The Attorney General’s 3 ½ page letter is a master stroke that has – by design – incited a media circus, transformed the state of political discourse, strengthening Trump and Republicans while turning the tables on Democrats, and set the stage for the Trump reelection campaign.
It has thrown Democrats back on their heels and given life to wild Republican demands for payback: with cable television black lists of Trump critics, calls for deposing Democratic committee chairs, and demands for new investigations of the FISA warrant, the Clinton campaign (even the Bill Clinton-Loretta Lynch visit on the tarmac), and the counterintelligence investigation of candidate Trump.
We will look back on this letter much as we look back on James Comey’s July 5, 2016 public scolding of Hillary Clinton (which overshadowed his announcement that the justice department would file no charges against her) and his announcement, two weeks before the November election, that with the discovery of new emails, the FBI was reopening the case.
Those events in 2016 were catnip for the media – including the prestige and partisan press, the tabloids, cable news, internet sites, talk radio, and social media – resulting in significant impacts on the shape of public discourse and campaign narratives. Polling shows that they swayed public opinion and, arguably, the results of the 2016 election.
In the same way, the Barr letter has fundamentally changed media preoccupations, priorities, and daily news coverage. Consider Monday morning’s headlines: ‘Republicans and Democrats angle to take offensive after Mueller report,’ Los Angeles Times and ‘Trump and Republicans Seek to Turn Tables After Report,’ New York Times. We are not yet at ‘after Mueller report!’ Barr is still hiding it from view. The Washington Post’s headline is a bit more careful, ‘With Mueller probe over, Trump allies switch from defense to bruising offense,’ but the gist is the same. We’ve raced past the actual Mueller report (in virtually complete ignorance of it) and are onto how the report boosts the Republicans and harms the Democrats. (Note these are the headlines that appeared on the first online pages of these newspapers Monday morning; they may not match the headline that appears after the click.)
The Barr letter – at barely more than 3 pages of text – is a big, shiny object that the media, political actors, and the public can’t help but fixate on. Because – apart from the Barr’s purported summary of “the principal conclusions reached by the Special Counsel and the results of his investigation” – there is nothing else to examine. The report is still shrouded from view.
Not a single complete sentence, as written by Robert Mueller, appears in the Barr letter. We have only words, phrases, and sentence fragments pieced together by Trump’s AG to go on.
Never mind the parsing of Barr’s letter, which reveals even at this stage that the Attorney General is spinning like mad. To understand this cynical act of media misdirection and political mischief, consider a single, simple question: How long is the Mueller report? Mueller’s talking indictments stretched to hundreds of pages. Their strength lay in details and context. Moreover, because of their considerable heft and scope, they had a greater impact than they would have otherwise. We could assess their significance and their credibility even with scads of redactions.
The Barr letter doesn’t so much as reveal the length of the report. Two hundred pages? Five hundred? More than 1,000? The lengthier the report, the fishier Barr’s letter looks. Whatever the length, though, there would be vastly more grist for the mill – and tremendously more substance for the media to dig into and the public to focus on – if we could see the actual report. We know this because we know Robert Mueller’s work.
Barr’s release of this meager summary – which we have every reason to believe has a heavy partisan slant – has precluded meaningful discussion. The letter, without the report, hides Mueller’s decision-making regarding prosecutions and declinations from view. We get, instead, a spin-doctor’s characterizations. More significantly, Barr’s letter has preemptively killed a robust series of narratives – including alarming facts and context of Russian interference, an account of the President’s off the rails actions, a record of unseemly and despicable behavior by those surrounding the Trump campaign, and who knows what else?
Well, Barr knows. And he’s not saying.
By the time we see the Mueller report (if we ever do), the Trump White House, Fox News Channel, Congressional Republicans, talk radio, Brietbart, Daily Caller, et al. will have baked-in the narrative that the Mueller investigation has exonerated the President and exposed the concerns with Russian sabotage and the Trump campaign as invidious slanders by Democrats. The mainstream media (from the New York Times to NPR to CNN and all the way down) will report all this in typical He Said, She Said fashion (which even the prestige press favors when covering partisan issues), so this cake will be fully baked.
Whatever the Mueller report contains, the significance will have been brushed aside for most Americans who have not yet chosen sides. Those are the folks who can turn elections.
Mission accomplished, Mr. Barr.
Note: my suggestion in the first sentence of this post, that Barr’s letter was crafted (“by design”) to achieve political ends, this is based on Barr’s longstanding partisanship. As Josh Marshall has reported, William Barr in his first gig as Attorney General, was among the political appointees in the Bush 1 administration who “took a case that Bush-appointees in Little Rock didn’t believe had merit and worked hard to make it an active case. This was in the hopes that a late breaking scandal would help then-President Bush stage a dramatic comeback to win reelection.”
I regard this history at least as relevant to Barr’s Trumpian partisanship as his 19-page audition memo for his second run as AG, which preemptively cast doubt on the legitimacy of the special counsel’s investigation of presidential obstruction.
April 4, 2019 update: The New York Times reports in this morning’s paper, “Some members of Mr. Mueller’s team are concerned that, because Mr. Barr created the first narrative of the special counsel’s findings, Americans’ views will have hardened before the investigation’s conclusions become public,” as I suggested in this post.
(Image: William Barr via wikipedia.)
