The Consigliere

Attorney General Bob Barr has always been known as a conservative. He has been Attorney General before, for President George H.W. Bush. In those days he was thought of as a principled conservative and an excellent Attorney General. Some believe he has tarnished that reputation in his service as Attorney General for President Trump. As reported by Mattathias Schwartz in his article “The Advocate” in the New York Times Magazine of June 7, the columnist Michael Gerson has said that Barr is committed to the “hierarchical” and authoritarian “premise” that a top-down ordering of society will produce a more moral society. “In a 2019 speech at the University of Notre Dame he put forth that ‘piety lay at the heart of the Founders’ model of self-government, which depended on religious values to restrain human passions. ‘The Founding generation were Christians,’ Barr said. Goodness flows from ‘a transcendent Supreme Being’ through ‘individual morality’ to form the social order. Reason and experience merely serve to inform the infallible divine law. That law, he said, is under threat from ‘militant secularists’ including ‘so-called progressives,’ who call on the state ‘to mitigate the social costs of personal misconduct and irresponsibility.’ At their feet, Barr places mental illness, drug overdoses, violence and suicide. All these things, he said, are getting worse. All are ‘the bitter results of the new secular age.’”

This is not the populism and crypto-fascism of his boss. It is a philosophy we can imagine being spoken by a Cardinal/advisor to a European monarch of limited intelligence. The Founders from Washington, Hamilton and Jefferson on down would have been startled to have heard themselves described in such a manner. They all were in reality Deists, children of the Enlightenment, believing in the sanctity of reason.

In its lead editorial of May 10, 2020, “Mr. Barr and the Perversion of Justice,” the New York Times notes Barr’s claim that “history is written by the winners” (perhaps he considers himself such) and asserts that he is abusing his power not to write, but to erase, some of the most important lessons of American history. “The Watergate scandal with its revelations of how dangerous a renegade White House could be, led to reforms meant to ensure an independent Justice Department, one faithful to the law rather than to the Oval Office.

“The nation had seen firsthand how much harm a president with no respect for the law could do—particularly when he used the Justice Department, under a compliant attorney general to protect allies, punish adversaries and cover up wrongdoing.

“Among the key reforms were stronger transparency and ethics rules, like the creation of independent inspectors general to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the executive branch…

“To Mr. Barr, their reforms were obstacles to a vision of a virtually unbound executive. For decades he has pushed to give presidents—Republican presidents anyway—maximum authority with minimum oversight. In a 2018 memo criticizing the Russia investigation, he argued that the president ‘alone is the Executive Branch’ in whom the ‘Constitution vests all federal law enforcement power, and hence prosecutorial discretion.’ For the attorney general that discretion includes cases involving the president’s own conduct.”

Such a vision of the presidency could be as described as a Super Nixonian White House. The editorial quotes Douglas Kmiec, Head of the Office of Legal Counsel at DOJ for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush as well as Donald Ayre, Deputy Attorney General under George H.W. Bush. The former asserts, “George III would have loved it” and the latter that the America Bill Barr wants is “a Banana Republic where all are subject to the whims of a dictatorial president and his henchmen.”

The editorial correctly asserts, “The nation’s founders did not wage a war for independence from a tyrant who considered himself to embody the law so that the republic would tolerate another executive who considers himself above the law.” As James Madison put it in the Federalist Papers No. 47, “An elective despotism was not the government we fought for…but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.”

General Michael Hayden, a former CIA Director, has said that Bill Barr reminds him of David Addington who subscribed to the same philosophy:  “…if the president wants it, most time he gets it and it’s legal.” Barr has enabled Trump at every turn, discredited the Mueller investigation, covered up Trump’s efforts to gain foreign influence in the election, and go easy on General Flynn and Roger Stone. Now his lead task is helping Trump subvert the election. Barr is doing this in four ways.

First, Barr is actively undoing the work of the Department of Justice to address the counterintelligence threat exposed during the 2016 election. Trump and Barr want the Russians back.

Second, Barr is castigating the work by federal law enforcement that sought to hold accountable those who undermined the 2016 elections.

Third, Barr is making clear that those who work with Trump to subvert the elections will get special treatment from DOJ if Trump is reelected. Rudolph Giuliani with his criminal activities in Ukraine and elsewhere is being protected. That necessity explains why the chief prosecutor in the Southern District of New York was fired.

Fourth, any attorney general committed to his job and who wants to serve the American would be fighting disinformation. Barr is doing the opposite, lying about mail-in ballots being especially vulnerable to fraud, without any evidence because there isn’t any. Rather than “open the floodgates of potential fraud” as Barr claims, main-in ballots—since they are paper not electronic—are a strong defense against election interference by Russia, China and others. In 2016, disinformation such as this was coming from Putin. Now it’s coming from Trump and Barr, but maybe that’s the same thing. In addition, Barr appears to be hinting at indictments of Biden and Obama, right before the election—a move certain to cause a scandal.

Our Founders would despise these new Super Nixons.

“If it be asked, what is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? The answer would be, an inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws—the first growing out of the last…a sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government.” — Alexander Hamilton, 1794

“I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1800

“ I have always given it as my decided opinion that no nation had a right to intermeddle in the internal concerns of another.” — George Washington, 1796

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican government.” — George Washington, 1796

John Jay

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