One of the most revealing things President Donald Trump ever said was his complaint last year that “I don’t have an attorney general.”
This wasn’t because Jeff Sessions was failing to come to work every day, but rather because he had recused himself from the Russia investigation. Had Trump known that Sessions would not oversee that investigation, and thus protect him from it, the president said, “I would have quickly picked someone else.” Because after all, what higher duty could the U.S. attorney general have than to do the president’s personal bidding?
Well now Trump has his attorney general, William Barr. As we learned in his Tuesday congressional testimony, Barr will do everything in his power to make sure as little as possible of Robert Mueller’s report on the Russia scandal reaches the public.
And now Barr will be using his office to accommodate the president, Fox News, and every fevered right-wing fantasy of a Deep State anti-Trump conspiracy: He intends to review controversial counterintelligence decisions made by Justice Department and FBI officials, including actions taken during the probe of the Trump campaign, The Washington Post reported.
“This indicates that Barr is looking into allegations that Republican lawmakers have been pursuing for more than a year — that the investigation into President Donald Trump and possible collusion with Russia was tainted at the start by anti-Trump bias in the FBI and Justice Department.”
In testimony on Wednesday, Barr even said: “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal.” This echoes one of the more preposterous descriptions Trump and his advocates have used for the counterintelligence investigation. So let’s make sure we understand what’s “controversial” about that investigation.
As we now know, in 2016, Russia mounted a comprehensive effort to help get Trump elected president. That effort included social media propagandizing, outreach to Trump campaign officials, and the hacking of Democratic emails. The FBI began its counterintelligence investigation that summer, when it was alerted that a Trump campaign adviser had bragged that Russia possessed stolen Clinton emails that could be used to embarrass her.
That investigation confronted two broad questions: What was the nature of Russian meddling in the American election, and was the Trump campaign involved? We can argue about how to interpret everything the investigation eventually uncovered. But the Republican position has in effect been that there should never have been any FBI investigation at all into the Russian attack on the American election.
A more sane group of people would say that while of course Russia’s attack on our electoral system was important to investigate, that investigation hasn’t shown criminality by the president and his associates (well, apart from the crimes Mueller found by members of Trump’s inner circle), so in the end they were vindicated, sort of. We could argue about that conclusion too, but that’s not the position Republicans are taking. They’re saying the entire investigation was illegitimate from the get-go.
A less ludicrous position might be that while the investigation was legitimate, the way it was carried out was problematic. Republicans make arguments on this score as well. Their theory is that there was a vast and ruthless conspiracy within the Justice Department and specifically the FBI — for the record, probably the most politically conservative agency in the entire federal government — to destroy Trump.
The problem is that there is no genuine evidence that any actions anyone took in the course of the investigation displayed improper anti-Trump bias. Peter Strzok? Nope. Strzok, who had a key role in the counterintelligence investigation of Russian meddling, exchanged text messages in which he disparaged Trump — surely the first case in history in which an investigator held one of his targets in low esteem.
Those texts were publicly released by the Justice Department, which is why we know they exist. What were not released, for instance, are text messages exchanged by the FBI agents in the New York office who were reportedly consumed with their hatred of Hillary Clinton. But having established that someone working on the Russia investigation disliked Trump, Republicans spun out a story of a vast conspiracy to destroy the future president. The only trouble was that they could never find any evidence that such a conspiracy existed or explained why this imagined conspiracy failed to do the one thing that would have accomplished its supposed goal. But now, the new attorney general has given the president and his superfans on Fox and in Congress what they wanted: an official probe into the Russia investigation, to see if there was malfeasance that hasn’t yet been discovered.
I suppose it’s possible that Barr’s team will find that the conspiracy is real, and we’ll all be astonished. But it’s much more likely that they’ll take what we already know and package it into a tale full of supposition, conjecture and dark insinuations. Their conclusions will be trumpeted for days on Fox. The president will tweet that every allegation he has ever made about the nefarious FBI has been proven true. Congressional Republicans will demand that the Justice Department be purged of anyone unwilling to declare their eternal loyalty to Trump.
And the president will nod in satisfaction and say, “Now I have an attorney general.”
Paul Waldman is an opinion writer for The Washington Post.