That should be “lying his big fat ass off,” but, well, it’s more euphonious without the adjective, so we’ll go with the short version, even though throwing around ad hominem sneers n’ snickers at public figures is kind of a tradition here at Literature R Us, particularly when it comes to fat, aging, wrinkled, rancid, reeking butts like the one so prominently possessed by our current attorney general.
But enough of this chit-chat. Let’s cut to the chase: Barr isn’t speaking truth to power; he’s lying his big, fat, wrinkled, deeply unattractive ass off. In a recent interview with ABC News,1 Barr purports to describe what happened prior to the issuance of the Justice Department’s recommendation that Roger Stone receive a sentence of seven to nine years for lying to Congress and seeking to intimidate a witness, a recommendation signed by Timothy Shea, the newly appointed interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, a man who had worked for Barr for many years in the past.
According to Barr, Shea told him and other unnamed “senior staff”—senior to Shea, presumably—that the career attorneys handling the case advocated for the “7 to 9” figure because it was consistent with the Justice Department’s sentencing guidelines—nothing, really, more than the “default” option. But, says Barr, “he [Shea] felt and all of us immediately felt [the 7 to 9 figure] was very, very high and excessive in this case,” though Barr gives no explanation as to why “all of us immediately felt” that simply following the department’s guidelines would result in a recommendation that would be “very, very high and excessive in this case,” as though Stone were somehow almost more sinned against than sinning. Then, according to Barr,
On Monday [the day the recommendation was issued], he [Shea] came by to briefly chat with me and say that the team [handling Stone’s case] very much wanted to recommend the 7-9 year to the judge. And, but he thought that there was a way of satisfying everybody and providing more flexibility.
And there was a brief discussion of that. I was under the impression that what was going to happen was very much what I had suggested, which is deferring to the judge2 and then pointing out the various factors and circumstances. On Monday night, when I first saw the news reports, I said, “Gee, the news is spinning this. This is not what we were going to do.”
And so, according to Barr, he then overturned the department’s recommendation, prior, so he says, to learning about President’s Trump’s outraged tweets on the matter. He wasn’t influenced by the president at all! It was all Barr’s doing, acting on his own!
“Shocking” as it is to suggest, the most plausible explanation for all this is that Barr made up this entire story out of whole cloth. If Shea had had discussions with Barr, during which Barr had expressed the view that “7 to 9” was “very, very high and excessive”, there is no way on God’s green earth that Shea would have issued the “7 to 9” recommendation that went to the judge without explicitly informing his boss that his “advice” wasn’t being followed. It was grossly inappropriate for Barr to be involved in the matter in the first place, if he was so involved. It’s more likely, in fact, that Barr had bravely told Shea “leave me out of this”, which seems to be the only possible explanation of how the matter could have gone forward as it did. If Barr had been involved, Shea surely would have informed him of the final decision formally, not by way of a “brief chat” that, apparently, wouldn’t even have occurred if Barr had been out or otherwise occupied, and, most of all, the idea that Shea would say “there was a way of satisfying everybody and providing more flexibility” when he was ignoring his boss’s input is absolute nonsense.
As others have pointed out, Barr is pretending that the whole matter is just one of those things that happen now and again. Yes, every once in a while, there’s a misunderstanding, and the attorney general has to withdraw a sentencing recommendation for a high profile case involving a close associate of the president and issue a new one. And all the career attorneys attached to the case quit in protest over the attorney general’s intervention! Gosh darn it! Gosh darn it and Gee! But these things do happen! So move along, move along. Nothing to see, nothing at all.
All of this is disgusting enough, of course, but the cream of the hypocrisy is Barr’s pretense that he is standing up to Trump:
I have a problem with some of, some of the tweets [from the tweeter in chief]. As I said at my confirmation hearing, I think the essential role of the Attorney General is to keep law enforcement, the criminal process sacrosanct to make sure there is no political interference in it. And I have done that and I will continue to do that.
And I'm happy to say that, in fact the president has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case. However, to have public statements and tweets made about the department, about our people in the department, our men and women here, about cases pending in the department, and about judges before whom we have cases, make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we're doing our work with integrity.
First of all, of course, presidential tweets regarding who should or should not be indicted and/or convicted—and there have been plenty of them—count as “asks”, even though they are not conveyed to Barr on a one to one basis. Barr goes on to say
And I will make those decisions based on what I think is the right thing to do and I'm not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody. And I said, whether it's Congress, newspaper editorial boards, or the president. I'm going to do what I think is right. And, you know, the, I think the—I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.
Well, it’s almost as if commentary from Congress or “newspaper editorial boards” is on the same level as presidential tweets, even though the president can fire Barr and no one else can. Barr also ignores Trump’s frequent attacks on judges who don’t decide cases the way he wants them to, direct assaults on the independence of the judiciary, something that might concern someone who cares about the “integrity” of our justice system, though clearly Barr doesn’t. Jessie Liu, the previous U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, was eased out of her job via a nomination to a higher position in the Treasury Department, a nomination that was suddenly and “mysteriously” withdrawn after l’affaire Stone exploded. But, hey, the president’s the president, isn’t he? He can do what he wants, can’t he? And integrity be damned!
It’s “amusing”—though it would be a lot funnier if I were, you know, from Mars and not living in the U.S.A.—that the National Review has very earnestly pretended to believe Barr’s protestations of virginity—“Attorney General Bill Barr rightly and understandably rebuked government by presidential tweet in a notable ABC News interview on Thursday,” which only caused many (but not all) of its readers/commenters to accuse it of being the dupe of the “deep state” itself. Don’t you get it? The four career attorneys who handled the case—they’re the real criminals! Those are the guys who should be going to jail, not Stone! Wake the fuck up! It’s all a conspiracy!
Afterwords
The New York Times, the Pravda of the Deep State, takes a deep look at life in the DOJ, and comes up with what sounds like a parody of ballless chin-stroking: “In more than three dozen interviews in recent days, lawyers across the federal government’s legal establishment wondered aloud whether Mr. Trump was undermining the Justice Department’s treasured reputation for upholding the law without favor or political bias — and whether Attorney General William P. Barr was able or willing to protect it.”
Here's a newsflash, NYT: Bill Barr is Donald Trump’s willing bitch, and his beard.
Afterwords II
To be “fair”, the Times does point out a few of Barr’s sins, but not all of them, which would take some doing. Over at Slate, Jeremy Stahl gives a far more accurate sketch of the many sins of William Barr.
Afterwords III
It’s a very good bet that Timothy Shea is now known at the DOJ as “DMW”—“Dead Man Walking”.
UPDATE
More than 1,100 former Justice Department employees urge Barr to resign. They are more than 1,100% right.
1. Full transcript of Barr’s interview is here.
2. I “love” the way, throughout the interview, Barr repeatedly pretends that modestly “deferring” to the judge was his idea, as if all the lower-level attorneys somehow thought they had the power to sentence Stone all by themselves.
