No, Bill Barr isn’t doing anything. Stop falling for it.
Now that Donald Trump has lost the election and there’s literally zero chance he can somehow magically overturn the results, Attorney General Bill Barr has belatedly put out a press release announcing a “probe” into alleged election irregularities. People are going nuts about it. Here’s the thing.
It’s laugh-out-loud obvious that this isn’t going anywhere, and Bill Barr knows that. The question is why everyone else doesn’t know that by now. Bill Barr is the king of taking empty action aimed at getting Trump to think he’s helping him, only for it to turn out to be nothing at all.
Barr tried and failed to meddle in the Flynn, Stone, Cohen, Lev, Igor, and Bannon cases. Barr tried and failed to install his own guy in the SDNY. Barr tried and failed to get U.S. Attorney John Durham to indict Trump’s political adversaries. Barr tried and failed to get the “unmasking” probe to go anywhere.
Because Barr initially took down Mueller, Barr has a reputation for being some kind of evil wizard with supervillain powers. But since then he’s proven again and again to be a laughably inept henchman – subsequent details have suggested that it was actually Rod Rosenstein who took down Mueller, not Barr. In such case Barr hasn’t notched a single victory for Trump since becoming Attorney General.
It couldn’t be any more plain-as-day obvious that Bill Barr’s new “probe” into the election results isn’t going anywhere. There is literally a 0.0% chance that this will go anywhere. Given the timing of Trump’s firing of the Secretary of Defense today, it seems pretty obvious that Barr is only even announcing this imaginary “probe” in order to stave off being fired himself. But it’s so obviously not going anywhere.
