108 TIME July 19/July 26, 2021
7 Questions
‘
WHEN HE
GOT IN OFFICE
THIS TIME ... HE
REALLY WENT
OFF THE RAILS
’
in public service and a bad prosecutor
can do a huge amount of harm.Prosecutors’ credibility is the corner-
stone of the whole system. How does
Attorney General Merrick Garland get
us back to that place? I’ve been criti-
cal of Merrick Garland thus far. I think
Garland has not been strong enough, has
not been aggressive enough, in correct-
ing the abuses of Barr and the Trump
Administration. Garland has made clear
that he wants to avoid causing political
turbulence at virtually all costs.Did Trump hire the absolute worst
attorneys available to him? You’re
entitled in your personal capacity to
hire whoever you want. You suff er the
consequences. But when it comes to
picking the government’s top lawyers,
whether it’s White House counsel or,
most importantly, Attorney General, I
think you run into real problems when
you’re searching for your Roy Cohn.
And I think it’s quite clear that Bill
Barr’s audition memo reached Donald
Trump and he liked it. In Donald
Trump’s mind, he had his Roy Cohn.Did Bill Barr know better? He had to
have known better. This is a smart man.
This is a deeply experienced man. This
is a man who was Attorney General
once before. He appeared to be an
institutionalist. When he got in offi ce
this time, though, he really went off
the rails.Talking about the Roger Stone
case, this was the one time
in the 80,000 cases that DOJ
handles a year that the AG
stepped in. Would a jury convict
AG Barr for, say, misconduct on
that circumstantial evidence? I
don’t think Barr committed a crime
in intervening in the Stone case. The
Attorney General technically has the
right to ask for a lower sentence. It’s
just outrageous that he did that. It’s an
abuse of his power. —PHILIP ELLIOTTY
ou don’t mince words here.
In the introduction to your
book, you call Bill Barr “a
liar” and “a political partisan with
an extremist dystopian worldview.”
At what point did you come to this
conclusion? As to the part about
having this dystopian worldview, that
was something I only came to later
when I was trying to piece together
the question that so many people ask,
which is “Why would Bill Barr have
taken this job in the fi rst place?” Bill
Barr sees himself really as a culture
warrior, as somebody whose ultimate
mission was not so much to enforce
the criminal laws of the United States
fairly and impartially, but to impose his
own extremist worldview where the
only true way to govern societies is with
religious belief at the forefront, and
secularism is the root of all evil.
You were in the same boat as a lot of
us here in D.C. in that we overlooked
what was incoming when Barr was
nominated. How did we get that
wrong? I point the fi nger at myself
there. I happened to be on CNN the
day that his name was announced. I
said something like “He’s serious and
he is respected and he should be a real
upgrade from Jeff Sessions.” I did not
have knives out and ready for him from
the start.
Time and time again, we saw things
that scholars and practitioners
like yourself called wrong if not
outright unconstitutional. Why
did nothing matter? We as a
country vest enormous powers in
our prosecutors. The Attorney
General holds the most powers
of any prosecutor, and so
much of our system depends
on trusting in prosecutorial
judgment and discretion and
goodwill. I was taught from
a very early age at DOJ that
a good prosecutor can do the
most good of virtually anyone
Elie Honig The former prosecutor on his new
book, Hatchet Man, why Bill Barr went so wrong,
and what it will take to clean up Justice