Donald Trump’s Attorney General, Bill Barr, spoke at Hillsdale College yesterday. While his remarks on numerous themes drew a great deal of attention, Dahlia Lithwick focuses on his continuing attempts — with Trump — to undermine confidence in balloting on November 3 (“Bill Barr Would Like to Undermine Your Faith in the Election”).
Barr, like Trump, is no longer content to blame foreigners and malign faceless vote tamperers. He also warned Kass that greedy mail carriers were apt to get in on the action: “A secret vote prevents selling and buying votes. So now we’re back in the business of selling and buying votes. Capricious distribution of ballots means (ballot) harvesting, undue influence, outright coercion, paying off a postman, here’s a few hundred dollars, give me some of your ballots.” Just to recap, then: Your mail-in ballot is unsafe because foreigners want to forge it, Democratic governors want to steal it, antifa operatives plan to harvest it, oh, and Dot, your friendly neighborhood letter carrier will also gladly break the law in order to sell it. This narrative need not be provable or coherent; it’s enough that it’s rinsed and repeated on a near-daily basis in the media.
What Barr is actually performing here is the time-honored, Bannon-christened, Putin-sanctioned electoral practice known formally as flooding the zone with shit. What he wants most of all is for voters to doubt the capacity for the November election to be conducted fairly. That is why he told Blitzer that any effort to make voting safer in the midst of a pandemic—and of course that’s what the push for mail-in balloting was attempting to redress—is by definition tantamount to “playing with fire.” Under the pretense of concern for voter confidence, Barr jowlishly invents one reason after another to undermine it. . . .
Jonathan Chait, though he focuses on criminal prosecutions, observes that Barr and Trump are in sync regarding the role of the DOJ (“William Barr Lays Out Terrifying Theory for Corrupting Justice Department”):
Barr’s philosophy of the Justice Department is functionally indistinguishable from Donald Trump’s. The main difference is the level of sophistication in which they are expressed. Trump’s view is summarized by his aphorism “The other side is where there are crimes” — which is to say, by definition, Trump and his allies are innocent and whatever his opponents are doing is illegal. It’s either “lock her up!” or “dirty cops!,” depending on which party is at issue. Barr’s theories have multisyllabic terms and are decorated with historical references but boil down to the same two-track approach to justice.
Bill Barr is the Attorney General Donald Trump has long sought. Trump complained to Don McGahn [as quoted in the Mueller Report, v. II, p. 50], “I don’t have a lawyer,” and expressed the wish that Roy Cohn were his attorney.
Bill Barr will go to any lengths — will “invent one reason after another” and employ “multisyllabic terms that are decorated with historical references” — to do Trump’s bidding.