The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Declarative statement: You cannot have a non-partisan Department of Justice and a “fair and blindfolded” system of justice if only one side plays by the rules.

Sorry to have to be the one to break the news. It’s just a fact.

I know it’s a hard pill to swallow. People want to believe in the system. In a democracy, people need to believe that those charged with crimes remain innocent until proven guilty, and can obtain a fair trial. The public needs to believe that prosecutors won’t bring charges willy nilly against someone who disagrees with their politics.

It would also be nice if police would not unjustly harass and kill people because on their race as well. But as the latest cop killing in Memphis shows, while the system has come a long way from innocent black men being lynched without trial in the South for looking at someone the wrong way, we still have a long way to go.

Readers already know how I feel about all of this, since I’ve written about it many times, most recently calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to speed up justice against former criminal grifter president Donald Trump.

Attorney General Merrick Garland Should Bring the Hammer of Justice Down on Trump

But more investigative news reporting just coming to light is once again demonstrating how under Trump-appointed Republican prosecutors, the politics and partisanship dictated the terms of justice in the previous administration, and all the way back to the first President H.W. Bush, when William “Bill” Barr served as the nation’s top law enforcement official then.

Now I’m as eager as everyone else to move past this hellscape time in our history when Trump dominated the daily national agenda from the White House on Twitter. If some courageous prosecutor had charged him with crimes already, along with his co-conspirators in the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, we could all move on.

But no. While it may seem like ancient history now, and in contradiction to what one of my journalism professors used to say, “it may be history but it may not be news,” we can’t move on until a few more scores are settled.

Starting with Bill Barr.

First a little press background before I get to the main body of the story.

While The New York Times has seemed a bit moribund of late, with a staff that seems ready to walk out any day on strike, an authoritative voice just showed back up from the past. I was surprised to see the byline of David Firestone pop up on The Times editorial page this week. The last time I saw him he was sitting at his desk as National Editor in the new Times building in Manhattan when I was there in 2007. For many years, he was a correspondent in the Times Southern Bureau in Atlanta. I probably read every story he wrote there, even back when you had to read the newspaper in print.

When Howell Raines from Alabama became the editor of the Times one week after Sept. 11, 2001, he shook up the staff. Firestone and another correspondent in Atlanta were urged to move up or on. Firestone ended up in Washington, D.C. for a time, covering Congress. Rick Bragg, who got stuck covering hanging chads in the 2000 election in Miami, finally moved to New Orleans, where he and I became fast friends and I got a chance to report and write for the Times myself.

I guess it came as a surprise to see Firestone writing about Bill Barr. But why not? He’s obviously done his homework, and nailed the crap out of the story. He arrives back just in time to hammer a nail in Barr’s legal and ethical coffin for the history books. I doubt Barr’s reputation will ever recover.

Bill Barr’s Image Rehab Is Kaput

Of course Firestone had a little help from Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman and Katie Benner in the Washington bureau. His editorial opinion piece is based on their detailed reporting.

How Barr’s Quest to Find Flaws in the Russia Inquiry Unraveled

I must admit that I didn’t immediately pay attention to this story when it first came out, because like I said, I would like to move on from Trump like everybody else. I would like to spend my time thinking about other things. I scrolled right past it on the NYTimes.com website, and I can’t wait until Trump is ancient history.

But that can’t happen until he finally pays for at least a few of his crimes against humanity and democracy.

Firestone’s flaming arrow aimed at Barr’s heart made me sit up straight in my desk chair, and convinced me to spend the time to wade all into it. It’s a complicated story that may not be totally clear to many people around the country who were not necessarily keeping up with the details of these stories all along. Cable news commentators can’t do these big stories justice, especially not when they are having to put out sensational clickbait fires like another cop killing in Memphis.

Let me try to simplify it for readers here.

But first, there is another related reason I’m interested in this story. As you know, I’ve been keeping up with what’s going on in Twitter headquarters in San Francisco of late, where Elon Musk is trying to play “Deep Throat” to the Republicans in the House.

Elon Musk Comes to Washington as a Republican ‘Deep Throat’

The Times hasn’t gotten around to writing about that yet. The Washington Post did do a puff piece about Musk’s whirlwind trip to D.C., cited in my better piece.

Also, Musk has hooked up with former Rolling Stone Gonzo journalist Matt Taibbi, who has been producing a series of stories based on internal “Twitter Files” made public by Musk since he took over the company. Some of those stories had to do with how Twitter fashioned ad hoc moderation policies to first place a warning on Trump’s posts, and then ban him from posting on the platform and deactivating his account.

The Twitter Files: The Removal of Donald Trump

More recently, Taibbi has been drinking the anti-Russian involvement in Trump’s 2016 campaign Kool-aid, joining a sort of double entendre of a conspiracy theory that claims the entire investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller was another conspiracy theory all its own. Taibbi is going on and on claiming the F.B.I. was involved in a conspiracy to get Trump moderated and banned on Twitter, and claiming the Mueller investigation was a hoax and a witch hunt all along just as Trump claimed.

Well, this new Times investigation — while never mentioning this other conspiracy theory or naming Taibbi or Musk — explodes this side business once and for all time.

Regular readers who have been following me for years may recall what I said about that failed investigation at the time.

Let’s Be Clear: Mueller Punted, Mueller Failed

I caught a bunch of grief from Democrats for that story, especially those using Mueller’s photo as their profile pic on Facebook. So much for the dream that Mueller would save us all from Trump by bringing charges, placing him in handcuffs, and frog-marching Trump out of the White House and transporting him straight to New York to occupy the same jail cell where Jeffery Epstein hanged.

If you really want to dig into some of the best reporting archive on the subject, there are 84 articles here:

Search for Robert Mueller

Now to the Main Point

This complicated story can be summarized in this way.

“During his 22 months in office, (Barr) allowed his Justice Department to become a personal protection racket for his boss, Donald Trump, and left prosecutors, the F.B.I. and other law enforcement officials subject to the worst impulses of the president.”

No, Barr was never interested in any version of “fair” or “blindfolded” justice. He did Trump’s political bidding as soon as he replaced Jeff Sessions of Alabama as the nation’s top law enforcement official.

In his memoir, however, published in 2022, Barr did an about-face for history’s sake, bashing Trump for “lacking a presidential temperament” and for his “self-indulgence and lack of self-control.”

Barr urged Republicans not to renominate Trump in 2024, accusing the former president of going “off the rails” with his stolen-election claims by preferring the counsel of “sycophants” and “whack jobs” rather than his “real advisers.”

And as Firestone writes, “Clearly concerned that history was paying attention, (Barr) was even stronger in his videotaped testimony to the Jan. 6 committee, loosing a variety of barnyard epithets and bitter insults to describe Mr. Trump’s legal strategy. He said the president had become ‘detached from reality’ and was doing a disservice to the nation.”

“The hollow and self-serving nature of this turnabout was always apparent,” Firestone says. “Mr. Barr never made these concerns public at a time when his dissent would have made a difference. Instead, he left office in 2020 showering compliments on his boss, praising Mr. Trump’s ‘unprecedented achievements’ and promising that Justice would continue to pursue claims of voter fraud that he must have known were baseless.”

“But if Mr. Barr harbored any fantasy that he might yet be credited with a wisp of personal integrity for standing up for democracy, that hope was thoroughly demolished on Thursday when The Times published the details of what really happened when Mr. Barr launched a counter-investigation into the origins of Robert Mueller’s report on the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. The reporting demonstrated a staggering abuse of the special counsel system and the attorney general’s office, all in a failed attempt by Mr. Barr to rewrite the sour truths of Mr. Trump’s history.”

More excerpts from the editorial:

It was bad enough when, in March 2019, Mr. Barr tried to mislead the public into thinking the forthcoming Mueller report exonerated Mr. Trump, when in fact the report later showed just how strong the links were between the campaign and the Russian government, which worked to help defeat Hillary Clinton. A few months later Mr. Barr assigned John Durham, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut, as a special counsel to investigate Mr. Mueller’s investigation, hoping to prove Mr. Trump’s wild public allegations that the federal intelligence officials had helped instigate the claims of Russian interference to damage him.

Attorneys general are not supposed to interfere in a special counsel’s investigation. The whole point of the system is to isolate the prosecution of sensitive cases from the appearance of political meddling. But the new Times reporting shows that Mr. Barr did the opposite, regularly meeting with Mr. Durham to discuss his progress and advocating on his behalf with intelligence officials when they were unable to come up with the nonexistent proof Mr. Barr wanted to see. (Aides told Times reporters that Mr. Barr was certain from the beginning that U.S. spy agencies were behind the allegations of collusion.)

When the Justice Department’s own inspector general prepared to issue a report saying that, while the F.B.I. made some ethical mistakes, the investigation was legitimate and not politically motivated, Mr. Durham lobbied him to drop the finding. When that effort was unsuccessful, Mr. Barr reverted to his usual pattern of trying to spin the report before it was issued, disagreeing with its finding before it was even out. Mr. Durham then followed up with a similar statement, shattering the clear department principle of staying silent about a current investigation.

The two men even traveled to Britain and Italy together, pressuring government agencies there to disclose what they told U.S. spy agencies about the Trump-Russia connections. That infuriated officials of those governments, who said they had done nothing of the kind, and no evidence was ever found that they had. But on one of those trips, The Times reported, Italian officials gave the men a tip that, people familiar with the matter said, linked Mr. Trump to possible serious financial crimes. (It is not clear what those possible crimes were, and more reporting will be necessary to reveal the details.) Did Mr. Barr follow protocol and turn the tip over to regular prosecutors in his department for investigation? No. Instead, he gave it to his traveling companion, Mr. Durham, who opened a criminal investigation but never made it public and never filed charges, and when word began to trickle out that a suspected crime had been discovered, he falsely let the world think it had something to do with his original goal.

The Durham investigation, of course, has never presented any evidence that the F.B.I. or intelligence agencies committed any misconduct in the course of the Russia investigation, bitterly disappointing Mr. Barr and especially his patron, Mr. Trump, who had assured his supporters for months that it would produce something big. Desperate for some kind of success, Mr. Durham indicted Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who had worked for Democrats in their dealings with the F.B.I., over the objections of two prosecutors on the special counsel team who said the case was far too thin and who later left the staff.

Mr. Sussmann was acquitted last May of lying to the bureau, and the jury forewoman told reporters that bringing the case had been unwise. Mr. Barr later tried to justify the trial by saying it served another purpose in exposing the Clinton campaign’s starting the Russia narrative as a “dirty trick.” The trial did nothing of the kind, but it did expose Mr. Barr’s willingness to abuse the gratuitous prosecution of an individual to score political points against one of Mr. Trump’s most prominent enemies.

One of the other casualties of this deceitful crusade was the deliberate damage it did to the reputations of the F.B.I., the intelligence agencies and officials in Mr. Barr’s own department. All of these agencies have had many problematic episodes in their pasts, but there is no evidence in this case that they willfully tried to smear Mr. Trump and his campaign with false allegations of collusion. They were trying to do their jobs, on which the nation’s security depends, but because they got in Mr. Trump’s way, Mr. Barr aided in degrading their image through a deep-state conspiracy theory before an entire generation of Trump supporters.

Republicans in the House are launching a new snipe hunt for proof that these same government offices were “weaponized” against conservatives, an expedition that is likely to be no more effective than Mr. Durham’s and Mr. Barr’s.

But weakening the country’s institutions and safeguards for political benefit is how Mr. Barr did business in the nearly two years he served as the nation’s top law enforcement official under Mr. Trump. He has a long history of making the Justice Department an instrument of his ideology and politics; when he was attorney general in 1992 during the Bush administration, the Times columnist William Safire accused him of leading a “Criminal Cover-up Division” in refusing to appoint an independent counsel to investigate whether the Bush administration had knowingly provided aid to Saddam Hussein that was used to finance the military before Iraq invaded Kuwait.

Under Mr. Trump, Mr. Barr did the opposite, demanding that an unnecessary special counsel do the bidding of the White House and trying to steer the investigation to Mr. Trump’s advantage. His efforts came to naught, and so will his campaign to be remembered as a defender of the Constitution.

Nailed it.

If Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland is interested in his own place in history, he must consider that you can’t kiss up to the other side to appear to be fair, when the other side has no political interest whatsoever in playing fair. What is the point of voting to gain a majority in a democracy and not using that people power for good and to do what’s right, on the right side of history, so to speak

#LockTrumpUp

Iraqgate

As it happens I remember very well the reporting on the “Iraqgate” scandal, with the U.S. accused of funding Saddam Hussien in his war with Iran, before the U.S. invaded Kuwait to kick Saddam out of that country in our first Gulf War in 1990–1991. I got a couple of pieces of that story myself and wrote about it for a chain of newspapers on the Gulf Coast, where a number of spies ended up after fleeing Iraq before the war started. I always read William Safire’s columns.

Right after the war started, I interviewed a spy who claimed he was the basketball coach for the Kuwaiti national basketball team, who mysteriously ended up on Perdido Key in the Panhandle of Florida as the owner of a bar called “Peanuts.” He told me a story about being there when Kuwait played Iraq in basketball, and Saddam was in attendance. There was a plan to assassinate Saddam, but Bush got cold feet and called it off because it came out publicly and he had to reiterate that the policy of the U.S. was not to involve itself in assassinating world leaders. Even though, of course, the C.I.A. had been involved in such things in the past. They tried several times to get rid of Fidel Castro in Cuba, for just one example. All their attempts failed.

Firestone is a new member of the Times editorial board. Good for him. We look forward to his authoritative voice going forward. The Times and the country need more authoritative voices.

This is NOT a partisan editorial. It is one based on empirical facts.

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