With Berman fiasco, Barr turns another corner--this time coming face-to-face with history and his "legacy"

After William Barr directed the Justice Department to drop the case against Michael Flynn, he asserted with a smirk to CBS News that “history is written by the winners,” suggesting that lying to investigators isn’t necessarily a crime, and it depends on who is writing the “history” to determine what is a crime or not; Barr apparently believes that “winners” are those who escape justice for their crimes, and “history” will be told by right-wing conspiracy media, not by historians in academia. Last year Barr also told CBS that he didn’t care about his legacy: “I’ll be dead,” he said. 

The problem for Barr is that history and his legacy is being written today; the firing of SDNY Attorney Geoffrey Berman fiasco is only in addition to Barr’s attempt to discredit and even criminalize the Mueller investigation and overlooking and even participating in deliberate attempts to obstruct justice and fire independent watchdogs.  Barr seems to completely oblivious to another unfortunate reality: when he was last Attorney General, the president he served under, George H.W. Bush, was generally regarded then—as today—as a competent man with a long history of public service. Bush at least pretended to be president of all the people, and he never tried to alienate specific groups with vulgar, course slurs, or tell obvious lies to obfuscate the truth. He was generally cordial with the press and didn’t make deliberate efforts to start a war with it. 

The fact that Barr provided Bush with the “justification” to pardon Caspar Weinberger before he could testify in trial about Bush’s complicity in the Iran-Contra scandal—the kind of blatant political move with an eye to the president’s re-election that we see Barr doing now—was not viewed in quite the same evil light because the president he was protecting then was not an evil man, like the one Barr is protecting now.

Unlike Bush, Donald Trump has been from the beginning of his presidency the subject of numerous tomes by “insiders” about how he is an incompetent, unfit, bigoted, chaos-sowing, nativist white nationalist with dictatorial tendencies. While some may say that Barr has been slovenly serving the interests of Trump for sole purpose of his political survival, Barr himself may justify his actions to himself by claiming that it is not Trump the man he is serving, but the survival of conservative political ideology.  But others may point out that Barr’s indifference to the moral and ethical—let alone illegal—behavior of Trump is condemning the Republican Party to one that is tying its identity to a white nationalist “base” that is radicalized in the extreme, with its chief propaganda conduit Fox News, which although it has the highest ratings among cable news programs, it still represents a minority of total news viewership.

Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus were examples of men who did act with an eye to history and their legacy. When Richard Nixon ordered then Attorney General Richardson to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, he refused to do so and resigned. His deputy, Ruckelshaus, also refused Nixon’s order and resigned. The AG third-in-line—future failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, did, however, carry out Nixon’s order. The political and public fallout proved to be disastrous for Nixon, for Bork felt pressured to appoint a new prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who decided to expand the investigation beyond the break-in. 

If Trump loses the election, he won’t be the only loser. Not only will Barr’s “legacy” be settled history, but he will likely be the subject of possible criminal investigations into his actions as Attorney General by a new sheriff in the Justice Department. And he will deserve no mercy for his moral and ethical cowardice.