The New Yorker – May 13, 2019

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COMMENT

NORULES

I

f there is one thing that Attorney Gen-

eral William Barr’s testimony in the

Senate last week made abundantly clear,

it’s that he is fine with acting less like the

chief law-enforcement officer of the

United States and more like the personal

lawyer for a tantrum-prone client named

Donald Trump. Barr dissembled when

answering questions about his handling

of the Mueller report, then mischarac-

terized Robert Mueller’s objections to

his spin on it, saying that the special coun-

sel had been primarily troubled by how

“the media was playing this.” In fact,

Mueller had written, in a letter to Barr,

that he was concerned because the Attor-

ney General’s summary “did not fully cap-

ture the context, nature, and substance” of

his team’s work. Barr described that letter

as “snitty” and probably written by “staff

people,” thereby dismissing objections

that Mueller clearly wanted in the his-

torical record. By the end of the day, Barr

had said that he would not come back and

testify in the House, as he was scheduled

to do. Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker,

then said that, in misrepresenting Muel-

ler’s discontent, the Attorney General

had lied to Congress, which is “a crime.”

Barr is apparently a believer in the

“unitary executive” theory, an expansive

reading of the powers of the Presidency

that’s popular in conservative legal cir-

cles. Theory aside, though, serving as

Trump’s Attorney General—and keep-

ing the job—seems to mean signing on

to the Roy Cohn approach that Trump

so admires: treating anything, including

the Constitution, that does not serve

Trump’s interests as an urgent threat;

projecting Trump’s own venal motives

onto his critics and opponents; denying

and stonewalling.

As a businessman, Trump was nota-

bly litigious. In 2016, when he was run-

ning for President, USA Today found that

he had been involved in thirty-five hun-

dred lawsuits, and was the plaintiff in

nearly two thousand of them. That vol-

ume of litigation was extraordinary not

only for a Presidential candidate but even

for a real-estate mogul. As President, he

is pursuing a similar strategy—stacking

up lawsuits and thwarting investigations

in the hope that he can run out the clock

before the 2020 election. Last month, he

sued the chairman of the House Over-

sight and Reform Committee, Represen-

tative Elijah Cummings, who had re-

quested some of his financial records from

an accounting firm. Then Trump, three

of his children, and his private company

sued Deutsche Bank and Capital One to

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

prevent them from releasing information

about his financial arrangements, which

Democrats had subpoenaed. Trump also

went to court to try to block a lawsuit

brought by two hundred members of

Congress, which alleges that his business

dealings violate the emoluments clause

of the Constitution. And Trump and his

Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, have

so far declined to produce the President’s

tax returns for the House Ways and

Means Committee, which requested them

from the I.R.S. in early April. Since Rich-

ard Nixon, it has been the practice for

Presidents to release their returns, but, in

Mnuchin’s words, Congress is making an

“unprecedented” demand—“exposure for

the sake of exposure.”

Meanwhile, Commerce Secretary Wil-

bur Ross said no to a request from the

Senate Appropriations Committee to

testify about his department’s budget. In-

deed, Trump has declared a near-blan-

ket denial of all congressional requests

for information and testimony from mem-

bers of his Administration; after Barr’s

testimony, Trump said that he would not

allow the former White House counsel

Don McGahn to appear before the Sen-

ate. “I don’t want people testifying to a

party, because that is what they’re doing

if they do this,” Trump told the Wash-

ington Post, in April. Cummings told re-

porters, “To date, the White House has

refused to produce a single piece of paper

or a single witness in any of the commit-

tee’s investigations this entire year.”

The Administration’s persistent at-

tempts to stymie congressional oversight

don’t bear much in the way of legal merit.

In April, a district court in Washington,

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