Can someone please build a Bill Barr statue so that we can topple it?
That would surely be a no-brainer, in light of his despicable decision to play Tom Hagen for Don the Con.
I have to believe at this point that Uncle Sam is sick and tired of waking up to find another horse’s head in the bedclothes. But, hey, that’s what happens when low-information voters pick an authoritarian who telegraphed his intentions from day one.
Watching Barr’s latest ham-handed attempt to carry water for Trump – the sudden weekend firing of Geoffrey Berman, a powerful U.S. attorney who has been investigating Trump and his henchmen – I find myself feeling nostalgic for Janet Reno. Anybody remember Reno? She was Bill Clinton’s choice for attorney general, and she was so independent, during her eight-year tenure, that she drove Clinton crazy. She OK’d independent-counsel probes of the president who gave her the job, she OK’d probes of six Clinton Cabinet members…and Clinton never fired her. Imagine that.
Lest we be endlessly distracted by Trump’s farcical flights of fancy – slurring Asians by referring to Covid as “Kung-flu,” riffing seriously or facetiously about slowing Covid testing to keep the stats low – what just happened with Berman, in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, is a stark reminder of the havoc these two saboteurs continue to wreak on the rule of law. Barr, in his role as consigliere, is Trump’s last line of defense against criminal exposure. If Trump loses in November (and agrees to exit), he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his sorry life paying (or stiffing) lawyers to keep him out of jail.
Granted, there’s no smoking-gun evidence that Berman – a 2016 Trump donor, tapped by Trump for the post – was summarily ousted because of the sensitive probes he was supervising. No substantive explanation has been offered, which is how things go in banana republics. Trump’s Orwellian minister of truth, Kayleigh McEnany, claimed yesterday that Berman was fired because Trump wanted to find a new job for Jay Clayton, who currently chairs the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington. McEnany’s spin (which nobody believes) went like this: “Mr. Clayton wanted to go back to New York City. We wanted to keep him in government.”
Well, that’s nice. But “Mr. Clayton” has zero experience as a prosecutor – local, state, or federal. He does golf with Trump, however. Oh, and one other thing: As a lawyer, he has represented Deutsche Bank. The same bank that’s long suspected of money-laundering. The same bank that loaned piles of money to Trump when no other bank would touch the grifter. And it just so happens that Berman and his prosecutors have been investigating the Trump family’s finances, which are intertwined with Deutsche Bank.
Yeah, maybe the Trump-Barr decision to eject Berman five months before the election was entirely innocent. Maybe they merely wish to indulge Jay Clayton’s dream to dwell in the city that never sleeps.
But you’d have to be a Senate Republican to believe that – especially when you consider what else is currently on the menu at the SDNY office: A probe of Trump’s Ukraine fixer, Rudy Giuliani; a probe of a Turkish government-run financial firm, which happens to be a probe that Trump and Barr have been trying to shut down; and a probe of Trump’s 2017 Inaugural Committee, which is suspected of taking lots of illegal lucre from foreign sources.
Plus, Berman’s SDNY has a track record. It prosecuted and convicted Michael Cohen for his role in Trump’s hush money payments to two women (Trump was exposed in court as “Individual One”), and it has secured the indictments of two Giuliani goons, Lev Parnas and Igor Furman.
Granted, most voters probably pay little attention to this kind of stuff, because it doesn’t affect their daily lives. But the fragile fabric of democracy can only withstand so much rending. Trump and Barr, in whatever time they have remaining, are dedicated to doing their worst – as evidenced again, earlier this year, when they fired Jesse Liu, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, in order to reduce Roger Stone’s prison sentence. In the words of Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior counsel in the ’90s Clinton probes, “This is how an authoritarian works to subvert justice.”
I guess Susan Collins got it wrong when she said that Trump’s Senate exoneration would prompt him to learn his lesson.
But there’s an upside to all this. Really.
For starters, Barr bungled the Berman ouster so badly last weekend that (to make a long story short) he ultimately was compelled to promote Berman’s deputy, Audrey Weiss – who’s reportedly incorruptible and determined to oversee the ongoing investigations that touch on Trump. And she’ll likely stay on the job through the election, because it’s not likely that the Senate will move favorably on Clayton before that. Imagine the Judiciary Committee’s nomination hearing, when Clayton is quizzed for details about his money-laundering client, Deutsche Bank.
And let’s look at the big picture. Barr can play the inside game all he wants, but he’s powerless to erase Trump’s deserved rep as America’s Mortician, as the guy most responsible for the deaths of 122,000 civilians – surpassing all the U.S. soldiers killed in World War I. Most people may not know or care what happens in federal corruption cases, but they do care about staying alive. The November death toll, plus the jobless rate, may well seal Trump’s fate, and not even Tom Hagen would be able to rig that otherwise for his Don.