Opinion: William Barr is doing exactly what Trump hired him to do
Attorney General William P. Barr appears before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday. By Paul Waldman Paul Waldman Opinion writer covering politics Email Bio Follow Opinion writer April 10 at 12:34 PM One of the most revealing things President Trump ever said was his complaint last year that “I don’t have an attorney general.” This wasn’t because Jeff Sessions was failing to come to work every day, but rather because he had recused himself from the Russia investigation.
And now Barr will be using the power of his office to accommodate the president, Fox News bloviators and every right-wing Internet troll in their fevered fantasies of a deep state anti-Trump conspiracy: In testimony Wednesday, Barr even said: “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal.” This echoes one of the more preposterous descriptions Trump and his advocates have used for the counterintelligence investigation. So let’s make sure we understand what’s “controversial” about that investigation.
That investigation confronted two broad questions: What was the nature of Russian meddling in the U.S. election, and was the Trump campaign involved? We can argue about how to interpret everything the investigation eventually uncovered. But the Republican position — and we have to be clear about this, because it’s utterly bonkers — has in effect been that there should never have been any FBI investigation at all into the Russian attack on the U.S. election.
The problem is that there is no genuine evidence that any actions anyone took in the course of the investigation displayed improper anti-Trump bias. Peter Strzok? Nope. Strzok, who had a key role in the counterintelligence investigation of Russian meddling, exchanged text messages in which he disparaged Trump, in what must surely have been the first case in history in which an investigator held one of his targets in low esteem.
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