╌>

'One Damn Thing After Another' Review: William Barr's Good Advice

  
Via:  Vic Eldred  •  2 years ago  •  15 comments

By:   WSJ

'One Damn Thing After Another' Review: William Barr's Good Advice
Attorney General Barr was Trump's most helpful and influential ally. The president should have listened to him more often.

Leave a comment to auto-join group Books

Books


S E E D E D   C O N T E N T



In November 2020 President Trump accused the Department of Justice of failing to investigate the presidential election he claimed was stolen. Attorney General William Barr didn't take Mr. Trump's complaint lightly. He fired back. Justice had been looking into allegations of serious fraud, he insisted, but "to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election."

The president summoned him to the Oval Office. Mr. Barr knew there would be trouble. The president handed him an article quoting the statement. "Did you say this?" he asked. "Why would you say that?" Mr. Barr's answer was simple. "Because it is true," he answered. "But you did not have to say that! You could have just said, 'No comment.' This is killing me—killing me. This is pulling the rug out from under me."

The president paused. “You must hate Trump. You would only do this if you hate Trump.”

Mr. Barr, who weeks after this exchange stepped down from his second appointment as AG, didn’t hate Mr. Trump. He tried to understand him and, when asked, serve his administration well. In “One Damn Thing After Another,” he assesses Mr. Trump’s abilities and accomplishments as president. He measures the 45th president’s abilities against the 40th. “The White House during Reagan’s first term [1981-85] was often presented in the media as disorganized or fractured,” Mr. Barr writes, “and every Democratic one as a well-oiled machine. But in light of all I’ve seen and experienced there since, the Reagan White House was the model of organization.”

Reagan was a shrewd president, though Democrats and the press saw him as little more than a retired mediocre actor. Reagan knew when to engage in a partisan fight—and when not to. “He could remain a bit above the fray,” Mr. Barr reflects, “allowing able surrogates to carry the fight, unless and until his personal intervention was needed, and then he could weigh in with devastating effect. I appreciate Trump’s tenacious battling when it’s necessary. The trouble is that it’s often not necessary.”

Democrats were desperate to drive Mr. Trump from office. Their efforts were embarrassing and failed. They seized on every new horror story about him, no matter how ridiculous. They thought a crude dossier with made-up tales about his dalliances in Russia would end his career. It didn’t.

Their enmity often fell on Mr. Barr. One memorable episode revealed in the memoir: In March 2019 special counsel Robert Mueller delivered his report on “collusion” with Russia to the attorney general. The special counsel’s office was told to redact all classified and confidential material before delivery. The Mueller team simply didn’t do it. And so when news of the report’s delivery to the AG got out, Mr. Barr had a choice: Either take several weeks to redact material while the world assumed the U.S. president was about to be indicted, or advise Congress of the Mueller report’s bottom-line conclusion: no indictment. Mr. Barr chose the latter. The Democrats claimed he offered the brief summary of the report in order to avoid releasing its unsavory details. The real reason—the special counsel didn’t do his job.

Mr. Barr as attorney general was no adoring fan of Mr. Trump, but in truth he was the president’s most helpful and influential ally. The president didn’t pay enough attention to him. He often listened instead to a gang of private “legal advisers”—Mr. Barr calls them “kibitzers.” Mr. Trump often preferred them to Mr. Barr, though their advice was often wacky.

But “One Damn Thing After Another”—the title alludes to a remark made by Ed Levi, attorney general in the Ford administration, when asked what the job was like—isn’t primarily about Mr. Trump. It’s about the author. He grew up on New York’s Upper West Side, graduated from nearby Columbia University, and studied to become a lawyer at the night law school of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. His father taught English at Columbia, where he was friends with, among other famous intellectuals, Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun. Mr. Barr’s mother, an editor for women’s magazines, passed on to her son a “Celtic” habit of anticipating what might go wrong.

In 1991—he was only 41—Mr. Barr became Attorney General. He was primed to attack the country’s rising crime wave. “I made it clear from the start that my highest priority remained addressing the intolerable levels of violent crime around the country.” He rejected misguided ideas for fighting crime. Instead of the notion that “poverty causes crime,” he argued the opposite was true—crime causes poverty. He stepped down as AG in 1993 and spent 26 years in private law.

But as the political left became imperious and aggressive during the Obama years, Mr. Barr began to take a more active interest in national politics. He supported Jeb Bush initially but said all along he would vote for the Republican nominee—“even Trump, as off-putting as he was.” Whatever his downside, “there was one thing I was sure of: Hillary Clinton was not morally superior to Donald Trump.”

Mr. Trump’s shortcomings made Reagan’s presidential style all the more appealing. “When Trump is the issue,” Mr. Barr writes, “Republicans start the campaign in many swing states by writing off 10 percent of the electorate who otherwise lean Republican”—“affluent professionals and suburbanites, on the one hand, and culturally conservative working-class voters, on the other.”

The book includes substantive and brilliant chapters on the major challenges facing the country: racial strife, the dominance of tech companies, drug cartels, predatory crime, religious pluralism in public schools. In the end, though, the narrative comes back to the subject of Donald Trump. Is he capable of taking on these challenges? His “political persona,” writes Mr. Barr on the book’s final page, “is too negative for the task ahead.” He’s right.




Mr. Barnes, co-founder of the Weekly Standard, is writing a book on how the 50 states came together.


Tags

jrGroupDiscuss - desc
[]
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
1  seeder  Vic Eldred    2 years ago

William Barr was Donald Trump's best Presidential appointment. It's too bad Trump didn't listen to him and worse that Trump made Barr's job so difficult.


The Book is

One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General

By William P. Barr

William Morrow

im-493487

 
 
 
JBB
Professor Principal
2  JBB    2 years ago

original

 
 
 
Snuffy
Professor Participates
3  Snuffy    2 years ago

Looking forward to reading it.  You are correct in that he was probably one of the best appointments made by Trump.  It's a shame that when he differed from Trump that Trump didn't listen to him and it's also a shame that the left would attack him only because he was a Trump appointee.  Partisan politics strike again...

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
3.1  JohnRussell  replied to  Snuffy @3    2 years ago
You are correct in that he was probably one of the best appointments made by Trump.  It's a shame that when he differed from Trump that Trump didn't listen to him and it's also a shame that the left would attack him only because he was a Trump appointee

William Barr is extremely conservative. The idea that people would only object to him because Trump appointed him is erroneous. Many people object to extreme conservatism. 

 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
3.1.1  Sean Treacy  replied to  JohnRussell @3.1    2 years ago

Barr was AG under the first George bush.  He’s not “extremely conservative”

 
 
 
JBB
Professor Principal
3.1.2  JBB  replied to  Sean Treacy @3.1.1    2 years ago

original

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
3.1.3  JohnRussell  replied to  Sean Treacy @3.1.1    2 years ago

At the end of 2020 I thought I had written   my last piece about former attorney general William Barr . I had followed his two-year tenure very closely and wrote about it often, always dismayed by what was obviously a very arrogant man who was suffering from a terminal case of Fox News Brain Rot. He would have been more to be pitied than censured if it weren't for the fact that he was running interference for the most powerful man in the country. Now Barr has published the obligatory tell-all about his time in the Trump administration, called "One Damn Thing After Another," and I am compelled to write about him one more time.

Barr's overweening egotism, so flamboyantly displayed in his new book and accompanying promotional appearances, is second only to Donald Trump himself. He has said repeatedly on his book tour that he doesn't care what people think of him and I believe him. After all, when you think as highly of yourself as he does, approbation from others is totally unnecessary.

His book discusses his happy life growing up in New York City in a conservative family and attending Columbia University before briefly joining the CIA while in law school at night. He eventually joined the Department of Justice and was named George H. W Bush's Attorney General at the young age of 41. He is mostly remembered in that assignment for pushing the president to pardon the parties involved in the Iran Contra scandal — which Bush did on Christmas Eve 1999, eerily foreshadowing what was to come 30 years later.

He spent the next couple of decades cashing in handsomely, as so many do, and obviously spent a lot of time immersed in right-wing media which nurtured his cultural grievances. By the time Donald Trump became president, Barr was spouting off about Hillary Clinton and "Uranium One" and writing letters to the White House expressing his dismay that the Democrats and the Deep State were in cahoots to destroy the president with the Russiagate investigation. Of course, Barr is too sophisticated to let the cat out of the bag by publicly using those catchphrases but it's clear nonetheless that he is a true believer of the Lou Dobbs/Sean Hannity variety.

In his book, Barr rails against everything and everyone to the left of Ted Cruz, writing that Barack Obama is a "left-wing agitator [who] throttled the economy, degraded the culture and frittered away U.S. strength and credibility in foreign affairs" and claims that Critical Race Theory is "at bottom, essentially the materialist philosophy of Marxism, substituting racial antagonism for class antagonism." He carries on about left-wing "Maoism" and "militant secularism" declaring that there is a "mounting effort to affirmatively indoctrinate children with the secular progressive belief system — a new official secular ideology." He knows who the enemy is, righteously proclaiming that he is "under no illusion about who is responsible for dividing the country, embittering our politics and weakening and demoralizing our nation --- it is the progressive left and their increasingly totalitarian ideals."

You might wonder why a man with such staunch views about morality and secularism would eagerly seek out a libertine TV star with five kids by three different wives but to Bill Barr, the country was careening toward a constitutional crisis by trying to restrain President Trump from doing anything he damn well pleased. Barr, you see, believes in the near infallibility of the executive branch and Trump believes in the infallibility of Trump so it made a lot of sense for them to join forces.

Barr goes to incredible lengths to excuse Trump's crude and ignorant behavior as president portraying him as a sort of unruly teenager whose "madcap rhetoric" and "imprecise comments" would get him into scrapes. Sure, he has an "imprecise and discursive speaking style" which includes "flights of gross hyperbole" but he's really an entertainer and everyone knew his words weren't meant to be taken literally. (He even approvingly quotes that fatuous Salena Zito quote that "the press takes him literally but not seriously and the people take him seriously but not literally" in the same breath.) This is bizarre coming from the man who takes himself and his politics as seriously as an undertaker.

Barr adamantly denies that he served more as Trump's personal lawyer than as the independent Attorney General but gives the game away when he repeats something he told Trump during the famous meeting in which he said all the vote fraud claims were "bullshit." He writes that he told Trump, "'No, Mr. President, I don't hate you,' I said. 'You know I sacrificed a lot personally to come in to help you when I thought you were being wronged.'"

Of course, it was obvious from the beginning that he saw his mission to protect Trump from the alleged depredations of the "swamp" that was out to get him. His mischaracterization of the Mueller report and eagerness to launch Trump's "investigate the investigators" vendetta. He overruled the Justice Department prosecutors to recommend a lighter sentence and dropped the charges against Trump's loony former National Security adviser Michael Flynn even after he had pleaded guilty. He claims that he was simply ensuring that the department was meting out equal justice but strangely, those were the only two people he found in the whole country who deserved that intervention.

Barr claims that Trump did a terrific job as president, "pursuing sound, conservative policies" up until the election at which point he seems to have abruptly turned into some kind of unrecognizable Mr. Hyde, who "cared only about one thing: himself. Country and principle took second place." Barr goes on to write that "after the election he was beyond restraint. He would only listen to a few sycophants who told him what he wanted to hear. Reasoning with him was hopeless."

It's remotely possible that Barr did not remember that Trump had said back in 2016 that he would only accept the results of the election if he won? But he knows very well that Trump was telegraphing his plan to contest the election in 2020 if he did not win --- he was helping him set it up. He   personally cast doubts   on the mail-in ballots, inanely suggesting that they were subject to foreign interference. Trump had been hedging his bets for months, suggesting it was rigged long before any votes were cast.

It's tempting to see this book as Barr's attempt at redemption but it really doesn't come off that way. Barr truly believes he has had a stellar career, topped off by his exemplary service to the nation as the Attorney General who acted with integrity when the president suffered a breakdown and refused to accept his loss. He describes Trump at that moment as "out of touch with reality." I would suggest Trump isn't the only one.
 
 
 
Snuffy
Professor Participates
3.1.4  Snuffy  replied to  JohnRussell @3.1    2 years ago
William Barr is extremely conservative. The idea that people would only object to him because Trump appointed him is erroneous. Many people object to extreme conservatism. 

Seems that's not what Democrats thought of him back in 1991 when he was confirmed as the AG for Bush.

Joe Biden calls the Republican president’s nominee to be attorney general, William Barr, a “heck of an honorable guy.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., now the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, was part of the Senate majority that voted to confirm Barr in 1991.

Leahy   said   he thought Barr, as attorney general, would be “an independent voice for all Americans—not just the president.”

Then-Rep. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who was chairman of the House Crime and Criminal Justice Subcommittee, said: “Mr. Barr has proven to be a capable deputy attorney general. He did a good job of helping run the department in troubled times.”

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
3.1.5  JohnRussell  replied to  Snuffy @3.1.4    2 years ago

1991 was 30 years ago. 

 
 
 
JBB
Professor Principal
3.1.6  JBB  replied to  Snuffy @3.1.4    2 years ago

There has been a lot of murky dirty nasty orange water under that bridge since 1991.

original

 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
3.1.7  Sean Treacy  replied to  JBB @3.1.2    2 years ago

I suppose argument by mindless meme is better than just making shit up, but it's a long way from having any value. 

 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
3.1.8  Sean Treacy  replied to  JohnRussell @3.1.3    2 years ago
Critical Race Theory is "at bottom, essentially the materialist philosophy of Marxism, substituting racial antagonism for class antagonism."

So "extremely conservative" just means perceptive, I guess. 

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
3.1.9  JohnRussell  replied to  Sean Treacy @3.1.8    2 years ago

All your comments mean is that you are in solidarity with extreme conservatism. 

 
 
 
JBB
Professor Principal
3.1.10  JBB  replied to  Sean Treacy @3.1.7    2 years ago

I should express myself as eloquently as you?

[Deleted]

 
 
 
Snuffy
Professor Participates
3.1.11  Snuffy  replied to  JohnRussell @3.1.5    2 years ago
1991 was 30 years ago. 

You can believe what  you want but I believe you are wrong.  Barr is the same conservative today he was back in 91, what changed was that he was nominated by Trump.  Any nomination by Trump was going to have issues in confirmation.  Hell, Trump could have nominated Mother Teresa and it would have been partisanly contended in the Senate. 

The Democrats were openly attacking Barr before the confirmation all because they were already worried about the Mueller investigation.  They were doing everything they could to impede and oust Trump and they stated their "concern" that Barr would prevent Mueller from doing his job.  Openly partisan...   

 
 

Who is online

Igknorantzruls
bugsy
Kavika


416 visitors