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Minichello wins Ivy League championship

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United Way announces 2019 Brader, Kane awards

<p>For starters, I would like to say a few words in defense of Attorney General William Barr. He is being much maligned, even vilified, as a mumbling, bumbling, dissembling, lying apologist for President Donald Trump.</p><p>And I just want to note for the record that America&#8217;s 85th attorney general (who was also America&#8217;s 77th attorney general under President George H.W. Bush) is a very smart man who always knows precisely what he is doing. And why. And assumes he can get away with it.</p><p>On Wednesday, Barr knew precisely what he was just doing at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, when you saw him on your news screens. You saw him performing as a mumbling, bumbling, dissembling apologist for President Trump.</p><p>But Barr was careful to be technically precise. He was under control as he performed the role of a maybe-deceiving-but-never-quite-lying Trump apologist. It seemed that made it an acceptable trade-off, as he sees things. Because Barr&#8217;s ultimate mission, as discerned from past writings and comments, is to be our ultimate definer and defender of the strongest-conceivable presidency that can exist in our constitutional democracy.</p><p>That became clear Wednesday the moment we saw Barr elaborate on his neo-Nixonian authoritarian view that a president can simply shut down any special counsel investigation (Barr called it a &#8220;proceeding&#8221;) &#8212; even one into his own actions.</p><p>&#8220;If it was a groundless proceeding, if it was based on false allegations, uh, the president does not have to sit there, constitutionally, and let it run its course,&#8221; Barr testified. &#8220;The president could terminate that proceeding and it would not be corrupt intent, because he was being falsely accused.&#8221;</p><p>(FLASHBACK: We can still hear former president Richard Nixon, who ordered the infamous Saturday Night Massacre and ended up a resigned-in-disgrace private citizen, telling interviewer David Frost: &#8220;But when the president does it that means it is not illegal.&#8221;)</p><p>Barr, being a smart man, knew precisely what he was doing a month ago, when he issued his infamous March 24 mini-memo to Congress after receiving the special counsel&#8217;s report on Russia&#8217;s interference in the 2016 election and Team Trump&#8217;s Russia connections. Barr provided as little actual news as possible &#8212; just saying Mueller found no Trump Team conspiracy with Russia and he found no proof of obstruction of justice. Period.</p><p>Then Barr clamped on a news blackout, gifting Trump with several weeks where he could lie to Americans that he&#8217;d been totally exonerated &#8212; so people might tire of the yammer before the full report came out.</p><p>During those weeks, Barr flatly misled and deceived Congress by insisting to Congress under oath that he didn&#8217;t know if Mueller was displeased by his obstruction decision and news-lite memo. But this week, we discovered Barr know damn well &#8212; back on March 27 Mueller had written him to complain. Mueller said there was &#8220;public confusion&#8221; because Barr&#8217;s memo &#8220;did not capture the content, nature, and substance of this Office&#8217;s work and conclusions.&#8221;</p><p>Barr was also smart enough to know how he could take advantage of Mueller and giftwrap for Trump a few weeks of a special counsel news blackout. After all, Barr and Mueller have been good friends for three decades. Their wives went to Bible school together; the Muellers attended the Barr daughters&#8217; weddings. Barr knew Mueller was a straight-arrow sort who obeyed all rules, and was easy to manipulate.</p><p>Indeed, Barr got his job after writing an op-ed column calling Mueller&#8217;s pursuit of obstruction of justice effort &#8220;asinine.&#8221; Then he wrote a long memo about it and sent it to Trump&#8217;s White House.</p><p>For one month, Barr had pasted on his blankest of blank expressions, mumbled, bumbled, dissembled but maybe didn&#8217;t flat-out lie to Congress. And Mueller dutifully still went quietly through channels, never blowing his whistle.</p><p>Until Wednesday. When senators asked Barr why he&#8217;d deceived Congress by never mentioning Mueller&#8217;s letter, the 85th U.S. attorney general said dismissively: &#8220;Y&#8217;know, the letter&#8217;s a bit snitty and I think it was probably written by one of his staff people.&#8221;</p><p>Scholars have different ways of analyzing such moments. Psychologists like to talk about &#8220;transference&#8221; &#8212; it&#8217;s where one person projects what he or she is feeling onto to another. And Barr&#8217;s ever-blank face indeed betrayed a flash of grimace you&#8217;d expect from someone who was suffering a bit of a snit-fit, himself.</p><p>But that was also the sort of sudden twist of the literary knife of poetic justice, a moment that could someday end up enlivening a thesis of a Shakespearean scholar, perhaps even one who once matriculated at, say, Trump University.</p><p>E tu Barr?</p><style>
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<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>Martin Schram</p><p>Guest Columnist</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Martin Schram, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive. Readers may send him email at <a href="mailto:martin.schram@gmail.com">martin.schram@gmail.com</a>.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Their view: Barr extends a Shakespearean hand of friendship