Why Bill Barr is doing what he’s doing
If you check the headlines right now, you’ll see that Attorney General Bill Barr is an uber-villain who’s succeeding in getting away with anything he wants. He’s magically winning at whatever he’s trying to do, because, well, the headlines say that he’s winning. He’s single handedly morphing our democracy into… whatever. It all reads like a dystopian movie script. But back in the real world, the facts say that something very different is going on with Bill Barr.
Let’s start with the fact that, after Bill Barr initially hoodwinked a knowingly gullible media into printing that the Mueller report said the opposite of what it actually said, Barr has failed at everything he’s tried. His congressional testimony was a stumbling disaster that made Trump look bad. His world tour, in search of foreign nations willing to help him promote pro-Trump conspiracy theories, was a total bust. Now Barr has failed to prevent the Department of Justice Inspector General from publicly confirming that the FBI was justified for investigating Trump’s criminal enterprise of a 2016 campaign.
It’s not just that Barr is on a surreal losing streak. It’s that along the way he’s committed so many provable felony acts of obstruction of justice, it’s a given that he’ll be indicted and arrested once Trump is gone. The post-Trump DOJ will make a point of prosecuting Barr, as a way of reclaiming its reputation. Barr will be seventy years old and he’ll be heading to solitary confinement for more years than his natural lifespan will allow. His life will be over.
Bill Barr is in way too deep. He has been for awhile now. His actions make clear that he knows it, too. Barr will die in solitary confinement unless he can get Donald Trump to pardon him on his way out the door. Given Trump’s consistent track record of disloyalty to his most loyal of henchmen, a pardon for Barr seems like a long shot, but it’s all he’s got left. The trouble for Barr is that he just keeps failing in his efforts to please Trump, and thus the odds of that pardon continue to grow more remote. Yet Bill Barr has no choice but to keep doing anything and everything possible – no matter how desperate or absurd – to find a way to prove his worthiness to Donald Trump. That’s what’s driving Barr at this point. It’s as simple as that.
