Donald Trump cares deeply about the Justice Department, and he seems to care about one thing in particular: an attorney general who will do whatever he says, especially in the realm of trying to lock up as many of his political enemies as possible.
William Barr, a former attorney general under Trump and a respected legal figure within the conservative movement, is also very concerned about the Justice Department, but for different reasons. Barr believes the department has an important role to play in advancing conservative priorities on immigration, DEI, deregulation, criminal prosecutions (real ones, not just people Trump hates), and other traditional Republican policy goals.
Trump’s nomination of Todd Blanche for attorney general has therefore put Barr in a difficult position. Barr has solved that problem by writing confusion authorization of Blanche in The The Wall Street Journal. Barr’s scant assessment of Blanche’s qualities reads like a pathetic employee review that suggests the lowest possible raise. “Mr. Blanche has the necessary qualifications for the job,” he writes. “Mr. Blanche has already shown excellent leadership.”
Instead of the enthusiasm of Blanche’s qualification, Barr ignores that Trump will never let anyone. more more qualified than Blanche to hold the job. Blanche “will run the department as effectively as anyone could under President Trump,” Barr writes.
Barr’s reason for including this attribute is that no one could run the Justice Department effectively under Trump, if you define “properly” to mean following the rule of law. Since the post-Watergate era exposed the dangers of a politicized DOJ, that has been a low threshold for the job.
Barr agrees with this. Or at least, he used to. He wrote in his 2022 memory:
As head of the Department of Justice, I continued, the Attorney General is the chief prosecutor, overseeing the enforcement of the law through the criminal justice process. It is the responsibility of the Attorney General to ensure that the department’s enforcement actions are not politically influenced and are based only on the law, truth, and the equality of all people, regardless of political or personal issues. For that reason, I said, I could not tolerate political interference in criminal cases and I would take the job based on that understanding. The President agreed and said that, if he chose me, he would not interfere with me and would expect me to use my independent judgment to make the right call.
Barr reported, on a humorous note, that Trump “basically agreed, though perhaps a little begrudgingly.”
How unfortunate the deal was has become apparent during Trump’s second term. The Justice Department has investigated or prosecuted the murders of Trump’s enemies, including, but not limited to, former FBI Director James Comey; New York Attorney General Letitia James; Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook; and Democratic members of Congress Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Mark Kelly, and Elissa Slotkin.
The whole reason why Blanche was appointed to the post is reported to be that her predecessor, Pam Bondi, failed to imprison Trump’s enemies fast enough for the president’s wishes, especially because the charges she brought against them kept falling apart. Blanche is tested for the job as the best courtesan, follow up charges filed against former CIA Director John Brennan, another Trump target.
Blanche has been chosen to do one thing. What does Barr think about that one thing? He doesn’t say. The op-ed does not say, at any point, Blanche’s intention to smear the Justice Department in ways that Barr himself called unacceptable, or even Trump’s. desire that he should do so.
“Much of Mr. Blanche’s criticism is based on the idea that the Justice Department should be independent of the president and that it is wrong for the attorney general to agree with the president’s views,” Barr agrees. However, he says it is not “necessarily wrong for the attorney general to defer to the president’s decisions—as long as he believes that he is working legally and respecting the Constitution.”
Okay, but all the evidence suggests that Blanche just believes her job is to impeach anyone Trump wants, which seems like a reason not to vote for her nomination.
Barr’s decision to treat Blanche’s fake crime spree against Trump’s enemies as unrelated to his credentials is tantamount to supporting Genghis Khan’s leadership of the Mongol army based on his business agenda while ignoring his policies of burning cities to the ground and building pyramids of human skulls.
Perhaps Barr believes that Trump will have an attorney general who uses the law as a weapon against Trump’s enemies regardless, so the president might as well have someone who can also do the few things that Barr cares about. Yet this argument requires the senators to confirm Blanche, which would justify his blatant corruption of the law. Indeed, by ignoring Blanche’s barrage of pretextual legal threats against Trump’s enemies, Barr himself is justifying them.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s 2018 book, How Democracies Diehe says that the most decisive people in the success or failure of an authoritarian attempt are the ideological allies of the authoritarian. They must decide whether they will join the desired ruler, with the influence of furthering their traditional ideological goals, or abandon him and defend democracy.
Barr is a classic example of the Republican party’s response to the Trump era. Unfortunately, it seems he has read How Democracies Die as a how-to guide.
