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(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Bill Barr has never lacked for chutzpah.

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This is a guy who worked for the CIA and Justice Department, but sailed to office as someone who would take on the “Deep State.” He’s a former Verizon lawyer who threatened to bring the government down on Big Tech. FFS, this is a guy who pretending he was rooting out corruption even as he booked a $30,000 Christmas party at his boss’s hotel — the one that was leased from the federal government.

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But even by his own standards, Bill Barr’s latest book is an exercise in just goin’ for it. Amazon’s blurb for “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General” promises a “vivid, forthright” comparison of his first, normal stint in the executive branch, where he came in at the end to help sweep the Iran-Contra affair under the rug, to his second, when he helped hide the president’s attempted extortion of a foreign government.

Apparently Barr’s “second tenure under President Donald Trump [was] a deliberate and difficult choice.” Cue the world’s tiniest violins. But at least he got to lock up a whole bunch of Black and brown people both times, right?

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Lest we forget, Bill Barr presided over an absolute orgy of inappropriate interference with the supposedly independent Justice Department. From the mash note cum job application he sent to Trump in June of 2018, expounding on his theories unlimited presidential power and crapping on the Mueller investigation, to his obsequious resignation letter in December of 2020, offered up as a bribe to get him out the door without being fired via tweet, Barr never failed to put his own political interests first.

Before the Mueller Report was even released, Barr famously announced hopped in front of a microphone to announce that the it had fully exonerated the president. In reality Mueller laid out multiple counts of obstruction of justice, before concluding that only congress had the right to try a sitting executive. Barr then proceeded to blow up the prosecution of Michael Flynn and undercut line prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone. And for good measure, he tried to Saturday Night Massacre the SDNY in an apparent attempt to protect Rudy Giuliani.

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The president’s enemies got a different treatment, however. The investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server went on until October of 2019. And the Durham investigation looking for someone — anyone! — to punish for the Russia investigation, is ongoing. Perhaps Perkins Coie should be grateful they didn’t get teargassed. Unfortunately the protestors in Lafayette Park weren’t so lucky the day Trump needed to trespass at a church so he could get his photo taken manhandling a bible.

In the Ukraine scandal, Trump’s trusty adjutant buried the whistleblower complaint about his “perfect, perfect phone call” in the Criminal Division and obediently dummied up memos insisting that the executive branch was immune from congressional oversight. And he wasn’t above helping his boss’s reelection efforts either, even going so far as to set up an intake mechanism at DOJ for Rudy Giuliani’s fantastical slanders about Joe Biden and his son.

In fact, there was no Republican culture war issue that Barr didn’t weigh in on. From his preposterous lies about Antifa supersoldiers flying around America wreaking havoc, to his preposterous lies about election fraud, Barr was willing to put the credence of his office behind any GOP talking point. He even went on Fox and whined about a “jihad” on hydroxychloroquine. And what Grand Old Party would be complete without “Black on Black crime?” Drink!

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And now for just $35 you can get a hard copy of Bill Barr’s “candid account of his historic tenures serving two vastly different presidents, George H.W. Bush and Donald J. Trump.”

Because if there’s one thing Bill Barr is known for, it’s candor.

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Or you could take that money and spend it on literally anything else.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Topics

Attorney General, Bill Barr, Books, Donald Trump