Barr makes a strong case on the need for an investigation of the investigators. I say this as someone who believes firmly that the FBI did the right thing in opening up the investigation of Russian contacts with the Trump campaign, and also as someone who has not yet seen any evidence of wrongdoing in the opening of the investigation or in the Carter Page FISA application. The reason why an investigation is needed, however, is that—due to no fault of the investigators—the Trump campaign investigation was unprecedented and politically fraught in ways that go to the core of long-held concerns about the impact of secret government surveillance on our democracy. The country needs to know how it went so it can have confidence that the invariably fraught power exercised by the FBI was not abused, and also so the FBI can learn how to approach these problems better in the future.
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It is very hard to read this passage in a way that is charitable to Barr. It is one thing for an attorney general not to go out of his way to criticize the president for whom he works, even when asked. I get that. But here Barr goes out of his way, without being asked, to announce that he’s not troubled by Trump’s behavior and doesn’t think the president’s actions and comments harm American institutions. This comment makes it hard to take seriously Barr’s concerns about norms violations and harm to institutions, and will, like his insinuations, color his investigation no matter how fairly Durham conducts it.
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Barr’s insinuations in his interview were wrong. This is no justification for what he did, but Barr may in part have been reacting to various types of norm-breaking by former officials, and to very personal attacks by former officials. An example of the latter is Comey’s
May 1 op-ed, which unbecomingly attributed Barr’s and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s actions to a “lack of inner strength” and to having had their “souls” eaten by Trump—rather than addressing their actions, at least some of which were quite defensible, on the merits. Comey, in turn, has many very good reasons to be furious with the president and his administration due to their numerous unfair attacks on him, and due to Barr’s fact-free insinuations about him. The Trump administration, in turn, has reason to be furious with Comey over his leaked memos. It also has reason to be angry about the Strzok and Page messages, the leakers of foreign intelligence information who aimed to harm the president, and the exaggerated claims by several former intelligence officials about Trump’s complicity in the 2016 Russia operation. And the leakers and former-officials-turned-pundits, in turn, felt justified in (respectively) leaking in unprecedented ways, and in entering the political fray against the president, all due to Trump’s persistently outlandish, norm-breaking (to put it mildly) behavior.
