In Bill Barr, Trump Found His Dick Cheney

Two months into his ill-begotten presidency, when Donald Trump flew into a temper tantrum over Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ insistence on recusing himself from overseeing the Russia investigation, he famously bawled, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Cohn, in case you haven’t seen the documentary that took its title from the president’s outburst, was the red-baiting witch-hunter from the 1950s who became New York City’s top mob lawyer and, fittingly enough, young Donald’s fixer, mentor, and role model. Cohn had all the charm and scruples of a hungry wolverine (in addition to somewhat resembling one), and that’s precisely what the new president wanted and expected from what he liked to call the “Trump Justice Department.”

At the time, Trump could not have imagined that he’d eventually find the next best thing in the form of a long-retired Washington swamp creature from the first Bush administration. But it didn’t take long, after Bill Barr was hauled out of his favorite booth in some K Street steakhouse this past winter and duly confirmed by the Senate, before he showed he had exactly the right stuff. His pre-emptive spinning of the Mueller report in March displayed a combination of ballsy fraudulence, boss-loyalty, and public-relations savvy that sent Trump to his happy place, praising his AG as “a great gentleman,” not to mention “a great man.”

Rather than finding a new Roy Cohn, when Trump brought Barr on board, he actually landed his own Dick Cheney. Barr and Cheney — who, like other presidential-power-freak conservatives, never seem to have gotten over the constraints Congress put on the Ford Administration in the downdraft of Watergate — share a quasi-religious fervor about the unitary executive. They’re true believers in the “constitutional” necessity of the kind of power Nixon was describing when he said, in his famous 1977 TV interviews with David Frost, that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” But a whole generation of young conservatives, including Barr and Cheney, was chafing at the rise of congressional oversight in the wake of Watergate. Gerald Ford’s presidency — during which Cheney was chief of staff, Bush CIA director, and Barr a young CIA officer — had been unduly constrained by the meddlesome Democrats on the Hill, and they couldn’t wait to reassert “executive authority” with a vengeance the next chance they got. Which came with Reagan, and then the Bushes, and now Trump.

In May, having successfully clouded and blunted the impact of Mueller’s findings, Barr set out to make Trump’s fondest dream come true: He would investigate the investigators, inspired by the president’s favorite 4chan conspiracy theories. Like the one where it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election, and how Russia was framed in a cover up of the spy operation Barack Obama had ordered his intelligence agencies to conduct to take down both Joe Biden and Donald Trump and, oh never mind. Jane Mayer at The New Yorker can tell you all about it, if you want to dive down that rabbit hole. (That way lies madness. You have been warned.)

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill-barr-dick-cheney-impeachment-trump-896387/