The "Reputational Interests" of William Barr

The “Reputational Interests” of William Barr
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-reputational-interests-of-william-barr

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In the memo, Barr wrote that he would bowdlerize the report in accord with certain criteria: he would black out classified and grand-jury material, though Congress, if not the public, is entitled to see grand-jury proceedings, owing to statute and legal precedent, including in the case of Watergate. Then he imposed a novel and vague category for excision: he would protect the “reputational interests of peripheral third parties.” As for what those “reputational interests” are, who the third parties (as opposed to the first and second parties) are, and what, precisely, “peripheral” means, Barr has appointed himself the sole authority to decide.

The more the story unfolds, the deeper Barr’s interference appears to be. According to reports in the Times and the Washington Post, Mueller’s staff prepared summaries of each section of the report, which, according to one staff member, they intended for release “immediately—or very quickly” after it was delivered. Those summaries carefully excluded material that required redaction. Barr might simply have announced those summaries, representing the report in the words of those who worked on it, without going to the trouble of writing one of his own. According to the Washington Post, some members of Mueller’s team also said that the report contained evidence of Donald Trump obstructing justice that was “much more acute than Barr suggested”—implying that Barr suppressed their summaries in order to present an account more favorable to the President. These intrusions run counter to the image that the Attorney General has created of himself as a reliable professional devoted to the nation’s institutions, but they shouldn’t have come as a surprise; they are consistent with his record of more than twenty years at the Department of Justice.

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Barr’s effort to discredit the Mueller investigation should have brought to mind the not-so-distant history of his first stint as Attorney General, under George H. W. Bush. In 1992, just as Bush was leaving office, he issued, with Barr’s support, pardons for six Reagan Administration officials—including the former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger—who had been either charged for or were convicted of crimes connected with covering up the Iran-Contra affair and its violations of the U.S. Constitution. Weinberger’s pardon came before his case went to trial, and it was commonly believed that it was itself part of another coverup, to prevent the presentation of evidence that would have indicated Bush’s personal involvement in Iran-Contra, when he was Reagan’s Vice-President. Thanks to the pardons, the whole truth was never known.

Investigations into the scandal were still being conducted by the independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, who was, interestingly, like Robert Mueller, a consummately professional Republican who believed in the rule of law. Bush dismissed Walsh’s probe as “the criminalization of policy differences,” and the pardons effectively killed it. Walsh reacted with tempered bitterness, divulging in a public statement that Bush was, in fact, a subject of his investigation, and that the materials connected with the Weinberger case included “evidence of a conspiracy among the highest-ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.” The episode was a textbook lesson on how to short-circuit an independent counsel’s investigation and suppress damning evidence that investigators had uncovered—and William Barr was in the middle of it.

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