Goodbye Mr. Attorney General William Barr, (“Bill,” herein), you will not be missed.

Bill, we cannot get one sentence into this without setting out straight that you are and were an absolutely brilliant attorney, perhaps one of the best in the world. We are big enough to admit it (and so are you.) But that makes things even more awkward because now we lesser-lawyers are forced to ask hard questions, like what the hell were you doing offering yourself up to this administration?

Bill, the answers to this question brought up some awfully tough topics, too much of it ugly enough to make people want to turn away, so prepare yourself because this won’t be easy.

You wanted to be Attorney General again? Yes, we understand. You were attorney general for a time under H.W. Bush. It is surely a remarkable coincidence that you oversaw the DOJ back then just as the punishments were to be handed out to Republicans, for Iran-Contra, right? There were already several convictions and Casper Weinberger was about to go on trial in a few weeks. Remarkably, just as you came on the job, they all got pardoned because it was just such a mess, wasn’t it Bill? It was a mess in which priests and nuns, along with children, were gunned down in Nicaragua with weapons we provided, and you know that, Bill.

Charlie Pierce at Esquire, who wrote a book on it, once said that at its root, the Iran-Contra scandal was far worse than Watergate. Weapons went to terrorists, Bill. Money used in the sale to free hostages went to purchase weapons that killed all those innocents. They needed to do it this way to get around Congress which had banned money and weapons to the Contras. They got them anyway with horrific results.

You were there to ensure that no Republican got hurt. And so you made it happen. Again, you’re one hell of a lawyer and a vicious political animal. That’s one.

So we’ve sort of answered our own question as to what on God’s earth you were doing offering to work for Trump, a man who violates every ounce of your very genuine and very warped extreme Catholicism.

You seem to just have the nose for this shit, Bill. Reports have it that you believe in the unitary executive, some call it “the imperial presidency,” the belief that the president has the power to control the entire executive branch – including the DOJ, and thus, if the president does it, it cannot be a crime. It doesn’t take a brilliant lawyer to know that this is an extreme view, brought out only when the president is right proper, a Republican white man. In Trump, you saw a man and a movement that you could push into that position, right where he wanted to be anyway, and thus set the precedent.

You want a country where the powerful Republicans are very powerful, it’s all out on the table, black and white, a world in which the right people are the winners, and losers lose.

But you knew there was a big problem on the horizon, didn’t you, Bill? You knew damned well that Mueller was going to find something in that clusterfck. At the very least, Mueller would find the motherlode of obstruction of justice and possibly much more. It must have “triggered” you, Bill, knowing that Robert Mueller is perhaps one of the few lawyers on this planet better than you. Are you big enough to admit it, Bill?

But this was your thing, your specialty, reports alleged that you came to the administration saying you “could land the plane.” And even though Mueller’s a better lawyer, your position made that part irrelevant. You only needed to be a better wall, the only one the administration ever built

You did land that plane, the one with two holes in the wings and inoperative nose gear. Barely. You only got away with it because you had a Republican Senate there to back you up. It would have been interesting to see if you’d have stayed in the cockpit if the stakes were higher, with Democrats running the Congress. Once you neutered the Mueller report, the plane could have – indeed did – land on autopilot. And Behold! Again, no Republican got hurt. Bill Barr rides to the rescue again.

That’s two, Bill.

Mission accomplished? No, not even close. You had an agenda to push and no number of career prosecutors or television talking heads were going to reign you in as you ran roughshod in furtherance of Trump’s increasingly senile and demented actions. You were committed at that point and we know there were some sleepless nights. That is what happens when brilliant lawyers start counting up the number of violations of the U.S.C. criminal code that were all part of a hard day’s work for the Trump administration.

You happily and without shame broke one of the most fundamental and necessary unwritten rules in our federal government. The Attorney General is the nation’s lawyer and prosecutor. At any point, in any administration, there can come a time when the Attorney General is forced to prosecute someone else sitting at the table in cabinet meetings, or some underling. This, of course, includes the president. Big trouble arises when the president gets too close to the Attorney General or head of the FBI. Jim Comey turned down an invitation to play basketball at the White House under Obama because of appearances. You took phone calls from a man demanding you prosecute his enemies. See the difference?

Now that goes beyond shameful and borders on sedition and treason. It would be bad enough under a normal president, but this was no normal president and you knew it. We do not know all the Russian infiltration into our government, and in particular, with Trump – we only know that something’s very very wrong. You do know what’s wrong and you don’t care. In the end, you believe more in an imperial presidency much like Putin’s than you believe in Jeffersonian democracy. In other words, you were more than willing to look the other way.

But after a while, looking the other way wasn’t enough, right, Bill? Like any unleashed sociopath, with Trump, too much was never enough. Donald Trump needed more from you. He needed Roger Stone left alone, I mean he really needed Stone left alone. If there is one person in this country that could destroy Trump in two to three sentences, it is Roger Stone. Stone knew it. Trump knew it. We knew it. And, most damningly, as the man in charge of prosecuting him, you knew it, Bill.

So you stood aside when it got real ugly, when Trump had to commute Stone’s sentence despite all the hard work put in by your prosecutors. A president commutes and pardons his friends – and only his friends – and you don’t investigate? Come on, big Bill, that is where history is really going to kick you up and down as one of the worst conspirators. Again, that doesn’t take a genius attorney, or even an attorney, to know that all these pardons of a very select group needed to be investigated. Why is he so desperate, Bill? You know but you’re not telling. Shameful.

Were that your only problem.

You saved the almost comical until the end. Being the brilliant attorney and man you are, in about mid-September or so, you started to put a little distance between you and the raging man a few blocks down the street. Things were getting a little scary. He needed you so badly, asking you to commit more crimes, and violate more norms, openly. But those damned polls kept showing that you might well be out of a job come January and that was a problem. A real prosecutor might soon be using that same office and that meant that everything you did would be laid out on the table.

Only then did you start drawing some lines.

Sure, you let Trump pardon Flynn, but you couldn’t do a damned thing about that. But you never released anything on Hunter. You didn’t do a Comey and release some “Trumped-up” investigation findings in mid-October when Trump needed his surprise. You wouldn’t do it. We would congratulate you, were it not for the fact that once again you were furthering your own agenda, this time, keeping your own ample ass out of prison. You knew about the pardons for profit, didn’t you? And you know that Attorney Generals have seen prison before.

It all sent Trump into a rage. But what were you going to do? The polls, those damned polls, right, Bill? They foreshadowed a dark future. So lines were drawn, you could pretend you had some principles. You refused to hammer Hunter, put a bullet in Biden, obliterate Obama, and take one last shot at saving Trump. You wouldn’t do it. Coward.

It would have been a time you could put that imperial presidency and yourself on the line, take some risks. But risks aren’t really your thing, Bill – and we’re back around to being the brilliant lawyer, knowing when to settle. And so you did. You settled right into announcing you found no fraud before you met with Trump. Good lawyering, hedge your risk, always.

We would have loved to have been a fly on that wall in that meeting, one in which you surely got slapped around like the scared child that hides deep inside that brilliant, grizzled exterior. You’re a big man when punching down at career prosecutors that can’t touch you (yet), a condescending smartass when answering questions before House Democrats that can’t touch you (yet), you’ll clear out Lafayette Square with a blast from Big Man Barr, but you morph into a scared kitten when the risk is real and losers lose.

Speaking of scared kittens, we save the best for last. That nauseating, humiliating, sappy, soapy, resignation letter you penned, North Korean barbeque-style. Perhaps you believed it would save you from a life-threatening tweet. Again, the risk thing, Bill. You were looking at risk when you wrote this:

I am greatly honoured that you called on me to serve your administration and the American people once again as Attorney General. I am proud to have played a role in the many successes and unprecedented achievements you have delivered for the American people. Your 2016 victory speech in which you reached out to your opponents and called for working together for the benefit of the American people was immediately met by a partisan onslaught against you in which no tactic, no matter how abusive and deceitful, was out of bounds. The nadir of this campaign was the effort to cripple, if not oust, your administration with frenzied and baseless accusations of collusion with Russia.

Mother of god.

Attorney General William Barr has submitted his resignation to Trump. He will depart on Dec 23rd pic.twitter.com/ZQ4mgOnvLf

— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) December 14, 2020

You put your name to that shit, Bill? And a big “fck you” to the Democrats on your way out? Maybe you aren’t as smart as we thought because people remember things like that, Bill, and those people are about to take over your office and oversee your furious prosecutors.

That’s three, Bill.

Things change when you are the one that is panicking, right? You now face a future in which you’ll live every day in fear that you, William Barr, will find yourself at the wrong end of the “United States v. …” caption. You will also have to worry that the monster you helped to create, the MAGA movement, might come for you and your deep state depravity. They want their fraud Bill, and they might want to look for it in you. We hope not. It could be ugly.

We don’t want “ugly,” but a part of this is very much fitting. You did land the plane, Bill, you’re on the runway. But that plane’s on fire now and there are a lot of people ahead of you crawling in panic toward the door. The captain should be the last one off the plane, but we suspect you’re about to strip those stripes you fought to adorn.

It will be one of the last shameful things you’ve done, turning on those you served to lift, only to save yourself.

It is all so shameful and ugly, really ugly. But you were smart enough to see that this was how it had to end. Maybe you fooled yourself for a bit and envisioned otherwise. You outsmarted yourself, to your own bad end. Shame on you, Bill. But we need not say a thing, you feel it, you’re no dummy.

You will not be missed but your problem is we’ll be hearing your name too much in the near future.

Fitting.

Over the next month, we are doing a series, Goodbye to All That, in which we will say goodbye to each member of the Trump administration. We will do at least two a week and always one on the weekend. 

Part One of our series – Goodbye Kayleigh McEnany — You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself and You Will Not Be Missed

Part Two of our series – Goodbye Ivanka Trump — You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself and You Will Not Be Missed

Part Three of our series – Goodbye Mike Pence — You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself and You Will Not Be Missed

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Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak