Overnight we had a number of new stories shedding new light on what should have been obvious from the moment Bill Barr released his letter. Let me start by just pointing out a few key articles. While we’re seeing new information come out about the Mueller report, we should also note the continued credulousness of a lot of the DC press corps in evaluating Barr’s motives and aims in this whole drama.
Here we have a Politico piece on how Barr is mishandling the Mueller Report situation and his “legacy” is on the line. Here’s a Post story with some additional information but largely focusing on the fallout of the last couple days. But we keep seeing paragraphs like this.
Part of the difficulty for Barr, according to several current and former law enforcement officials, is that he is trying to follow Justice regulations that were written in the wake of Kenneth Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton, with an eye toward limiting the amount of information that can be made public.
Some senior Justice officials are also wary of repeating what they view as mistakes made in 2016 by then-FBI Director James B. Comey when he discussed details of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Because those senior officials contend Comey said too much about people who were not charged with crimes, they are now arguing internally for Barr to be more circumspect in public statements and releases of information.
There’s just no evidence on the table that merits this kind of extreme benefit of the doubt in Barr’s favor. A better way to put this is that Barr is using these regulations and the merited criticism of Comey from 2016 to withhold and keep secret as much as possible. They’re tools, not burdens he’s saddled with.
Meanwhile this Guardian piece has new information about how Barr got the job, essentially interviewing on the basis of an argument that the President couldn’t really obstruct justice and attacking that entire part of the Mueller probe. It turns out that on the same day* he sent in that unsolicited 19-page memo, he met up with the head of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, Steve Engel – the guy he’d later rely on to issue Trump’s exoneration. [Update: It seems The Guardian may have gotten the date of the lunch invitation wrong. Yikes! We’re trying to sort that out and will update you with more when we do.]
Some of this stuff might sound cloak and daggerish. But it’s really all pretty normal and about what you’d expect if Barr was brought in after making clear he’d do everything in his power to clear the President and keep the findings of the report secret. These guys are all from the same DC GOP legal fraternity around the Federalist Society. They’re running the DOJ. They meet. Nothing shocking. Again, all pretty straightforward and as obvious a month ago as it is today.
