Bill Barr strikes out

| 9:00 pm EDT August 22, 2020
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The media likes to push the narrative that Donald Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr is some kind of invincible henchman who can pull off any evil scheme at any time. Trump has even played into this narrative, once threatening to “activate Bill Barr” if he didn’t get his way. But if you look at the facts, you keep seeing a very different picture.

This past week Bill Barr failed to stop the arrest of Trump’s henchman Steve Bannon. Barr tried to stop it by ousting Geoffrey Berman from the SDNY. But it didn’t stop Bannon’s arrest, or even slow it down. Before that, Barr failed to stop the arrest of Rudy Giuliani’s co-conspirators Lev and Igor. Barr tried and failed to get Roger Stone’s sentence reduced, forcing Trump to do his own dirty work with a commutation.

Barr tried to stop the publication of Michael Cohen’s book by throwing Cohen back in prison, but within days Cohen had secured his re-release, and now his book is launching. Barr also failed to get the criminal case against Michael Flynn thrown out.

It’s not that Bill Barr is completely inept. Some of his evil schemes do work. He’s done real damage. But when Donald Trump’s top henchman is only successful about 20% of the time, that’s the story. He’s not some invincible wizard. He’s an evil bumbler who strikes out most of the time.

Unfortunately, because the media keeps painting Bill Barr as an evil genius, it causes a lot of folks to cower to him, which only serves to give Barr more leverage than he would otherwise have. This false narrative needs to stop. Barr is less incompetent than most of Trump’s other henchmen, but he’s not much less incompetent.