Book Discussion: Hatchet Man

 

The C-Span program Book TV broadcast a discussion by author Eli Honig about his 2021 book, Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor's Code and Corrupted the Justice Department. Honig is a former federal and state prosecutor, and now an expert commentator for CNN.

This discussion is useful to (1) help people recall what Barr did as US Attorney General (AG), and (2) why and how he was, as Honig describes it, so deceptive. Yes, Barr was deceptive, but a special kind of deceit describes it more precisely, he was a liar. Lies were often a key part of his deceit tactics. 

What Barr was hiding not just political corruption of the DoJ to serve the interests of the ex-president. We was also hiding the fact that he was and still is a hard core anti-democratic authoritarian Christian nationalist. He was also hiding his own personal agenda. Barr’s Christian fundamentalism and its hostility to secularism and non-heterosexuality came out in Honig’s research on speeches Barr gave in the 1990s. In my opinion, Barr was and still is an elite Republican Party Christian nationalist fascist.

Garland’s and Biden’s fatal flaw

Honig argues that Barr’s legacy was infliction of serious, long-lasting structural damage to the DoJ. Specifically, Barr attacked and undermined both the credibility and the independence of the DoJ. He argues that Barr damaged the DoJ in that way to serve his own deeply-rooted, extremist legal and personal (Christian fundamentalist) beliefs.

Honig also argues that Merrick Garland’s approach to fixing the DoJ is too weak. Garland is crippled by a desire to avoid political conflict or controversy whenever possible. That is presumably driven by Garland’s, and in my opinion Biden’s, tragically mistaken belief that conflict avoidance will somehow lead Republicans to be more trusting and more democratic. In other words, Garland is deeply flawed by the same false belief that his boss, Joe Biden probably has. Neither of them understands that the Republican Party is irreparably anti-democratic and irreparably morally corrupt. That leaves Garland’s and Biden’s efforts to fix the damage the GOP and the ex-president caused to the federal government to be too little and maybe too late.

Honig argues that people “better” than ones like Barr and his ilk are necessary in the DoJ to fix the damage and repair its broken pro-democratic institution status. Unfortunately, Honig doesn't use the word moral. Instead he just leaves it at better. IMO, that is a mistake.

Barr & the Mueller Report

Two matters related to the Mueller report that Honig discusses at length about obstruction of justice by the the ex-president are worth remembering.

• Barr was corrupt and mendacious from the start. His first significant act as AG was to distort the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller on (1) obstruction of justice by the ex-president, and (2) the role of Russian significant efforts to throw the election to T**** (which really did happen, but the GOP and T**** still deny to this day). Mueller himself had written an accurate summary of his own report for the public, but Barr refused to release it. Instead, Barr wrote and released his own summary of Mueller’s findings. Barr’s summary falsely asserted that the Mueller investigation had exonerated the ex-president. Lies of omission underpinned that propaganda. Barr received a public rebuke for his lies to the public from both Mueller himself and a federal judge. Barr also directly lied to congress when asked if anyone “from the Mueller team” disapproved of how Barr distorted (lied about) the Mueller report. He said nope. A couple of days after that lie to congress, Mueller’s letter of disapproval became public. Barr was hauled back into congress to explain his lie. Mueller’s defense was insulting nonsense: He said to congress that Mueller himself was not part of “the Mueller team.” Because of that, he did not lie to congress when he said that no one “from the Mueller team” disapproved of how Barr distorted and lied to the public about the Mueller report.

• When Barr released to the public his own summary of the Mueller report with his lies in it, that was just the first half of his propaganda and lies plan. The second half was brilliant. It was about as effective as mendacious, immoral mind manipulation can be. What Barr did after publicly lying about what the Mueller report contained and concluded, he withheld the report from the public for 28 days. Why did he delay releasing the truth? Those 28 days gave the public time to come to believe that the Mueller report exonerated the ex-president. Barr defended the 28 day delay as time needed to redact the report, but Honig argues that should have taken no more than a week at the very most. Worse, public release of the Mueller report should have been timed with the release of a summary. That unjustifiable time gap left plenty of time for the ex-president, Republican elites and their propaganda Leviathan to keep saying over and over and over that the Mueller report exonerated the ex-president. By the time the redacted Mueller report was released with an explicit statement that the ex-president was not exonerated, tens of millions of minds rejected that factual truth as a Democratic lie.

Barr really was a hatchet man. Honig argues that Barr was the worst AG in US history. He managed to convince tens of millions of Americans that the Mueller investigation exonerated a sitting president of obstruction of justice, despite an investigation that did not say any such thing. 

Barr also corrupted the DoJ’s independence and credibility. The loss of credibility seems to apply to some extent to both sides in American politics-culture wars. Many liberals, and independents like me, are now less trusting of DoJ motives and its professionalism. Many conservatives distrust the DoJ partly because they falsely believe that the ex-president committed no crimes, when in fact he did. 

Whatever it is that Garland thinks he is doing, it is not reassuring to to least some Americans. Honig’s argument that Garland is ineffective in repairing the damage to DoJ credibility is convincing. However, Honig does argue that Garland’s effort to rebuild DoJ independence is significant and deserves credit. 

But the question all of this raises is obvious: If one authoritarian president appoints one authoritarian AG, what is to stop them from doing the same to DoJ independence and credibility that T**** and Barr did? The precedent for Christian fascism to neuter the DoJ has been set. T**** and Barr set that precedent. It will never go away.