Donald Trump cares deeply about the Justice Department, and he appears to care about exactly one thing: an attorney general who will do whatever he says, specifically in the realm of trying to lock up as many of his political enemies as possible.
William Barr, a former attorney general under Trump and an esteemed legal mind within the conservative movement, also cares deeply about the Justice Department, but for different reasons. Barr believes the department plays a key role in advancing conservative priorities in immigration, DEI, deregulation, the prosecution of criminals (real ones, not just people whom Trump hates), and other traditionally Republican policy goals.
Trump’s nomination of Todd Blanche for attorney general has therefore put Barr in an awkward position. Barr has resolved the dilemma by writing a contorted endorsement of Blanche in The Wall Street Journal. Barr’s less-than-glowing assessment of Blanche’s qualifications reads like a grudging employee review that recommends the lowest possible raise. “Mr. Blanche has the necessary qualities for the job,” he writes. “Mr. Blanche has already demonstrated effective leadership.”
In place of enthusiasm for Blanche’s qualifications, Barr shrugs that Trump would never allow anybody more qualified than Blanche to hold the job. Blanche “will run the department as effectively as anyone could under President Trump,” Barr writes.
[Peter Wehner: Bill Barr embraces the darkness]
The reason Barr has to include this qualification is that nobody can run the Justice Department effectively under Trump, if you define “effectively” to mean following the rule of law. Since the post-Watergate era revealed the dangers of a politicized DOJ, that has been the minimum threshold for the job.
Barr agrees with this. Or at least, he used to. He wrote in his 2022 memoir:
As head of the Department of Justice, I continued, the Attorney General is the top prosecutor, overseeing enforcement of the laws through the criminal justice process. It is the responsibility of the Attorney General to ensure that the department’s enforcement actions are insulated from political interference and are based solely on the law, the facts, and the equal treatment of all individuals, without regard to political or personal considerations. For that reason, I said, I could not tolerate political interference in criminal cases and would take the job only based on that understanding. The President agreed and said that, if he picked me, he would not interfere and would expect me to exercise my independent judgment to make the call I thought was right.
Barr reported, with comical understatement, that Trump “agreed in principle, though perhaps a little begrudgingly.”
Just how begrudging that agreement was has grown glaringly evident during Trump’s second term. The Justice Department has investigated or charged a slew of Trump enemies, including but not limited to, former FBI Director James Comey; New York Attorney General Letitia James; Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook; and the Democratic members of Congress Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Mark Kelly, and Elissa Slotkin.
The entire reason Blanche was nominated for the job is reportedly that his predecessor, Pam Bondi, failed to lock up Trump’s enemies fast enough for the president’s liking, mainly because the charges she brought against them kept falling apart. Blanche has auditioned for the job as a more effective judicial hit man, pursuing ginned-up charges against former CIA Director John Brennan, another Trump target.
Blanche has been selected to do one thing. What does Barr think about that one thing? He does not say. The op-ed literally does not mention, at any point, Blanche’s willingness to corrupt the Department of Justice in ways Barr himself called unacceptable, or even Trump’s desire that he do so.
“Much of the criticism of Mr. Blanche rests on the idea that the Justice Department should be independent of the president and that it’s inherently wrong for an attorney general to accede to the president’s views,” Barr concedes. However, he says it is not “necessarily wrong for an attorney general to defer to the president’s decisions—so long as he believes he is acting lawfully and upholding the Constitution.”
Okay, but all evidence suggests that Blanche simply believes his job is to prosecute whoever Trump wants him to, which seems like a reason not to vote for his nomination.
[Read: Trump isn’t giving up on his slush fund]
Barr’s decision to treat Blanche’s apparent ginning up of fake crimes against Trump’s enemies as irrelevant to his qualifications is a bit like endorsing Genghis Khan’s leadership of the Mongol horde on the basis of his trade agenda while ignoring his policies on burning cities to the ground and building pyramids of human skulls.
Perhaps Barr believes that Trump is going to have an attorney general who uses the law as a weapon against Trump’s enemies regardless, so the president might as well have one who can also do a few things Barr cares about. Yet this argument requires senators to actively affirm Blanche, which would legitimize his naked corruption of the law. Indeed, by ignoring Blanche’s rampage of pretextual legal threats against Trump’s enemies, Barr himself is legitimizing them.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s 2018 book, How Democracies Die, argues that the most decisive figures in the success or failure of an authoritarian attempt are the would-be authoritarian’s ideological allies. They must decide whether to join the aspiring despot, with the inducement of advancing their traditional ideological goals, or break with him and defend democracy.
Barr is a paradigmatic example of the Republican establishment’s response to the Trump era. Unfortunately, he seems to have read How Democracies Die as a how-to guide.
The post William Barr’s Dangerous Endorsement of Todd Blanche appeared first on The Atlantic.
