december 9–22, 2019 | new york 41
ment lawyers, and two of them have worked
for the Justice Department. (So have two of
his sons-in-law.) Barr himself never com-
pletely left the orbit of the department. He
still socialized with old colleagues, like
Mueller and Supreme Court Chief Justice
John Roberts, who often attended the Barr
family’s Scottish-themed Christmas parties.
(Barr likes to play the bagpipes.) Barr some-
times called up to offer input to his succes-
sors. After 9/11, for instance, Barr suggested
the idea of using military commissions to try
captured terrorists.
Barr supported Jeb Bush in the 2016 pri-
maries, but unlike many of his contempo-
raries, he never voiced opposition to Trump.
However, he did watch, with growing hor-
ror, as the result of the election threw the
Justice Department into disarray. Demo-
crats blamed FBI director James Comey for
sinking Hillary Clinton’s presidential run, in
part, by mishandling the FBI’s investigation
into her emails. Meanwhile, in secret, the
Bureau had launched a counterintelligence
investigation, code-named “Crossfire Hur-
ricane,” into suspected Russian attempts to
swing the campaign for Trump. When that
news broke after Trump’s election,some in
Barr’s world of Justice Department alumni
were troubled by the prospect—however
remote—that Trump might be a Russian
tool. But Barr’s faction of the community
was pulsing with an alternative set of suspi-
cions, focusing on the motives of those who
initiated the investigation.
“It was apparent to all of us that there
was a ‘Get Trump’ attitude in theleader-
ship of the FBI,” says George Terwilliger, a
longtime friend of Barr’s who served as his
deputy attorney general in the 1990s. Dur-
ing the early stages of Trump’s presidency,
Terwilliger was speaking to Barr a few
times a week. “I know he was extremely
concerned,” Terwilliger says. They both
saw evidence of political bias in disclosures
about Peter Strzok and Lisa Page,two key
figures in the FBI who were having an
affair amid Crossfire Hurricane and
exchanging anti-Trump text messages,
which Barr has deemed “appalling.” And
both found it suspicious that Comey and
the FBI were relying on information gath-
ered in the Steele dossier, which was
funded by Trump’s political opponents.
I
n 2017, the Russia investigation
appeared to pose a serious threat to
Trump’s presidency. AfterTrump
fired Comey, Mueller was appointed
by the DOJ as special prosecutor. He
spent the summer assembling an aggressive
staff and issuing search warrants. Trump
and his family sought to bolster the presi-
dent’s defense team. They approached Barr
through an intermediary, David Fried-
man—the former Trump bankruptcy attor-
ney who is now the ambassador to Israel—
and asked if he would be interested in
joining. Barr declined. “I didn’t want to stick
my head into that meat grinder,” Barr later
testified. But he agreed to meet with Trump
at the White House the next morning. In the
Oval Office, Trump pressed Barr for his per-
sonal impressions of Mueller. “I told him
how well I knew Bob Mueller and ... the
Barrs and Muellers were good friends and
would be good friends when this is all over,”
Barr testified. “Bob is a straight shooter and
should be dealt with as such.”
Barr has made much of his personal rela-
tionship with Mueller, letting it be known
that their wives attend Bible study together,
and Mueller was a guest at two of his daugh-
ters’ weddings. It is a shield against any sug-
gestion he would set out to undermine the
investigation. But his full opinion of Mueller,
according to people who know both men, is
more complicated. Over their long relation-
ship, Barr was always the alpha. Former col-
leagues say that while Barr respected Muel-
ler, he saw him as an able prosecutor, not a
brilliant legal mind. “I doubt it would be any
surprise to Bill to learn or conclude that
Bob’s staff was driving the train much more
than Bob was,” said one person who has
worked with both men. When Mueller was
his subordinate in the 1990s, Barr would
often subject him to intellectual hazing.
“Bill was always making fun of people in
his meetings, and Mueller was a particular
target of his fun,” recalls another former col-
league. “Mueller would say things that were
kind of stupid at times, and Bill would just
mercilessly make fun of him.”
As the investigation developed, Barr
grew convinced Mueller required guid-
ance. News reports were hinting that the
prosecutors were pursuing a theory that
by firing Comey and publicly attacking the
“witch hunt,” Trump had obstructed jus-
tice. Barr thought that Mueller’s“novel”
obstruction theory, as he later described it,
was a constitutionally dangerous path,
and so on a snowy day in early 2018, he
went to visit the DOJ’s headquarters, a
monumental building known as Main
Justice, to lunch with Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein. Because Jeff
Sessions had recused himself from the
Russia investigation, Rosenstein had
appointed Mueller and was responsible
for overseeing his work. Like Sessions,
Rosenstein had a tortured relationship
with Trump. It was later reported that
Rosenstein was so alarmed after Comey’s
firing that he offered to wear a wire to a
White House meeting. (There isdispute
about whether he was joking.)
The two men ordered in Chinese food
and discussed a variety of topics, including
the Mueller investigation and its focus on
Comey’s firing. Barr told Rosenstein it
would be wrong and crippling to criminalize
a president’s decisions to remove top offi-
cials, which were part of his constitutional
duties. As he made his case, he recalled,
Rosenstein was “sphinxlike in his reaction.”
So Barr decided to follow up in writing.
Barr’s concerns about a politically unac-
countable FBI have some historical
grounding— think of J. Edgar Hoover, so
feared he effectively had tenure for life. Barr
later said he was afraid that Trump’s case
could have “a chilling effect” on the presi-
dent’s role in law enforcement. He put his
thinking into a long memo, which he sent to
Rosenstein and the head of the OLC. “I
know you will agree that, if a DOJ investiga-
tion is going to take down a democratically
elected president,” Barr wrote, “it isimpera-
tive to the health of our system and to our
national cohesion that any claim of wrong-
doing is solidly based on evidence of a real
crime—not a debatable one.” He urged the
officials not to “indulge the fancies by overly
zealous prosecutors.”
Barr conceded that a president could
obstruct justice through specific bad acts,
like destroying evidence, but he said he oth-
erwise had “necessarily all-encompassing”
authority over law enforcement. “He alone
is the Executive branch,” Barr wrote, citing
a Supreme Court decision. “While the presi-
dent has subordinates—the Attorney Gen-
eral and DOJ lawyers—who exercise pros-
ecutorial discretion on his behalf,they are
merely ‘his hand.’ ”
Barr wanted his message to reach Muel-
ler, and he put it in many bottles. He shared
the memo widely with Justice Department
alumni, academics, and members of
Trump’s legal team, which includedEmmet
Flood, the attorney who oversaw the final
stages of the Mueller investigation inside
the White House counsel’s office. When
Sessions resigned that November, Flood
advocated for Barr to be his replacement. “I
think he presented himself to the president
as the guy who could get it done,” says one
former Trump-administration DOJ official,
“and solve the problem that was confront-
ing the president.”
While some have said his memo looked
like a job application, Barr has called the
suggestion “ludicrous.” Friends say he agreed
to join the administration only reluctantly.
The final push came at a retreat for a CIA
advisory board he served on. “At that retreat,”
Barr said, “there were a lot of Democratic
businessmen and others, and they were
talking about the importance of having the
department in the hands of someone who
knew what they were doing.” Still, many
friends were surprised that he would expose
himself to the daily animosity of politics, as
