42 new york | december 9–22, 2019
reaction “a bit snitty” and blamed the spe-
cial counsel’s staff.) But the whole contro-
versy served to blunt the force of the full
report when it arrived weeks later. A furi-
ous House Speaker Nancy Pelosi threat-
ened to hold Barr in criminal contempt,
claiming he had lied to Congress about his
dealings with Mueller over the report. Barr
laughed off both the allegation and the
symbolic action. “Madam Speaker,” Barr
asked when they encountered each other
at a Capitol Hill ceremony soon afterward,
“did you bring your handcuffs?”
Barr’s defenders say that he did eventually
release the report, which was not legally
required, and it is not his fault if the public
didn’t read it or get outraged. In a final bid
to galvanize public opinion, House Demo-
crats summoned a reluctant Mueller to tes-
tify in July. But the hearings were an anticli-
max, as Mueller seemed fumbling and
uncertain under questioning. Hisold col-
leagues from the Justice Department, even
ones who are critical of Barr, say they
thought Mueller looked aged—notlike the
man they knew. Fairly or not, the shaky per-
formance reinforced the rumors that the
revered prosecutor, who is now 75,was not
fully in control of his investigation.
“Bill Barr might have been the only per-
son in the country conversant with how Bob
would actually come across,” says Douglas
Kmiec, who overlapped with bothof them
in the Justice Department 30 years ago.
“The rest of us, without the same familiarity,
kept seeing the same picture of BobMueller
as the man of steel.”T
he day after Mueller testi-
fied, Trump called the presi-
dent of Ukraine, setting up the
next episode in his police-pro-
cedural presidency. “That whole
nonsense ended with a very poorperfor-
mance by a man named Robert Mueller, an
incompetent performance, but theysay a lot
of it started with Ukraine,” Trumpsaid, ac-
cording to the reconstructed transcript. “I
will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I
am also going to have Attorney General Barr
call and we will get to the bottomof it.” A
great deal hinges on what the definition of
the word it is. Trump seemed to beconflat-
ing two investigations: John Durham’s
probe into the origins of the Russia investi-
gation and Giuliani’s intrigues, focused on
surfacing damaging information about Joe
and Hunter Biden. The fact that Trump ap-
parently saw them as a single agenda item
may be careless talk or evidence of a deeper
connection in his mind between the two ef-
forts, both focused on his enemies.
“I’ve had zero conversation with Ukraine,”
Barr told me, reaffirming a statement the
Justice Department put out in September,which also said Trump had never brought
up investigating Biden with Barr. The Jus-
tice Department played an important role,
however, in the effort to keep the contents of
the call from becoming public after the fact.
In August, after the White House informed
the department of the whistle-blower’s com-
plaint, the OLC issued an opinion that said
it could be withheld from Congress on the
grounds that the applicable law did not
cover presidential misconduct. The depart-
ment also determined Trump had not bro-
ken campaign-finance laws. After the com-
plaint came out, the Washington Post
recently reported, Trump wanted his attor-
ney general to go even further by holding a
press conference to declare him innocent
and was upset that Barr refused.
But Barr has extended himself to a sur-
prising degree in chasing the president’s
suspicions. In May, shortly after theMueller
report was released, he discountedits find-
ings of extensive Russian efforts tocontact
and influence the Trump campaign. “There
is no evidence of a conspiracy,” Barrtold Jan
Crawford in an in-depth interviewfor CBS
News. “So it was bogus, this whole idea that
Trump was in cahoots with the Russians is
bogus.” He blamed “a small group atthe top”
of the FBI and painted their actionsin apoc-
alyptic terms. “I mean, republics have fallen
because of [a] Praetorian Guard mentality,”
he said, “where government officials get very
arrogant, they identify the nationalinterest
with their own political preferences, and
they feel that anyone who has a different
opinion is somehow an enemy of the state.”
Crawford asked if the investigators’ actions
in pursuing Crossfire Hurricane might
amount to “treason,” the word Trump has
used. Barr said only, “Not as a legalmatter.”
The same month, Barr appointed Dur-
ham to investigate the investigation. The
dimensions of what the prosecutor had been
assigned to do were unclear, but asthe U.S.
Attorney in Connecticut, Durham had no
obvious political bias. He had served both
Democratic and Republican presidents,
prosecuting many tough mob and public-
corruption cases, and had a reputation for
extreme secrecy. During the Obama admin-
istration, he conducted a highly classified
investigation of the CIA’s alleged use of tor-
ture. Over the past few months, Trump allies
like Michael Mukasey, a former Republican
attorney general whose official portrait
hangs in Barr’s office, have fanned specula-
tion that Durham is onto something. “He is
an experienced and principled prosecutor,”
Mukasey wrote in The Wall StreetJournal
in September. “Stay tuned.”
What could Durham be looking into?
Barr initially questioned the evidence sup-
porting the FBI’s secret warrant for elec-
tronic surveillance on Carter Page, thewell as the potential for humiliation by
Trump, who ridiculed Sessions without
mercy. On his first day on the job, at a Rose
Garden ceremony where Trump signed an
emergency declaration allowing him to
build his border wall over congressional
objections, the president singled out Barr
and said, a tad ominously: “Enjoy your life.”
“He says that a lot,” Barr said with a grin.
Unlike Sessions, Barr commanded
immediate respect at Main Justice, where
his bureaucratic expertise allowed him to
take control. Already, some of the initial
chaos ushered in by Trump’s presidency had
begun to subside, as conservative political
appointees asserted themselves and many
career attorneys who had joined during the
Obama administration gave up and left. “As
time progressed, loyalty became the domi-
nant mentality,” says Erica Newland, an
OLC attorney who quit shortly before Barr
arrived. Barr’s department haspressed
Trump’s policies on a variety of fronts, from
immigration (for instance, by curtailing
rights to asylum), to drugs (Barr’s daughter
Mary headed the DOJ’s opioid enforcement
initiative for a time), to technology (pressur-
ing companies for backdoors to encryption),
to crime. After nearly two decades, Barr
resumed the use of the federal death pen-
alty; the first execution is scheduled for
December 9. The department has fought
subpoenas to reveal information about
Trump’s tax returns and other politically
charged issues.
Barr’s first order of business, though,
was dealing with the Mueller report. When
Barr finally had a chance to talk to Mueller,
in March, he said he was surprisedto learn
the special counsel was coming to a non-
decision on the obstruction issue.Mueller
turned in his 448-page report soon after-
ward, presenting a highly damaging pic-
ture of Trump’s actions but declining to
come to a “traditional prosecutorial judg-
ment.” Barr temporarily withheld the
report from Congress and the public, cit-
ing the need for careful redactions.
Instead, he issued a short summary of
Mueller’s findings, offering his own con-
clusion that the evidence of obstruction
was “not sufficient” and eliding an—admit-
tedly confusing—legal nuance. Because of
an OLC opinion that said the president
could not be indicted while in office, Muel-
ler had reasoned that it would be unfair to
accuse Trump of committing a crime with
no opportunity to defend himself in court.
He seemed to imply that it was upto Con-
gress to indict him via impeachment.
Barr’s favorable summary met with pro-
test from Democrats and recriminations
from Mueller’s office, which complained
that the report’s findings had been mis-
characterized. (Barr later called Mueller’s