Mr Barr has an expansive view of executive power. In a 2018 memo he argued a president could not obstruct justice in the lawful performance of his office. Our article from March
are dismayed by Robert Mueller’s failure to take down the president. Yet they have a consolatory new hate figure in the form of William Barr, who began his second spell as attorney-general last month. A grandfatherly 68-year-old, who first presided over the Justice Department for George H.W. Bush, Mr Barr has been castigated for his handling of Mr Mueller’s report, which remains under wraps at his discretion.
Whatever they intended, he and Mr Barr have combined to damage Mr Trump while clearing him. Theirs is a jumbled, two-handed version of James Comey’s fateful decision to criticise Hillary Clinton’s email arrangements even as he announced that she would not faces charges. No wonder it has elicited the same partisan response. Republicans consider Mr Trump exonerated, Democrats—almost as understandably—think he hasn’t been.
That alone risks Mr Barr’s intervention seeming partial—at least to the half of America aching to see Mr Trump in irons. And the impression is reinforced by the fact that Mr Barr prejudged the Mueller investigation, in the president’s favour, before he took charge of it. In an unsolicited 19-page memo to Mr Rosenstein last year, Mr Barr argued that the special counsel’s obstruction probe was “fatally misconceived” and “premised on a novel and legally insupportable reading of the law.
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