The end of Bill Barr
It’s not difficult to figure out why Bill Barr disappeared during the final stretch of the election. After trying and failing to do Trump’s bidding in the unmasking scandal, the Flynn case, the U.S. intel probe, and other stunts, Barr clearly saw that he wasn’t going to be able to save Trump – and that he didn’t want to go down with him.
Now that Trump has in fact lost, Barr is still lying low. Again, this isn’t surprising. The buzzards are now circling the Trump regime, and the popular discussion will soon shift to which of its members should be criminally charged. Of course the public doesn’t make those decisions; the next iteration of the Department of Justice will.
Joe Biden publicly stated several times during the election that when it comes to Trump regime crimes, he’ll simply appoint a solid Attorney General and then let the Department of Justice handle it, without meddling. In other words, some of the career DOJ people who suffered under Barr’s corrupt abuses will be the same people who have to decide whether to criminally prosecute Barr for his many instances of felony obstruction of justice.
Right now Bill Barr is surely looking at going down one of two paths. Option A is to try to help Donald Trump with his overall pardon strategy, in the hope that Trump will also blanket pardon Barr on his way out the door. Option B is to simply lie low from here on out, and hope that by the time the DOJ is free to prosecute him in January, it will simply conclude that there are bigger fish to fry.
Neither of these paths is a particularly good option for Bill Barr. But as Palmer Report has been pointing out for a few years now, once the Trump regime fell, its people were only going to be facing bad options. Barr’s best option is a pardon that forever makes him a pariah and will likely be challenged in court anyway. Barr’s other option is to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life in the fear that he’s finally being arrested.
Barr doesn’t have a magic wand up his sleeve for giving himself a happy ending. If he had that kind of prowess, he’d have used it to make sure Trump won. This is the end of Bill Barr. As with a lot of other people in the Trump regime right now, Barr simply has to decide how he wants to lose.
