William Barr Tapped to Replace Novelty Toilet Salesman as Trump’s Attorney General
On Friday morning, the president announced the nomination of William Barr, who served in the George H. W. Bush administration as the 77th attorney general of the United States, to become the 85th attorney general, too, this time as a member of the Trump administration. The announcement has obvious, significant implications for, among many other things, the White House's law-enforcement priorities, the power dynamics within the president's cabinet, and the future of the Mueller investigation. It also means that the acting attorney general, erstwhile daycare-business operator and novelty-bathroom-fixture enthusiast Matthew Whitaker, will soon find himself in search of a new grift.
Barr, who has been a Verizon executive and private-practice attorney since leaving the Department of Justice, does not boast the casually racist pedigree of his Senate-confirmed predecessor, but like Whitaker, he holds a notably expansive view on the outer limits of executive power. In November 2017, he opined to The New York Times that more evidence exists to investigate the Uranium One conspiracy theory than exists to justify the Russia investigation—which, to date, has yielded guilty pleas or convictions from the president's former campaign chair, national security adviser, and personal attorney, with God knows how many more indictments on the way.
On the same subject, Barr declined to criticize Trump for repeatedly calling for a formal law-enforcement probe of Hillary Clinton, noting the president's inherent right to ask for investigations while eliding the fact that the only people Trump ever seems to want investigated happen to be his political opponents. To The Washington Post, Barr tried walking an impossibly thin line, at once characterizing calls for Clinton's imprisonment as "not appropriate" while ignoring the fact that Trump spent the entire 2016 campaign doing...exactly that.
"I don't think all this stuff about throwing [Clinton] in jail or jumping to the conclusion that she should be prosecuted is appropriate," Barr added, "but I do think that there are things that should be investigated that haven't been investigated."
Elsewhere, the nominee has solicited Trump's attention in the time-honored manner of everyone else who has ingratiated themselves with this administration: by offering strident defenses of the president in media outlets they know he's watching. When Trump tweeted angrily about "13 angry Democrats" in the special counsel's office, Barr told the Post that, yes, he "would have liked to see [Mueller] have more balance in this group." A few months earlier, Barr applauded the firing of James Comey as "the right call," arguing that Comey's infamous e-mails announcement—which had come nearly a year earlier, before Trump even became the GOP nominee, let alone president—constituted a serious dereliction of duty. (It will never, ever stop being ridiculous that Trump's excuse for firing Comey was that, in his opinion, Comey had been unfair to Hillary Clinton.)
I do not dispute that Comey sincerely believes he acted properly in the best interests of the country. But at the same time, I think it is quite understandable that the administration would not want an FBI director who did not recognize established limits on his powers.
Barr dismissed out of hand the notion that Trump might have harbored any Russia-related motivations for this decision, despite the fact that the president had made multiple requests for "loyalty" as rumors of electoral malfeasance began to swirl. Sure enough, a few days after Barr's op-ed, the Times reported that Trump had asked Comey to go easy on Michael Flynn in the course of its law-enforcement duties; Flynn, you may recall, is the aforementioned national security adviser who has since accepted one of the aforementioned guilty pleas. A lot of William Barr's sage analysis seems to follow this pattern: It reads as sensible and well-grounded, because he constructs a narrative that omits the facts that, if included, would render his arguments absurd.
Assuming that the Republican-controlled Senate confirms Barr in early 2019—a formality, given his history of service and the GOP's three-senator majority—it will mark the end of the brief and hilarious tenure of Attorney General Big-Dick Toilet, whom history will remember as the only chief law-enforcement officer in this nation's history to have also appeared in a promotional video for razorblades.
Please join me in wishing him all the best in his future endeavors, which will consist, presumably, of self-publishing a free e-book memoir; jostling with Anthony Scaramucci for screen time on Fox News panels; and never paying for another drink at CPAC again.
