Good Trump, bad Trump

ONE DAMN THING AFTER ANOTHER: Memoirs of an Attorney General

Author: William P Barr

Publisher: William Morrow

Price: $35 

Pages: 608

It’s a rare Washington memoir that makes you gasp in the very second sentence. Here’s the first sentence from William P Barr’s One Damn Thing After Another, an account of his two turns as attorney general: “The first day of December 2020, almost a month after the presidential election, was gray and rainy.” Indeed it was. Here’s the second: “That afternoon, the president, struggling to come to terms with the election result, had heard I was at the White House. …” Uh, “struggling to come to terms with”? How about “struggling to overturn the election he just lost” or “struggling to undermine American democracy”?

Such opening vignettes serve a venerable purpose in the Washington memoir genre: to show the hero speaking truth to power. Barr had just told a reporter that the Justice Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” By the end of the book, Barr uses the election controversy as a vehicle for a novel interpretation of the Trump presidency. Everything was great until Election Day, 2020. For Barr, it was as if this great president experienced a sudden personality transplant. “After the election,” Barr writes, “he was beyond restraint. He would only listen to a few sycophants who told him what he wanted to hear. Reasoning with him was hopeless.”

The heart of One Damn Thing After Another concerns the earlier days of Trump’s presidency when, apparently, “country and principle” took first place. This, as the rest of the book makes clear, is the real reason Barr came out of a comfortable retirement in early 2019 to serve as Jeff Sessions’s successor as attorney general. Barr — who thought Trump was “being wronged” by the investigation into the 2016 election led by Robert S Mueller III, the special counsel — wanted to come to Trump’s defence.

Barr refers to the allegations that Trump colluded with the Russians in the lead-up to the election as the “Russiagate lunacy,” the “bogus Russiagate scandal,” “the biggest political injustice in our history” and the “Russiagate nonsense” (twice). As Barr reveals, Trump first asked him to serve on his defence team, but Barr figured he could do more good for the president as attorney general. He was right.

When Trump says repeatedly that he fired the FBI director James Comey because of the Russia investigation, Barr spins it as, “Unfortunately, President Trump exacerbated things himself with his clumsy miscues, notably making imprecise comments in an interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt and joking around with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador the day after firing Comey.” The just-joking defence is a favourite for Barr, as it is for the former president.

During his confirmation hearing, Barr promised to make Mueller’s report public — and he contrived to do so in the most helpful way for the president. Instead of just releasing the report as he had promised, Barr took it upon himself to decide whether Trump could be charged with obstruction of justice. Barr “cleared the decks to work long into the night and over the weekend, studying the report. I wanted to come to a decision on obstruction.” And then, mirabile dictu, Barr concluded that the president had not violated the law, and wrote a letter to that effect. When the Justice Department got around to releasing the actual report weeks later, it became apparent that the evidence against Trump was more incriminating than Barr let on, but by that point the attorney general had succeeded in shaping the story to the president’s great advantage.

The only scalps Barr wanted were of those in the FBI, who started the Russia investigation in the first place. He writes, “I started thinking seriously about how best to get to the bottom of the matter that really required investigation: How did the phony Russiagate scandal get going, and why did the FBI leadership handle the matter in such an inexplicable and heavy-handed way?” He appointed a federal prosecutor named John Durham to lead this probe, which has now been going on longer than the Mueller investigation, with little to show for it.

Barr loathes Democrats: President Obama, a “left-wing agitator, ... throttled the economy, degraded the culture and frittered away US strength and credibility in foreign affairs.” (He likes Obama better than Hillary Clinton.) Overall, his views reflect the party line at Fox News, which, curiously, he does not mention in several jeremiads about left-wing domination of the news media.

Barr is too smart to miss what was in front of him in the White House. Indeed, by the end, Barr concludes that “Donald Trump has shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed.”

Barr’s odd theory about Good Trump turning into Bad Trump may have more to do with his feelings about Democrats than with the president he served. “I am under no illusion about who is responsible for dividing the country, embittering our politics and weakening and demoralising our nation,” he writes. “It is the progressive left and their increasingly totalitarian ideals.” In a way, it’s the highest praise Barr can offer Trump: He had the right enemies.

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