Frank Rich: In Bill Barr, Trump Has Finally Found His New Fixer

[babylonsister]

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/frank-rich-bill-barr-trump-fixer.html

the national circus 12:55 P.M.
In Bill Barr, Trump Has Finally Found His New Fixer
By Frank Rich


Bill Barr’s assertion that “spying did occur” against the Trump campaign has brought condemnations of impropriety from congressional Democrats and career intelligence officials, and raised suspicion that the attorney general is covering for Trump. Has Trump, at long last, finally found his Roy Cohn?

When you invoke Roy Cohn, you have to specify which Roy Cohn. There’s the New York Cohn of the 1970s and ’80s, the Mob-connected fixer who enabled Trump’s rise, of course. But there’s also the earlier, Washington Cohn: the smear artist who abetted Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt to expose supposed Commies in the United States Army during the 1950s. The brilliantly perverse achievement of Barr is that he combines both Roy Cohns in a single package. He’s a fixer for Trump, as evidenced by his unsupported conclusion that the Mueller report lets the president off the legal hook for his manifold efforts to obstruct justice. But Barr is also the McCarthy-era Cohn, sliming a “group of leaders there at the upper echelon” of government agencies for spying without offering any specifics or evidence.

That said, Barr is more insidious than either Roy Cohn. The Cohn of the McCarthy era was the chief counsel to a Senate committee; the New York Cohn was a lawyer in private practice. William Barr is the attorney general — the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States. And he is just getting started in his career in nonenforcement. He is poised to bowdlerize the Mueller report with redactions whose legitimacy cannot be verified and is stonewalling congressional efforts to read the report in full. He is in position to assist Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, as he buries documents whose exposure Trump may fear more than Mueller’s evidence — his tax returns. And, as the GOP operative turned Never Trumper Rick Wilson has pointed out, Barr’s accusations of “spying” are designed not only to feed right-wing conspiracy theories about a “deep state” plotting to subvert Trump but also to sully “the future public, private, and legal testimony of members of the DOJ, FBI, and intelligence community who have seen the damning data on Trump and his claque.” The goal? “To intimidate anyone who would investigate Trump’s vast portfolio of corruption and obstruction of justice, both before and after he took office.”

Barr, let’s recall, was more highly-thought-of only a few weeks ago. As the successor to Matthew Whitaker, a low-rent scam artist with not even minimal qualifications to serve as acting attorney general, he didn’t have a tough act to follow. He was routinely praised as an “institutionalist” who would protect the Justice Department — though his advocates never explained why any true institutionalist would enlist in an administration that above all is devoted to the destruction of governmental institutions and defiance of the rule of law. In this sense, Barr was initially welcomed as another iteration of those previous “adults in the room” who would protect America from their boss’s worst instincts: John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and Gary Cohn, the chief economic adviser who sold his soul for a tax cut rather than publicly break with a president who gave a pass to neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville.

In the end, no Trump Cabinet member ever rises above the common denominator of his or her peers, a perpetual rogue’s gallery that, from Mnuchin to Wilbur Ross to Betsy DeVos to (RIP) Kirstjen Nielsen, makes the bar in Star Wars look like King Arthur’s court.

[duforsure]

1. Just remember

His last fixer is headed to prison soon.