Barr’s Performance Has Been Catastrophic

Benjamin Wittes: “It has been catastrophic. Not in my memory has a sitting attorney general more diminished the credibility of his department on any subject. It is a kind of trope of political opposition in every administration that the attorney general—whoever he or she is—is politicizing the Justice Department and acting as a defense lawyer for the president. In this case it is true.”

“Barr has consistently sought to spin his department’s work in a highly political fashion, and he has done so to cast the president’s conduct in the most favorable possible light. Trump serially complained that Jeff Sessions didn’t act to ‘protect’ him. Matthew Whitaker never had the stature or internal clout to do so effectively. In Barr, Trump has found his man.”

Playbook: “It’s bad for democracy to have an administration ignore the will of a co-equal branch of government. Barr opposes answering questions from a staff attorney, but — as Chairman Jerry Nadler of New York says — it cannot be up to the administration to decide how Congress conducts its business. This is all a mess.”