Bill Barr Must Resign

The attorney general is working to destroy the integrity and independence of the Justice Department, in order to make Donald Trump a president who can operate above the law.

When donald trump chose Bill Barr to serve as attorney general in December 2018, even some moderates and liberals greeted the choice with optimism. One exuberant Democrat described him as “an excellent choice,” who could be counted on to “stand up for the department’s institutional prerogatives and … push back on any improper attempt to inject politics into its work.”

At the end of his first year of service, Barr’s conduct has shown that such expectations were misplaced. Beginning in March with his public whitewashing of Robert Mueller’s report, which included powerful evidence of repeated obstruction of justice by the president, Barr has appeared to function much more as the president’s personal advocate than as an attorney general serving the people and government of the United States. Among the most widely reported and disturbing events have been Barr’s statements that a judicially authorized FBI investigation amounted to “spying” on the Trump campaign, and his public rejection in December of the inspector general’s considered conclusion that the Russia probe was properly initiated and overseen in an unbiased manner. Also quite unsettling was Trump’s explicit mention of Barr and Rudy Giuliani in the same breath in his July 25 phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, as individuals the Ukrainian president should speak with regarding the phony investigation that Ukraine was expected to publicly announce.

Still more troubling has been Barr’s intrusion, apparently for political reasons, into the area of Justice Department action that most demands scrupulous integrity and strict separation from politics and other bias—invocation of the criminal sanction. When Barr initiated a second, largely redundant investigation of the FBI Russia probe in May, denominated it criminal, and made clear that he is personally involved in carrying it out, many eyebrows were raised.

But worst of all have been the events of the past week. The evenhanded conduct of the prosecutions of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn by experienced Department of Justice attorneys have been disrupted at the 11th hour by the attorney general’s efforts to soften the consequences for the president’s associates. More generally, it appears that Barr has recently identified a group of lawyers whom he trusts and put them in place to oversee and second-guess the work of the department’s career attorneys on a broader range of cases. And there is no comfort from any of this in Barr’s recent protests about the president’s tweeting. He in no way suggested he was changing course, only that it is hard to appear independent when the president is publicly calling for him to follow the path he is on.

Bad as they are, these examples are more symptoms than causes of Barr’s unfitness for office. The fundamental problem is that he does not believe in the central tenet of our system of government—that no person is above the law. In chilling terms, Barr’s own words make clear his long-held belief in the need for a virtually autocratic executive who is not constrained by countervailing powers within our government under the constitutional system of checks and balances. 

Indeed, given our national faith and trust in a rule of law no one can subvert, it is not too strong to say that Bill Barr is un-American. And now, from his perch as attorney general, he is in the midst of a root-and-branch attack on the core principles that have guided our justice system, and especially our Department of Justice, since the 1970s.

The system that Barr is working to tear down was built up in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals, during which the Justice Department’s leadership was compromised by its support of a president who sought to use the machinery of government to advance his personal interests and prospects for reelection. As Richard Nixon later told David Frost, he believed that “when the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” But the system held, and after two attorneys general and numerous other government officials were convicted for their conduct in these scandals, the Ford administration turned to the task of restoring public trust in government.

President Gerald Ford chose as his attorney general Edward Levi, a distinguished legal scholar and professor who was then president of the University of Chicago. “Levi took restoring faith in the legitimacy of government and adherence to the rule of law as his very highest priority,” his special assistant at the time, Jack Fuller, later recalled. Levi said at his swearing-in that the central goal of the Justice Department must be to sustain “a government of laws and not men,” which he knew would take “dedicated men and women to accomplish this through their zeal and determination, and also their concern for fairness and impartiality.”

Given the Department of Justice’s extraordinary powers to affect lives, and often to do so long before any case goes to court, Levi characterized its proper actions as having a “judicial nature” that demanded, in many instances, a substantial insulation from political influence. And he saw the pursuit of fair, accurate, and equal justice as a shared endeavor, with decisions best made through a sort of “government by discussion,” so that the soundness and integrity of any actions could be tested by the review and consideration of others.

David Frum: With liberty and justice for some

In two short years, Levi enshrined these ideas at the Department of Justice, turning them into articles of faith for its employees. He created new mechanisms of accountability to ensure their endurance, such as the Office of Professional Responsibility, an ethics watchdog for the department. His reforms substantially restored public trust in our justice system. For the past 45 years, the vision he articulated has also inspired thousands of Justice Department lawyers. This was the department that I served, as an assistant U.S. attorney, United States attorney, principal deputy solicitor general, and deputy attorney general in the Carter, Reagan, and first Bush administrations.

Barr’s frontal attack on this system begins with an assault on Levi’s central premise, that ours must be a “government of laws and not men,” in which no person is above the law. Far from emphasizing thorough, transparent, and evenhanded processes—like the investigations presided over by former Special Counsel Mueller and Inspector General of the Department of Justice Michael Horowitz—Barr has done whatever he can to suppress findings adverse to the president, and to endorse conclusions more favorable to Donald Trump.

Even more emphatically, though, Barr has brought with him to the department an extraordinary belief in the need for an all-powerful president that is flatly irreconcilable with Levi’s vision, which restored the Department of Justice to honor and integrity in the mid-’70s. Perhaps most disturbingly, Barr contends that it is virtually impossible for a corrupt president to be held to account by the Department of Justice, or by any independent counsel that it or Congress might appoint.