Bill Barr is up to his old tricks again

| 9:00 pm EDT July 23, 2022
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Bill Barr, who used his power as Attorney General to turn the U.S. Department of Justice into Trump’s private law firm, has been singing a different tune lately. Barr has publicly tried to detach himself from his past by claiming Trump became “detached from reality” with his “stolen election” bluster. Aiming to avoid liability and appear on the right side of history, Barr has condemned the Big Lie as everything from “idiotic” and “stupid” to “complete nonsense” and “completely bullshit.”

Now that Barr got that off his chest, he apparently feels comfortable returning to his evil, anti-democratic ways. Barr, along with like-minded GOP pals Karl Rove, Steve Wynn, and Bobby Burchfield, launched a nonprofit organization on Thursday with an innocent-sounding name: Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE). The point of the organization, however, is to defend state legislatures’ right to set election laws, according to a report from Reuters. “We do not think the courts should be setting the rules for elections,” Burchfield explained.

In his new role, Barr is acting as a private citizen, and he is avoiding both invoking Trump or backing any political candidates. RITE has already filed briefs aimed at helping Republican laws in Montana and Florida survive legal challenges. These laws make it harder to vote by limiting the use of drop boxes, disallowing same-day voter registration, restricting third parties’ ability to complete voter registrations, and increasing voter identification requirements.

According to RITE’s launch announcement, the group is all about aiming to “assure confidence in our democratic process.” Ignoring the reality of the GOP’s role in enabling the insurrection and then obstructing its investigation, RITE curiously places the lion’s share of the blame for anti-democracy efforts on Democrats: “In recent years, voter confidence in the electoral process has suffered as the left and some on the right have advanced numerous often unfounded claims of election irregularities.”

Barr is back in his element and up to his old tricks after a bit of rebranding hocus-pocus. Barr may have said the right things recently about Trump’s election lies, yet, as he indicated in March, even Trump’s deadly deceptions will not stop him from voting for the cretin again. Bill Barr has not changed and, more importantly, we are not fooled.