Bill Barr’s big mistake: He applied Trump’s call for ‘law-and-order’ to the election | Analysis

Mr Barr finally leaped over the president’s red line by suggesting his boss lost. In Trump World, that’s a cardinal sin, writes Washington Bureau Chief John T. Bennett

Attorney General William Barr often echoed Donald Trump. But not often enough. (AP)

William Barr, Donald Trump’s hand-picked attorney general, had toed the line before. But he finally crossed it when he essentially said his boss lost his re-election bid fair and square.

By essentially pushing out Mr Barr, the president showed once again that loyalty, for him, is a one-way street. The attorney general told an interviewer late last month that the Justice Department had not found any evidence of the widespread voter fraud Mr Trump and his campaign lawyers are alleging.

“There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results,” he told the Associated Press. And the [Department of Homeland Security] and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.”

That comment is in stark contrast to Mr Trump’s claims of a coordinated Democratic plot to flood vote-counting facilities with hundreds of thousands of ballots cast for President-elect Joe Biden.

“NO WAY WE LOST THIS ELECTION!” the president tweeted a few days before Mr Barr basically said the opposite. His fatal AP interview came amid Mr Trump pressuring specific Republican officials in swing states he lost to help him overturn the election since his AG would not do so.

“Why won’t Governor @BrianKempGA, the hapless Governor of Georgia, use his emergency powers, which can be easily done, to overrule his obstinate Secretary of State, and do a match of signatures on envelopes. It will be a “goldmine” of fraud, and we will easily WIN the state....” he wrote of the GOP chief executive of Georgia.

“....Also, quickly check the number of envelopes versus the number of ballots,” he added even though once signatures are checked upon receipt of the ballots, the two pieces of election mail are separated. “You may just find that there are many more ballots than there are envelopes. So simple, and so easy to do. Georgia Republicans are angry, all Republicans are angry. Get it done!”

Mr Barr did not appear angry as he delivered his assessment to the wire service, nor when he entered the West Wing later the same day.

As he has been since 4 November – the day after Election Day – Mr Trump is the angriest Republican of the all.

His once-busy daily schedule released by the White House once featured multiple meetings or public events. It would signal when the once-chatty chief executive likely would add one or more of his record pace-setting press gaggles to his impressive list.

But since the AP and major American news networks projected Mr Biden as the 46th president, the 45th’s daily schedule more often than not features just this entry: “THE PRESIDENT has no public events scheduled.”

Red line

But Mr Barr finally leaped over the president’s red line by suggesting his boss lost.

In Trump World, that’s a cardinal sin. After all, Mr Trump spent weeks in late October and early November promising his supporters his reelection would mean a continuation of “winning, winning, winning.”

The now-former AG committed another deadly Trump inner circle sin: He followed the facts.

Voter fraud claims that had been submitted to the Justice Department were “very particularized to a particular set of circumstances or actors or conduct.”

“They are not systemic allegations. And those have been run down; they are being run down,” he told AP. “Some have been broad and potentially cover a few thousand votes. … They have been followed up on.”

Some Justice Department observers for months had wondered for years whether Mr Barr’s true master was Donald Trump or the “unitary executive theory,” which has been pushed by former Vice President Dick Cheney and others like former George W Bush attorney John Yoo.

It claims that the Executive Office of the President has vast powers – but believers typically think those authorities need to be codified in law, executive orders, legal precedents and agency guidelines.  

Dirty work

Barr long appeared more than willing to do Trump’s dirtiest work and say things that amplified and gave legitimacy to the president’s most bombastic and legally questionable claims.

Mr Biden, congressional Democrats and other Trump critics have worried since Barr became AG that he might do the president’s bidding should the boss somehow challenge the outcome of an election the vote-counting showed he lost.

Those worries were not without merit. Mr Barr largely turned the Justice Department into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trump-Pence 2020 campaign organization.

But the AG sent a signal earlier this year when he made a public cry for his boss to stop tweeting about Justice business – specifically the former case involving the president’s longtime friend, Roger Stone.

“I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody … whether it’s Congress, newspaper editorial boards, or the president," Mr Barr told ABC News in February. "I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.”

The end came for Mr Barr when he applied one of Mr Trump’s re-election campaign mantras – “law and order” – in the interests of the country rather than massaging his boss’s massive-yet-fragile ego.

The 70-year-old Mr Barr has completed his second run as the country’s top lawyer. He probably felt he had codified all of the “unitary executive” powers he could with less than 50 days until Mr Trump leaves office. The president might try finding a temporary replacement to do his bidding.

But time is running out. And, as Mr Barr said, all the cases “have been followed up on.”