44 new york | december 9–22, 2019
Trump campaign’s foreign-policy adviser,
along with other unspecified breaks with
“normal procedures” at the FBI. In May, he
told CBS that he had asked questions about
the FBI’s actions in 2016, and the answers
he received were “just not jiving.” More
recent indications suggest that the probe has
since broadened in scope to examine not
just the FBI but also the CIA. In late Octo-
ber, the New York Times reported that Dur-
ham’s work, originally classified vaguely as
an “administrative review,” was now a crimi-
nal investigation, allowing him to issue sub-
poenas and convene a grand jury, a step that
could be routine or something more.
In late September, as all of Washington
was poring over the CIA whistle-blower’s
complaint, Barr was in Rome, meeting with
government counterparts, reportedly
including the chief of Italy’s intelligence
agency, to assure their cooperation with
Durham. Barr has also sought assistance
from Australia and Great Britain,and the
department has said Durham talked to “cer-
tain Ukrainians who are not members of the
government.” According to an anonymous
British official recently quoted in the Inde-
pendent, Barr’s inquiries have been “like
nothing we have come across before, they
are basically asking, in quite robust terms,
for help in doing a hatchet job on their own
intelligence services.”
“That’s all bullshit,” Barr said to me in his
office of the skepticism surrounding his
overseas meetings, which he said were nec-
essary under the circumstances. “This is a
case where we’re asking for assistance and
information, some of which is sensitive or
classified information.”
It would be easy to dismiss Durham’s
probe as a fool’s errand simply because
some unserious people are taking it seri-
ously, but there are legitimate questions to
be asked about how the FBI conducted
itself, like: Why didn’t the Bureau try to
warn Trump’s campaign it was afraid the
Russians were trying to compromise the
candidate before it launched a counterin-
telligence operation? (Naming it Crossfire
Hurricane does convey a gunslinging men-
tality.) Barr has defended his use of the
term spying to describe the FBI’sactions,
calling it a “perfectly good English word,”
and has said the use of surveillance against
a campaign is “a serious red line that’s been
crossed.” Defenders of the FBI’s handling of
the investigation say that any irregularities
were the result of panic, not politics, and
that the prospect of foreign infiltration of a
presidential campaign presented an
ex ng f ordi-
na ry r bout
the findings of a just-completed report by
the Justice Department’s inspectorgeneral,
examining some of the same issues and
scheduled to be released December 9, say it
concludes that the FBI’s decision to launch
the counterintelligence investigation was
justified based on the evidence it had. But
Barr is said to disagree with the report’s
conclusions, feeling that Durham has
found information that deserves further
investigation and contending that agencies
outside the purview of the DOJ’s internal
watchdog, such as the CIA, may have
important undisclosed information.
In their Italian trips, Barr and Durham
reportedly showed interest in evidence per-
taining to Joseph Mifsud, a mysterious
Russia-connected professor who tipped off
a Trump adviser about the hacking and
release of Democratic emails in early 2016.
Mifsud is also a fixture of right-wing con-
spiracy theories, which postulate that he was
an agent not of Russia but the CIA and
somehow working against Trump. On
December 4, the Washington Post reported
that the inspector general’s report uncov-
ered no evidence to support the theory that
Mifsud was a CIA asset and questioned
whether Durham had, either.
Barr’s critics contend he merely wants to
keep asking questions until he finds the
answer Trump wants or at least confuses the
issue politically. In the darkest light, Dur-
ham’s investigation looks like away for
Trump to undermine the impeachment
inquiry—which, after all, emanated from
the CIA—while also holding the threat of
punishment over those he hasalready
purged, like Strzok, Comey, and Comey’s
deputy Andrew McCabe. “It’s worse than
even I anticipated,” says Neil Kinkopf, a lib-
eral legal scholar who warned of the “breath-
taking scope” of Barr’s theory of presidential
power at his Senate-confirmation hearing.
“I think I was at the extreme end ofbad, but
even I did not anticipate him acting as the
president’s political lawyer.”
“What’s political for one side is law
enforcement for the other,” says oneof Barr’s
aides. “It depends on where you sit.But you
follow the law to where it goes.” In some
cases, the law goes to uncomfortable places
for Trump. Early this year, for instance, Barr
was briefed on an investigation being con-
ducted by the Office of the U.S. Attorney for
the Southern District of New York, which
was looking into a pair of Giuliani associates
who were then in the midst of helping him
pressure a prosecutor in Ukraine to
announce an investigation of a gas company
with which Hunter Biden was involved. In
October, the two men were hurriedly
arrested at Dulles airport, shortly after
ing at Trump’s hotel in Wash-
n. T e charged with lying about
their political donations, which included a
$325,000 contribution to a Trump-aligned
super-pac. Subpoenas in that case havelately reached into Trump’s fund-raising and
many other potentially embarrassing areas.
Although the Southern District is unoffi-
cially known as the Sovereign District,
because it operates with stubborn auton-
omy, it is still an office of the Justice Depart-
ment, reporting to the attorney general. So
far, the investigation has proceeded without
publicly reported interference, even as pros-
ecutors have reportedly focused on Giuliani
himself. Barr is said to have little affection
for Trump’s increasingly erratic private
attorney. But even so, he has argued, in his
2018 memo, that the president has “abso-
lute” discretion to place “his thumb on the
scale in favor of lenity”—meaning Trump
could, in theory, ask him to take it easy on his
friend Rudy. When I asked Barrif there
were any limits, outside of illegality,on what
the president could instruct him to do, he
told me he and Trump had set strict ground
rules. “Right from the very beginning,” Barr
said, “the president made clear to me, and
we discussed, that he will not getinto the
business of talking about, or asking me,
either to pursue, or not to pursue, cases. He
leaves that up to my judgment.”
Still, if there is one thing that is now
clear about Barr, it is that he carries out
orders. Both his friends and his critics
accept that he is motivated less bya desire
to protect this individual president than to
reinforce the institution of the presidency,
especially and not coincidentallyin peri-
ods when the executive branchis con-
trolled by the Republican Party. “He’s come
to this theory that the presidency should
be all-powerful,” says Donald Ayer, a Jus-
tice Department official in the first Bush
administration who belongs to Checks and
Balances. “And here you have a president
who is going to afford you, by his blunder-
buss behavior, a lot of context in which you
can push or test your theory.”
A few days before I met Barr, Trump had
given a rambling interview to Fox &Friends.
He had talked up the Justice Department’s
ongoing counter-investigation ledby Dur-
ham like a wrestler promoting a showdown,
predicting that “Bull Durham” would soon
reveal a plot to “overthrow the presidency”
and thereby help to prove the corruption of
the entire impeachment “scam.”I asked
Barr how that fit into their ground rules.
Barr blinked quizzically. He seemed to be
genuinely unaware of the Fox interview,
which had burned up social media. His
staffers hurriedly tried to brief him.
“There’s a movie, Bull Durham—” his
chief of staff began.
“Yeah, yeah,” Barr said. He knew that part.
“I’ll just say it again,” Barr told me, revert-
ing to a practiced answer. “I don’t pay atten-
tion to the tweets. If he has something to say
to me, he’ll say it to me directly.” ■