Bill Barr, the attorney general who did Trump’s bidding until the final weeks of the criminal regime, serenaded CBS News yesterday with a searing critique of the sick puppy to whom he’d previously pledged his loyalty. He said the feds’ classified documents case is “very strong,” and that Trump has basically doomed himself. Then Barr morphed into a shrink:
“(Trump) will always put his own interests, and gratifying his own ego, ahead of everything else, including the country’s interest…He’s like a nine year old, defiant nine year old kid who’s always pushing the glass toward the edge of the table, defying his parents to stop him from doing it. It’s a means of self assertion and exerting his dominance over other people. And he’s a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s, his personal gratification of his, you know, his ego, but our country…can’t be a therapy session for a troubled man like this.”
Can’t argue with any of that. But I have questions for Barr:
At what point did he realize that the country was in the hands of a nine year old who didn’t give a shit about the country’s best interests? When exactly did Barr finally figure that out? Did that never occur to him during his 22 months of servitude? Did the truth magically occur to him only when Trump began planning for a coup to reverse his election defeat? It’s oh so convenient that Barr is singing like a canary now. The prevailing winds have shifted, so he wants to whitewash his soiled reputation.
That brings to mind a certain historical figure. Bill Barr is our Albert Speer.
Speer was Hitler’s personal architect at the outset of his public career, but later earned eternal infamy as minister of armaments – as the guy who ran and sustained the Nazi war machine. Until virtually the end of the war, Speer ensured that the planes and tanks and guns kept rolling off the assembly line, thanks to the millions of slave laborers who were starved and worked to death in his factories. He fled Hitler’s bunker as the enemy troops closed in, having served his mentor almost to the bitter end.
A year later, when he landed in the dock at the Nuremberg Trials – when it was clear that the prevailing winds had shifted – he oh so conveniently he saw the light. He testified that Germany should “condemn Hitler as the proven author of its misfortune. The world will learn from what happened not only to hate dictatorship as a form of government, but also to fear it.”
Speer’s born-again candor helped sway the judges not to hang him.
But this is America, where born-again candor puts you on the talk shows. It’s all well and good that Barr wants Trump kept in exile (“He is a consummate narcissist, and he constantly engages in reckless conduct that puts his political followers at risk and the conservative and Republican agenda at risk”). It’s all well and good that Barr thinks the Justice Department’s indictment is the real deal (“If even half of it is true, then he’s toast”). The problem is, he can’t escape his past servility.
Barr misled the public about the Mueller probe of the Trump-Russia scandal, whitewashing the findings that, in truth, detailed how the ’16 Trump campaign welcomed Russia’s assistance. He big-footed career prosecutors in order to shield guilty Trump flunkies like Roger Stone and Michael Flynn. He ordered the tear-gassing of peaceful Lafayette Square protestors so that Trump could hold a bible in front of a church. He denounced pandemic restrictions as “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties” since slavery. He declared long in advance of the ’20 election – and without a shred of evidence – that mail balloting was grist for massive fraud. All told, his authoritarian behavior was so flagrant that in May ’20 more than 1,900 former Justice Department employees, Republicans and Democrats alike, demanded his resignation.
Barr can’t launder his Trump complicity with candor after the fact, any more than a serial killer can make amends by ladling gruel at a soup kitchen. It just sucks that we rarely get the truth until rats like Barr and Speer hoist a wet finger to the wind and calculate that it’s high time to flee a sinking ship.