Trump wanted his Roy Cohn. In William Barr, he found his John Mitchell instead.
“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” That was President Trump’s famous lament after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation. But in Sessions’s eventual replacement, William P. Barr, Trump may have done even better — by his standards — than Cohn, the notoriously unscrupulous defense lawyer.
As Barr prepares to testify before the House Judiciary Committee for the first time as Trump’s attorney general, he has instead come to resemble another disgraced lawyer of the past: former attorney general John Mitchell, whose misplaced loyalty to President Richard M. Nixon outweighed the duty he owed to the Justice Department and the country.
Mitchell lied incessantly about Nixon’s role in Watergate and other misconduct, no matter the consequences — which in Mitchell’s case eventually included disbarment and prison. Barr’s long series of distorted, dishonest and false statements in defense of the president may not land him in criminal jeopardy, but they are familiar steps on that same crooked path — steps that the Judiciary Committee should press Barr to explain.
They begin with Barr’s misleading declarations about the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in the interregnum before its release, including minimizing powerful evidence of obstruction of justice. A Republican-appointed federal judge ruled that Barr’s statements were “distorted” and showed a “lack of candor.”
I was preparing to serve as an impeachment counsel to the House Judiciary Committee at the time. As I write in a new book, my colleagues and I were astonished that Barr would sacrifice his reputation to protect Trump. Yet that episode turned out to be just the start of Barr’s service in defense of the president.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/27/trump-wanted-his-roy-cohn-william-barr-he-found-his-john-mitchell-instead/
