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The Reputational Interests of William Barr
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-reputational-interests-of-william-barr
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In the memo, Barr wrote that he would bowdlerize the report in accord with certain criteria: he would black out classified and grand-jury material, though Congress, if not the public, is entitled to see grand-jury proceedings, owing to statute and legal precedent, including in the case of Watergate. Then he imposed a novel and vague category for excision: he would protect the reputational interests of peripheral third parties. As for what those reputational interests are, who the third parties (as opposed to the first and second parties) are, and what, precisely, peripheral means, Barr has appointed himself the sole authority to decide.
The more the story unfolds, the deeper Barrs interference appears to be. According to reports in the Times and the Washington Post, Muellers staff prepared summaries of each section of the report, which, according to one staff member, they intended for release immediatelyor very quickly after it was delivered. Those summaries carefully excluded material that required redaction. Barr might simply have announced those summaries, representing the report in the words of those who worked on it, without going to the trouble of writing one of his own. According to the Washington Post, some members of Muellers team also said that the report contained evidence of Donald Trump obstructing justice that was much more acute than Barr suggestedimplying that Barr suppressed their summaries in order to present an account more favorable to the President. These intrusions run counter to the image that the Attorney General has created of himself as a reliable professional devoted to the nations institutions, but they shouldnt have come as a surprise; they are consistent with his record of more than twenty years at the Department of Justice.
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Barrs effort to discredit the Mueller investigation should have brought to mind the not-so-distant history of his first stint as Attorney General, under George H. W. Bush. In 1992, just as Bush was leaving office, he issued, with Barrs support, pardons for six Reagan Administration officialsincluding the former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinbergerwho had been either charged for or were convicted of crimes connected with covering up the Iran-Contra affair and its violations of the U.S. Constitution. Weinbergers pardon came before his case went to trial, and it was commonly believed that it was itself part of another coverup, to prevent the presentation of evidence that would have indicated Bushs personal involvement in Iran-Contra, when he was Reagans Vice-President. Thanks to the pardons, the whole truth was never known.
Investigations into the scandal were still being conducted by the independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, who was, interestingly, like Robert Mueller, a consummately professional Republican who believed in the rule of law. Bush dismissed Walshs probe as the criminalization of policy differences, and the pardons effectively killed it. Walsh reacted with tempered bitterness, divulging in a public statement that Bush was, in fact, a subject of his investigation, and that the materials connected with the Weinberger case included evidence of a conspiracy among the highest-ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public. The episode was a textbook lesson on how to short-circuit an independent counsels investigation and suppress damning evidence that investigators had uncoveredand William Barr was in the middle of it.
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