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The Attorney General of the United States, William Barr, has explanations to make.
For more than two weeks that Barr has sent his summary of the more than 400-page Mueller report to Congress, it seems increasingly clear that the Attorney General is making a political scandal against President Trump.
During this process, he unnecessarily tarnished his reputation on behalf of a president who was increasingly unbalanced and chronically dishonest.
Not only did Barr approve Trump's speech "no collusion," but with respect to the obstruction of justice, Barr concluded that there was no criminal behavior from the president.
However, Barr's reasons for issuing an opinion on Trump's criminal responsibility remain obscure and frustrating. The Department of Justice guidelines state that a sitting president can not be charged – the Attorney General's opinion is therefore not necessarily relevant. Even though Barr concludes that Trump broke the law, he could not do anything if. It is up to Congress to hold the president accountable for potentially criminal acts. By intervening on the issue, Barr was in fact usurping the role Congress had mandated by the Constitution to make such decisions.
All of this raised legitimate concerns that Barr was putting his finger on the scales to help the president.
Last week, confirmation of these fears began to infiltrate. Articles published in the New York Times and the Washington Post have followed one another in which Mueller's team, once allergic to leaks, made it clear that she was unhappy with Barr's behavior.
According to the Times, Mueller's investigators were unhappy with Barr's statements on their investigation, claiming that they "were more troubling to President Trump than Mr. Barr said." , "And" there was an immediate discontent with the [Mueller] team when they saw how the Attorney General had characterized their work. "
But the most troubling detail was the revelation in the Post's story that Mueller's team had prepared summaries of each section of the report, with a minimum of drafting, that "could have been published immediately – or very quickly."
Why did not Barr just publish the summaries prepared by Mueller's team? Why put his opinion on their conclusion – an opinion that now seems inaccurate?
In addition, why has the report still not been published?
Unfortunately, the answer seems more and more obvious: Barr protects the president. Barr's summary quickly created a public narrative about the report that brought tremendous political benefits to Trump. It now appears that Barr is deliberately dropping his feet to publish the full report, lest the President be embarrassed.
Far too many media have bitten the hook, immediately slamming the report summary by Barr and some even blaming journalists and experts for allegedly misinterpreting the history of Russia.
But did they do it? There is no reason at this time to take Barr's summary of the Mueller report seriously. This Attorney General was not only appointed by Trump – after firing his predecessor, partly for not doing enough to protect him from Mueller's investigation – but before taking up his post, Mr. Barr also wrote an unsolicited 19-page memo addressed to the Department of Justice. criticized the investigation. Now he refuses to publish the report and – if Mueller's attorneys are to be believed – has misrepresented it to the public.
If he skewed the report, he is still part of Trump's administration and is openly abandoning his integrity and ethical core to a man totally devoid of one or the other. It's not really a surprise at the moment. Such obsequiousness is the defining characteristic of this administration and its suite of pioneers and facilitators.
This weekend, it was enough to watch Kirstjen Nielsen humbly resign as Secretary of Homeland Security to marvel at the blind loyalty of the members of this administration to a president who did nothing that deserves such dedication .
Nielsen was responsible for the policy of separating children from their parents. This decision should haunt her for the rest of her life. But she was there Sunday, thrown in the bus for not being cruel enough to the immigrants, and yet, as the tires bounced off her body, she still played the role of the loyal soldier.
With Barr, it's more of a puzzle, unless the inclination of the Republicans to bend the knee to power has been so deeply ingrained in the life of political parties that they apparently have no other path .
When he testified before Congress at his confirmation hearings earlier this year, Mr. Barr reassured members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that he could "truly be independent." As he said at the time, "I feel in a position of life where I can do the right thing without worrying too much about the consequences. "
But as is often the case for anyone who is sufficiently disturbed and morally deficient to work in this administration, acting in the opposite direction is a sort of default position, even if the consequence is an honor.
The column of Michael A. Cohen appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @ speechboy71.
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