Former Attorney General Bill Barr has created quite a buzz in the political world for the past week and has raised eyebrows with his passion on a subject that he ignored when he should have addressed it.
During his tenure, he was accused of helping Trump cover up his misdeeds on numerous occasions. One of the most notable ways that Barr helped Trump was by using the powers of the Justice Department to contain the political fallout from investigations into Trump and his associates. On elections alone, Barr repeatedly undertook actions that damaged confidence in the fairness of the vote as Trump demanded that the DOJ work to flip the result in his favor. Barr went so far as to cite a wild and unfounded theory that shadowy foreign actors could falsify ballots en masse and send them in by mail.
Barr also sought to take control of investigations into Trump’s associates. He ordered Justice Department lawyers to come up with reasons to abandon cases and tried more than once to force prosecutors to drop them. He even considered overturning Michael Cohen’s campaign-finance convictions.
But now Barr is singing a very different tune about his former boss, Donald Trump. In an interview with ABC’s “This Week,” Barr said that Trump is “doing himself no favors” by continuing to make baseless claims of election fraud and attacking the judicial process. In another interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Barr called Trump a “troubled man” and said that he believes Trump lied to the Department of Justice when he had his lawyers claim that he had returned all classified documents. Barr also criticized Trump for his lack of self-control and frequent attacks on Judge Juan Merchan and members of his family.
He continued by predicting that Trump is “toast” if half of the 37-count indictment against him is true. Now, after a week of personal insults from the former president, Barr is fighting back with an utterly brutal assessment of his old boss.
“This is not a circumstance where he’s the victim or this is government overreach,” Barr said. “He provoked this whole problem himself. Yes, he’s been the victim of unfair witch hunts in the past. But that doesn’t obviate the fact that he’s also a fundamentally flawed person who engages in reckless conduct. And that leads to situations, calamitous situations like this, which are very destructive and hurt any political cause he’s associated with.”
The former attorney general did say that while Trump has “many good qualities” and “accomplished some good things,” his actions ultimately endanger the GOP cause.
“He is a consummate narcissist and he constantly engages in reckless conduct that that puts his political followers at risk and the conservative and Republican agenda at risk,” he said.
Barr then added this jaw dropping postscript:
“He will always put his own interests and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country’s interests. There’s no question about it. This is a perfect example of that. He’s like a 9-year-old — a defiant 9-year-old kid who’s always pushing the glass toward the edge of the table, defying his parents to stop him from doing it. It’s a means of self-assertion and exerting his dominance over other people. And he’s a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s, his personal gratification of his ego. But our country can’t be a therapy session for a troubled man like this.”
Bill Barr’s epiphany may be a prime example of “too little, too late”.
