew McCabe, but after months of back and forth, it turned out there never was any indictment. Barr stepped in and reduced the DOJ’s sentencing recommendation against Roger Stone to the precise range that the judge, based on her history, was likely going to give Stone anyway – so that Barr could create the appearance that he’d gotten Stone’s sentence reduced.

Bill Barr is committing serious crimes on Donald Trump’s behalf. But most of the time Barr ends up taking watered down action aimed at conning an increasingly hapless Trump into believing that Barr is accomplishing things for him. Now Barr is taking action against John Bolton which, while highly corrupt, is also rather toothless. We’ll see if Trump falls for it again, or if Trump ends up demanding that Barr do something more serious to Bolton after the book ships.