From the four-page “Barr letter” and its fatuous conclusion that Trump did not obstruct justice to the pre-release press conference in which Barr attempted to spin the report in the president’s favor, the attorney general has been doing damage control. Over the last week, as Trump has said he will fight every request and every subpoena, Barr is now running interference between the Justice Department and the Congress. He is refusing to appear before the House Judiciary Committee unless chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., shelves his plan to have part of the session run by committee counsel and hold a part of the hearing in closed session. Apparently Barr does not like the idea that the legal staff could follow up closely with a line of inquiry. He prefers the disjointed five-minute questioning format that never gets anywhere, which is a sad statement coming from the attorney general of the United States.
If Barr can’t face a committee lawyer, perhaps he’s not really fit to be the top law enforcement officer in the federal government. The Judiciary Committee lawyers interviewed many of the other participants in the Russia investigation, including former FBI director James Comey, in closed session. The only difference with Barr is that this will be a public hearing, which one might expect the self-described most transparent government in history to be happy to accommodate.
Barr has been around long enough to remember all the times that congressional committees had counsel question witnesses, including cabinet members. It most famously happened during the Watergate hearings when lawyers like Sam Dash and Richard Ben-Veniste became national figures, holding the president’s men’s feet to the fire. Chief counsel to the Senate’s Iran-Contra committee, Arthur Liman, led the questioning in that inquiry. And considering that just a few months ago, the Republicans hired an outside attorney to question Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, it’s entirely absurd that Barr is balking.
Nadler refused to change his plans, explaining patiently that witnesses aren’t allowed to dictate procedure to congressional committees, nor is the attorney general allowed to dictate to the legislative branch. (The Trump administration remains very confused about the separation of powers in general.) Nadler says he’ll issue a subpoena if Barr refuses to show up. There is some talk about holding the hearings with an empty chair which would be very silly and unproductive.
Robert Costa of the Washington Post reported on MSNBC on Monday that Republican sources tell him the Democrats are being “political” and have no right to hold hearings that are impeachment inquiries in all but name. I think we know how to solve that problem, don’t we?
Mueller Is Admirably Apolitical. That’s the Problem.
He is serving a vision of America that no longer exists.
Robert S. Mueller III has spoken, but he had very little to say. As he said at a brief news conference on Wednesday morning, he will not go beyond what his report said. He will not criticize Attorney General Bill Barr, even though he wrote a letter to Mr. Barr in late March complaining that the attorney general’s summary of the Mueller report did not capture its “context, nature, and substance.”
And while he didn’t completely close the door on appearing before Congress, Mr. Mueller made it clear that it wouldn’t exactly be must-see TV, so what would be the point.
What we saw on display in Mr. Mueller’s nine-minute statement was his often discussed sense of rectitude and propriety. These are admirable attributes, normally. But we might well wonder whether those attributes are what is needed in the age of Donald Trump, or whether the preservation of our democratic institutions demands more.
Born in Manhattan to a former Navy officer and the granddaughter of a railroad executive, Mr. Mueller was the product of an era and a social class to whom the kind of flesh-ripping partisanship we have today was absolutely anathema.
He grew up mostly in Princeton, N.J. At a private school he attended in New Hampshire, a lacrosse (yes, lacrosse) teammate was John Kerry. It’s worth mentioning Mr. Kerry, because he was the same sort: well-born and imbued with the identical sense of class duty. Mr. Kerry, as is well known, enlisted in the Navy even before he graduated from Yale in 1966, and insisted he be sent to Vietnam.
Mr. Mueller graduated from Princeton that same year and soon enlisted in the Marines. Like Mr. Kerry, he saw combat in Vietnam. He won a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. “One of the reasons I went into the Marine Corps was because we lost a very good friend, a Marine in Vietnam, who was a year ahead of me at Princeton,” he said in a 2016 interview. “There were a number of us who felt we should follow his example and at least go into the service. And it flows from there.”
Mr. Kerry is a Democrat, and Mr. Mueller a Republican. But in their social stratum, while Republicans surely outnumbered Democrats, it didn’t matter all that much. You could, in those days, be in either party and still have the same sense of duty and even, unimaginable as it seems today, believe many of the same things. Thus Mr. Mueller could be comfortable spending much of his career in the Department of Justice in one form or another, being named to posts by Democrats and Republicans alike.
And that is the Robert Mueller who did not want to be seen as being part of anything too “political.” As a creature of his generation, his class, the Marines and the Justice Department, being political surely goes against every instinct he has.
But there is another ideal that men like Mr. Mueller and Mr. Kerry were raised to uphold: the willingness to stand up to the dark impulses of the moment. There is a story, first reported by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, that illustrates the mind-set perfectly. Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, in the face of all the hysteria, precious few lawyers were willing to defend suspected terrorists. At a Washington dinner party, guests began to turn on Tom Wilner, a corporate lawyer who was at the time defending a Guantánamo detainee.