The Dangerous Position of William Barr

David Rohde suggests Attorney General William Barr “might want to recall the example of John Mitchell, who, in 1975, became the first—and only—former Attorney General of the United States to be sent to prison.”

“Mitchell served as Richard Nixon’s Attorney General from 1969 to 1972, and then as chairman of Nixon’s 1972 Presidential reelection campaign. As campaign chairman, he oversaw the Watergate break-ins and then participated in the coverup. Unlike other aides who broke with Nixon and implicated the President, Mitchell declined to reveal his conversations with the President. He was convicted by a jury of his peers of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury for his role in Watergate. Mitchell served nineteen months in federal prison before being released, for medical reasons.”

“For many in the American legal community, though, Mitchell’s actions before Watergate were more troubling. While serving as Attorney General, Mitchell hatched secret—and, at times, bizarre—plots to aid Nixon politically. He investigated government officials and journalists suspected of leaking damaging information about the President. He prosecuted opponents of the Vietnam War. And he controlled a secret slush fund used to smear Democratic Presidential candidates deemed a threat to Nixon. In one simultaneously abhorrent and amateurish act, Mitchell approved a payment of ten thousand dollars to a faction of the American Nazi Party in order to carry out a failed effort to remove Governor George Wallace from a Presidential ballot in California. Nixon aides believed that supporters of Wallace—an avowed segregationist running as a third-party candidate—would shift their votes to Nixon.”