What happened to Bill Barr?

| 9:29 pm EDT October 21, 2020
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Ever since the Trump White House coronavirus outbreak began, Attorney General Bill Barr has been almost completely out of sight. Apart from one low key appearance a week ago, Barr has been missing in action. This has come even as Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked Barr in public, talked about firing him, and complained that Barr isn’t arresting Trump’s adversaries.

Then came tonight’s FBI joint press conference about foreign interference in the election. We suspect that the surreal press conference was a compromise between Trump’s stooge John Ratcliffe, who wanted to play up the notion that Iran is meddling against Trump, and respectable FBI Director Chris Wray, who wanted to play up the well documented fact that Russia is meddling on behalf of Trump. The whole thing was odd enough, but the real question is this: where was Bill Barr?

The Director of National Intelligence and the Director of the FBI just held a joint press briefing on primetime national television. It would seem almost a given that the Attorney General would also be there – and yet Bill Barr was still nowhere to be found.

It doesn’t appear that Bill Barr is on his deathbed or anything. If he’s healthy enough to pop up at a roundtable in Albuquerque, then he’s presumably healthy enough to have participated in today’s FBI press conference. Instead, it appears Barr is making the calculated move to lie low during the final days of the election, even as Donald Trump whines about how Barr isn’t doing the things that he wants Barr to do. What’s going on here?