The present brouhaha1—or is it a kerfuffle?—over Robert Mueller’s “I said what I said” announcement may, or may not, slow down Attorney General William Barr—or as we like to call him in DC, “Michael Cohen II”—and his “plan” to rummage through the files of the federal government’s entire intelligence community and declassify anything he damn well pleases in order to “prove” his previous evidence-free claim that the FBI was “spying” on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Over at Slate, Joshua Geltzer and Mary McCord try to give us some idea of just how terrible this could be, but I think even they don’t quite do it justice. From the get-go, I have been stunned by Barr’s utter unscrupulousness and mendacity in pushing the notion that the Department of Justice is the president’s personal toy, that he can intervene and overturn any investigation he pleases if he feels it’s unjustified, especially if he or his friends are the target. I mean, he ought to know if he’s innocent, shouldn’t he?
In his initial, bullshit summary of Mueller’s report, Barr particularly annoyed me with the following sentence: “as the Special Counsel’s report acknowledges, there is substantial evidence to show that the President was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks.”
As I remarked at the time, so what if the president is “sincere”? You don’t get to be judge of your own case just because you’re sincere—although, as Barr has previously argued, if you’re president, you do. The president can, in fact, fire the attorney general because he’s tired of looking at him, so why can’t he shut down an investigation because he’s tired of hearing about it? It’s the same thing, isn’t it?
Well, if you want to argue that way, you can, and Barr did, in that infamous 44-page “brief” that he just whipped up over a few drinks when he had nothing better to do, arguing that the president can’t commit a crime by exercising one of the powers of his office, and then, just for the hell of it, sent it off to Uncle Donald. The entire rigamarole2 of “substantial evidence” and “sincere belief”—as if Trump ever had one, ever—is a mere smokescreen to cover and excuse the claim of the president to exercise arbitrary power unlimited by any law.
I’m hoping—I hope a lot these days, or at least I try to—that Mueller’s rather mulish performance will, willy-nilly, slow down Barr’s evident appetite for getting to the “bottom” of the FBI’s “spying”—which would convert the FBI into the president’s personal enforcement agency and also put the entire intelligence community at Barr’s mercy. And the best part is, none of the leaks would be “illegal”! Because everything would be, you know, legal!
Afterwords
James Comey wrote a nice piece skewering all (or many) of the lies Trump has uttered while attacking the FBI for daring to investigate him. Whether “truth” is an adequate defense against Trump’s ego and William Barr’s mendacity (and the goddamn cowardice of the entire goddamn Republican Party is another and unfortunately not easily answered question.
1. Want to know more about “brouhaha”? Check out footnote 1 of this post.
2. “Rigamarole” sounds like sort of a cute, made-up word, but the Online Etymology Dictionary says not: 1736, "a long, rambling discourse," apparently from an altered, Kentish colloquial survival of ragman roll "long list or catalogue" (1520s), in Middle English a long roll of verses descriptive of personal characters, used in a medieval game of chance called Rageman, perhaps from Anglo-French Ragemon le bon "Ragemon the good," which was the heading on one set of the verses, referring to a character by that name. Sense transferred to "foolish activity or commotion" by 1939.
