A Major Villain

One side benefit to Donald Trump's decisive defeat in last month's election will be the departure of a whole slew of despicable characters in his administration. Picking who was the worst of the bunch is a formidable tasks because there are so many choices.

One particularly loathsome individual who must rank in the top firmament of nearly everyone's list is Trump's outgoing attorney general, William Barr. To help anyone compiling the long list of Barr's evil deeds, on Tuesday The New Republic helpfully published an article (link here) with the title "Bill Barr Will Go Down in History as Trump’s Worst Enabler." The secondary deck title is "The attorney general could not deliver the corrupt boons the President sought, but it was not for want of trying."

The piece pulls no punches. Right up front, Barr is identified as the person who "did more damage to the rule of law than any other attorney general in American history." That naturally raises a question — was he even worse than Richard Nixon's grossly corrupt attorney general John Mitchell who was prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated in federal prison for his crimes in the Watergate scandal?

Probably so. Mitchell was evil and deeply corrupt but ultimately a clumsy fool. Barr is evil and deeply corrupt but far more careful. While, like Trump, he completely lacks a moral compass, he's far smarter. Mitchell was easy to prosecute because his crimes were so glaringly obvious, whereas Barr can cloak every heinous action he took as being within the law.

Barr claims to be motivated by a belief in a strong commander-in-chief — he wants a President to be running the show, not Congress nor the Supreme Court.

But Barr's actions have betrayed that goal. He actually wants a President to be entirely unaccountable under the law. He was Trump's worst enabler because he wanted to turn him into an all-powerful President. That's not democratic; that's fascistic.

You'd think that Trump's rampant corruption would have shown him the dangers of that approach. But he was blind to the lesson before him — whether this was intentional or accidental is irrelevant.

An attorney general is supposed to be nearly autonomous from the White House, but Barr ignored that precedent. One is left wondering why, given he wasn't a long-time Trump loyalist and didn't know the President before he was elected. One must surmise it was a quest for power — a more powerful President meant a more powerful attorney general.

That means Barr wasn't merely corrupt and evil. He was also extremely dangerous, far more than John Mitchell ever was.