Raising the Barr
Raising the Barr
Plus Thomas Massie and more on infrastructure
Bill Barr was in the news again over the weekend. A new Atlantic piece describes the last days of Barr’s tenure as attorney general and how Donald Trump’s quest to overturn the election finally drove the government lawyer to his breaking point or more specifically, to the point where he broke with Donald Trump.
Barr, who had also served as attorney general under Bush-41, was appointed by President Trump to resume the post after the departure of much-harangued Jeff Sessions. Barr stepped into the role on February 14, 2019, shortly after Trump survived his first impeachment.
Although Barr had good credentials, including serving under a president that I liked and respected (not Trump), like much of the Republican Party, the association with Donald Trump seemed to tarnish him.
Those of you who have followed me since the Resurgent days may remember that I was very critical of Barr at several points. Barr’s original summary of the Mueller report shaded the special counsel’s findings in a way that was beneficial to Barr’s boss, President Trump and apparently drew criticism from Mueller for its misleading nature. Barr disputed a report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz that exonerated the DOJ of wrongdoing in the Russia investigation but he provided no evidence of a conspiracy against Trump. Barr also pushed the unconstitutional idea of an unaccountable chief executive at the expense of congressional power.
To a great extent, Bill Barr covered for Donald Trump and enabled the former president’s ability to abuse his office. But then, one day last December, Barr found a line that he would not cross.
Per the Atlantic piece, which is based in part on interviews with Barr, on December 1, 2020, Barr met with an Associated Press reporter and told him, in a voice so low that he had to repeat himself, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.” This simple statement blew a hole in President Trump’s claims of massive fraud, claims that Trump is still clinging to today.
Barr also told the Atlantic that Mitch McConnell had been urging him to speak out with the truth about the election. Never mind that McConnell was not speaking out himself.
In Barr’s telling, which is credible on this point because it was reportedly confirmed by McConnell, the then-majority leader was focused on maintaining control of the Senate by winning the Georgia runoffs. This required making the argument that the two seats were needed to check the Biden Administration. The problem was that Republicans couldn’t follow this strategy without undercutting Trump’s claims about the election. If they crossed Trump, they fully expected him to sabotage the Senate races.
In an apparent first, Barr quietly ordered the Justice Department to investigate “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities before the election results were certified. Barr says he did this so that he would be able to explain to Trump that the allegations were unfounded.
“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr said. “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”
If you haven’t read the Atlantic piece, you should, even if only for Barr’s description of the epic meltdown when Trump confronted him about the December AP article. Trump allegedly referred to himself in the third person and hurled profanities at his AG for disloyalty. Barr compares the former president in that moment to Gen. Jack D. Ripper in the classic film Dr. Strangelove, the same movie which gave us the line “There’s no fighting in the war room!” and let us see Slim Pickens riding a nuclear bomb. If you aren’t familiar with the scene in question, you can watch it below, but you should really watch the full movie if you’ve never seen it.
I won’t repeat the entire passage here, but one passage is enlightening. Barr says that he told the president, “You know, you only have five weeks, Mr. President, after an election to make legal challenges. This would have taken a crackerjack team with a really coherent and disciplined strategy. Instead, you have a clown show. No self-respecting lawyer is going anywhere near it. It’s just a joke. That’s why you are where you are.”
I’m left wondering how Barr would have reacted if the president did have a “crackerjack” team rather than a “clown show.” Would the facts of the case still have mattered or would Barr have shaded the truth as he did in covering the president in the wake of the Mueller report? Did Barr reach his line because Trump’s attempt to steal the election was based on transparent lies or would he have balked at stealing the election even if it was possible to do so? That may seem like an unfair question, but it is Barr’s own actions that make it relevant.
For that matter, how far was McConnell willing to go? The Senate majority leader does have a duty to help his party gain seats in Congress, but he also has a higher duty to the Constitution. Would McConnell have continued to stand by and offer only tepid statements if it had looked possible that Trump would be able to overturn the results of the election? I’m afraid that I know the answer to that.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the Trump era is how quickly and completely so many Republican officials, both elected and appointed, were corrupted by the former president and his base. For every person who tried to hold the line against Trumpian corruption, there seems to have been more who were more loyal to Trump than the country or who lacked the courage to blow the whistle on the corruption.
And for good reason. People like Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, former Inspector General for the Intelligence Community Michael Atkinson, and even John Bolton who crossed Donald Trump or tried to hold him accountable generally saw their careers ending quickly as they were replaced by yes-men.
In the end, I’m left with the impression that Barr was bent but not broken. He allowed himself to be compromised by his loyalty to Donald Trump but only to a point. As I wrote last December after his break with the president, “Attorney General Barr seems to have had a limit to how far he would go to be a ‘wingman’ for President Trump. In the end, he chose to follow the law and do his job honestly. Americans should honor him for that.”
Bill Barr was not a model attorney general before December, but thank goodness he stepped up to tell the truth when he did. Honesty is better discovered late than never.
Your Racketeers aren’t celebrities except maybe in our own minds. Nevertheless, sometimes we do interact with some legitimate heavy-hitters. For instance, this morning, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) replied to my comment on one of his tweets. Unfortunately, Massie’s reply contained an out-of-context quote from Dr. Fauci and amounted to disinformation.
I looked up the source of Massie’s Fauci quote and found it in a Department of Health and Human Services press conference from January 28, 2020. The relevant portion of the video is about 43 minutes in and relates to CDC doctors responding to a question about Chinese claims of asymptomatic transmission.
CDC Director Robert Redfield, the speaker before Fauci answers:
“The Chinese have reported evidence of transmission in the asymptomatic phase based on data that they have reviewed. CDC has not been given the opportunity to review that data, so what we say is we haven’t been able to confirm by data the impact of transmission during the asymptomatic phase. The Chinese believe they have that data. So, this again, is our hope, that we can get more directly involved in China to be able to review and get more definitive.
We have limited experience here as Dr. Michener has already said. Five cases. We’re evaluating now the number of contacts. In the context of those evaluations, we are trying to address this issue: Is there any evidence of shedding of the virus in any of these contacts before? But we going to present the data that we have and we’re not necessarily going to affirm someone else’s interpretation, so that’s why you see the differences. We haven’t seen that data to confirm that conclusion.”
Then Dr. Fauci steps up and Massie omits the crucial first part of his statement:
“To just add one thing to that seems to get lost in that question is that, as Bob said and I agree, we would really like to see the data because if there is asymptomatic transmission it impacts certain policies that you do regarding screening and et cetera [emphasis mine].
But the one thing historically that people need to realize is that even if there is some asymptomatic transmission, in all the history of respiratory-borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of any outbreaks. The driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person. Even if there’s a rare asymptomatic person that might transmit, an epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers.”
Massie commits several errors here. First, he goes back to the first month of the pandemic when there was a lot we didn’t know about COVID-19. The congressman conveniently ignores the wealth of data that has been amassed over the past 18 months that shows large numbers of people infected with COVID-19 are asymptomatic carriers and spreaders.
Second, Massie ignores Fauci’s preface that additional data might change his understanding of the virus and how to react to it. Fauci’s statement was backward-looking and addressed other diseases from the past. It is a logical fallacy to believe that COVID-19 cannot have asymptomatic transmission because previous respiratory illnesses did not. That is doubly true when where there is evidence to the contrary.
It is fair to say that Fauci seemed doubtful about the early Chinese data. However, to his credit, Fauci did not allow his preconceptions to overcome the evidence that was presented for asymptomatic transmission. The same cannot be said of Massie.
Finally, Massie uses Fauci’s statement as a criticism of mask mandates on airlines. In reality, Fauci did not discuss masks in the clip and, to my knowledge, has never said that masks were ineffective against Coronavirus transmission.
Fauci’s much-misunderstood comments from March 8 about people not needing to wear masks were driven by a lack of understanding about the extent of asymptomatic spread as well as a desire to reserve masks for healthcare workers. But even in the viral video, Fauci does not say that masks don’t work, just that they provide “imperfect protection” and have “unintended consequences” such as making people touch their faces.
Maybe Rep. Massie didn’t know these facts, but I suspect he did. In any case, he should know them now. The congressman should retract his comments and tell his supporters the truth.
On a final note, I feel vindicated by other news over the weekend. On Friday, I wrote about the infrastructure compromise. At the time, a lot of people were criticizing the deal because Democrats and President Biden had said they intended to go forward with a budget resolution in addition to the compromise bill. Some were even reporting that Biden had threatened to veto the compromise bill if the budget resolution did not pass first.
But Biden never said he would veto the compromise. He said he wouldn’t sign it. And the two are not the same thing since not signing a bill does not prevent it from becoming law (unless Congress adjourns).
In any case, over the weekend Democrats tamped down the rhetoric and backpedaled away from linking the two bills. As of this writing, the Republican partners in the compromise seem satisfied and the infrastructure bill is forging ahead.
It’s a seemingly small thing to see a bipartisan coalition to pass a bill in Congress, but it’s something we haven’t seen much of for the past decade or so.
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It is common for many to say that the role of AG is not to be the President's personal lawyer. While that is true, the fact that the Justice Department is within the Executive Branch(Since 1870) with POTUS at the head of it pretty much ensures that the AG will be a partisan officer largely doing the bidding of the Administration. I think that AG Barr did about as good as one could've done in the Trump administration. Especially given that Trump, more than any other POTUS, viewed the presidency as an extension of himself. My guess is that Barr probably walked a tightrope, knowing full well how off the charts unhinged Trump was. There was always this worry that a intemperate President could lash out and purge the more sane voices in his presidency, and fill them with full blown sycophants(especially given that Congress never really sufficiently exercised its powers to hold Trump accountable for his deeds). An easy solution to this, is to not nominate and elect Donald Trump or anyone like him again. Good moral character and integrity can go a long way to fix a lot of what went wrong the past few years.
Regarding Massie, I think people need to cut experts some slack regarding Covid-19, given that we were pretty much learning about it as we went through the pandemic, from a baseline of zero knowledge. I get that Massie is staunchly opposed to most of what the federal government does as a libertarian, and I'm very sympathetic to that argument, broadly speaking. But getting facts wrong retrospectively in good faith or simply being inconclusive(such as with Fauci and asymptomatic spread), is not morally equivalent to lying in the slightest. My biggest concern is that smearing apolitical, good faith public servants like Fauci and others, will discourage good people from serving in our government. Which means less competent partisans will fill these posts. And when you have the less competent hacks running the scene, you get a less competent government. Which usually means more dollars and resources wasted, running contrary to the aims of a limited, efficient government.