B8 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MARCH 6 , 2022
few weeks later he told Trump about a nascent
investigation in Pennsylvania involving fewer
than 10 ballots found in a trash can. The
president immediately touted the Pennsylva-
nia case as proof of pervasive fraud, but it
turned out to be simple human error.
Trump’s legal efforts were a clown car of
incompetence, but for a time Barr rode in that
car. Before resigning in December 2020, Barr
told the president in blunt terms that his
mass-voter-fraud arguments were bunk.
By comparison, the chapters Barr devotes
to more conventional issues like school vouch-
ers come as a kind of relief, even if they often
read as an airing of grievances for conserva-
tive lawyers — a Festivus for the Federalist
Society. He also repeats his 2020 claim that
some states’ coronavirus restrictions were
“the most sweeping and onerous denial of civil
liberties” since slavery — the kind of factually
inebriated argument sure to infuriate histori-
ans of segregation or the World War II
internment of Japanese Americans.
Barr earned the wrath of liberals and many
current and former Justice Department offi-
cials for his handling of cases involving
Mueller’s investigation of Trump, specifically
two of the targets, Roger Stone and Michael
Flynn, and the public release of Mueller’s final
report.
Democratic lawmakers argued that Barr
kneecapped his old friend Mueller and sabo-
taged the report by declaring that there was
insufficient evidence to charge Trump with
obstruction, thereby killing any possibility of
Congress removing the president from office.
Some of Barr’s strongest arguments in the
book come when he pushes back against that
idea, noting that Mueller’s own turn as, in
essence, a hostile witness before Congress did
more to undermine such an outcome than
anything Barr did.
He is far less convincing when it comes to
the handling of the Stone and Flynn cases,
arguing that he publicly overruled the Stone
prosecutors on a sentencing recommenda-
tion, and sought to scrap a guilty plea Flynn
had already entered, in the greater interests of
justice. If that was justice, it was of a kind
unrecognizable to most federal prosecutors.
His book is not for those prosecutors, nor is
it for those eager for shocking details about
Trump’s conduct behind closed doors. Barr’s
book is really a defense of his tenure to fellow
conservatives — and a call to dump Trump in
2024.
Like that day in college so many years ago,
Barr bided his time before taking one last
swing. But as long as there are senior officials
like Barr, there will be presidents like Trump.topher A. Wray.
Comey, who seemed to make bad judgment
a personal brand in 2016, later became a
source of friction between Trump and Barr
when the attorney general refused to pursue a
criminal case against the former FBI chief.
Barr’s account of Trump’s obsession with
arresting his perceived political enemies is
often told with a sense of humor that is more
than a little unsettling, as if he is describing
not the commander in chief but a cranky
sitcom dad whose declarations prompt head
shakes, eye rolls and a laugh track.
On Wray, the dispute was more stark. Barr
thought he was a good FBI director, while
Trump complained that Wray was not aggres-
sive enough against his preferred targets.
One of the “pathologies of our age,” Barr
writes, is that people “have come to think that,
simply because circumstances suggest wrong-
doing, some set of people should go to prison
for a crime,” an idea he returns to later in the
book, arguing: “Not all censurable conduct is
criminal. The current tendency to conflate the
foolish with the legally culpable causes more
harm than good.”
Barr is right that the Justice Department
has been weakened by constant public de-
mands that this or that politician be arrested.
Former prosecutor Rudy Giuliani hyped fan-
tastical allegations of crimes and investiga-
tions against first Hillary Clinton, then Joe
Biden. Over the two years of special counsel
Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, liberal
veterans of the Justice Department offered up
daily speculation about the crimes Trump and
his colleagues surely committed.
But the former attorney general conven-
iently ignores his own participation in this
behavior of lending his law enforcement
credentials to specious accusations against
politicians he doesn’t like. It was Barr who
said in 2017 that Clinton should be investigat-
ed criminally over a corporate deal called
Uranium One, and it was Barr who publicly
praised Comey’s decision to announce, just
days before the 2016 election, that he was
reopening the criminal investigation of Clin-
ton’s use of a private email server while
secretary of state.
In late 2020, Barr’s relationship with the
president soured, as Trump complained that
John Durham, the prosecutor tapped to inves-
tigate how U.S. agencies pursued allegations
of collusion between Russia and the Trump
campaign in 2016, was not going to deliver big
news before Election Day.
More critically, Barr writes, Trump and his
legal team, including Barr’s nemesis, Giuliani,
pushed absurd claims of mass voter fraud.
“His legal team had a difficult case to make,
and they made it as badly and unprofessional-
ly as I could have imagined,” Barr writes. “It
was all a grotesque embarrassment.”
Once again, Barr engaged in some of the
same conduct he now decries. In September
2020, he grossly exaggerated the facts of a
small fraudulent-ballot case in Texas, and aW
hen Donald Trump seemed to waver
in late 2018 on nominating William P.
Barr to be his attorney general, Barr
had a private conversation with the president
and told a story from his college days.
One day while playing flag football near
Columbia University, an opposing player
threw sand in Barr’s eyes, and the two had to
be separated. Barr waited two hours to get
even, and as the teams returned to campus, “I
walked over to my assailant and laid him out
— stupefied on the pavement — with a bloody
nose.”
It’s a rare job interview in which the
applicant tells a story about cold-cocking
someone and still gets the job, but Barr did.
Trump liked the story, Barr recounts in his
autobiography, “One Damn Thing After An-
other: Memoirs of an Attorney General.”
Barr wasn’t sure if the point of his story —
that sometimes it’s smarter to wait to respond
to an attack — registered with the president.
Left unaddressed is whether Trump may have
received another message: Don’t mess with
Bill Barr.
Modern American politics is driven less by
what people believe than who they hate, and
one of the quickest paths to fame and relevan-
cy is to be despised by the other side. In this,
Barr excelled: Democrats argued that he was
Trump’s hatchet man, twisting justice to spare
the president’s friends and punish his critics.
Barr was easily Trump’s most effective and
important Cabinet member, and showed far
more competence and cunning than Trump’s
prior attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and the
mercifully brief acting AG Matt Whitaker.
The title of Barr’s book is not, as one might
suspect, a reference to its nearly 600-page
length but comes rather from former attorney
general Ed Levi’s description of the job. The
first quarter of the narrative is a kind of
prequel, describing Barr’s childhood, early
legal career and first stint as attorney general
in the early 1990s under President George
H.W. Bush.
Barr is an old-school conservative, raised on
disgust with anti-Vietnam War hippies, con-
tempt for the media he brands “corrupt” and
blames for Bush’s 1992 loss, and a belief that
religious life in America is under siege from
liberals.
Initially a Jeb Bush supporter in 2016, Barr
says he came to back Trump largely because of
Trump’s likely picks for the Supreme Court.
“On this basis alone,” he declares, “I would
crawl over broken glass to the polls to vote for
Trump.”
Barr can tell a good yarn and has a penchant
for deadpan punchlines.
“Do you know what the secret is of a really
good tweet? Just the right amount of crazy,”
Trump told Barr at the end of one meeting.
The president, Barr writes, seemed to bond
with him over their shared dislike of former
FBI director James B. Comey, but Barr bristled
when Trump talked ceaselessly about firing
his handpicked replacement for the job, Chris-
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For more literary events, go to wapo.st/literarycalLITERARY CALENDARMarch 6 - 12Book World
ONE DAMN
THING AFTER
ANOTHER
Memoirs of an
Attorney
General
By William P.
Barr
William Morrow.
595 pp. $35Devlin Barrett writes about the FBI and the
Justice Department for The Washington Post and is
the author of “October Surprise: How the FBI Tried
to Save Itself and Crashed an Election.” He was
part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for
national reporting, for coverage of Russian
interference in the U.S. election.Attorney General
William Barr
with President
Donald Trump at
the White House
in 2019. Barr
would resign in
late 2020 after
refuting Trump’s
claims of election
fraud.MEMOIR REVIEW BY DEVLIN BARRETT
JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POSTWilliam Barr’s memoir
blasts Trump and
Giuliani — and ignores
his own partisan excesses