Farewell to Attorney General Barr – And Thank You

Attorney General William Barr is resigning effective December 23.  Who knows why.  You can never tell with Donald Trump, except when the President says so in a nasty tweet.  President Trump’s tweet about Attorney General Barr was nice, so you can’t tell anything from it.  In any case, Attorney General Barr has done an excellent job, and he deserves a thank you as he leaves.

Attorney General Barr was appointed by President Trump in January of 2019.  Early on, the mainstream media began calling him a “Trump loyalist” because of things he did.  For example, when he initiated an investigation into the question of whether the FBI investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign, Democrats and the mainstream media went crazy.  (See my post from back then here.)  After all, President Trump had been complaining about surveillance on his campaign for a long time. 

Except Attorney General Barr wasn’t doing this because of President Trump.  Rather, he took the view it was a bad idea for any Department of Justice to spy on any presidential campaign.  What he wanted to know was whether the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign was, in his words, “adequately predicated.”¹  He said: “I am not saying improper surveillance occurred.  I am saying I am concerned about it, and I am looking into it.”¹

When Attorney General Barr did things President Trump wanted, it was because Attorney General Barr thought that was what needed to be done, not because President Trump wanted it.  And when the facts and the law required him to do something that President Trump did not want, Attorney General Barr did them anyway.

For example, when Attorney General Barr said that US attorneys around the country “could” investigate voter fraud, Democrats went crazy.  When Attorney General Barr said, on December 1, “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” President Trump went crazy.  In other words, by doing his job according to the law and rules, William Barr got both sides mad at him.

I particularly appreciated two points Attorney General Barr made in an interview with The Wall Street Journal this past weekend:

“The attorney general also hopes people remember that orange jumpsuits aren’t the only measure of misconduct.  It frustrates him that the political class these days frequently plays ‘the criminal card,’ obsessively focused on ‘who is going to jail, who is getting indicted.’

The American system is ‘designed to find people innocent,’ Mr. Barr notes. ‘It has a high bar.’  One danger of the focus on criminal charges is that it ends up excusing a vast range of contemptible or abusive behavior that doesn’t reach the bar. …

‘The Department of Justice is not a trade association for prosecutors,’ Mr. Barr says.  Its client is the American people; its duty is to ensure the principles and standards of justice are fairly executed.”

Finally, the so-called “Trump loyalist” not only did not disclose DOJ’s investigation in Hunter Biden during the campaign – because to do so would have been against DOJ guidelines, he also announced today that he was not going to be appointing a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden.  Rather, Attorney General Barr said:

“To the extent that there is an investigation, I think that it is being handled responsibly and professionally.  To this point I have not seen a reason to appoint a special counsel and I have no plan to do so before I leave.”

In my April 2019 post, I said Attorney General Barr wasn’t going to sacrifice his honor and reputation for Donald Trump.  He took the job because he felt it was his duty – for his country.  As Attorney General Barr leaves, I think the best tribute to him is that he was not the attorney general either President Trump or Democrats in Congress wanted.  Rather, he was the attorney general that the American people needed.
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¹ Eric Tucker and Mary Clare Jalonick. “Barr backs Trump’s hints of spying in 2016 election,” Chicago Tribune, April 11, 2019.