Frank Bruni at NYT:
On Monday, showing fresh contempt for the people who work under him in the Justice Department, Barr renounced a determination by the department’s inspector general that the F.B.I.’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia was legitimate and that anti-Trump bias was not its animating force. He did this instantly.
And then, on Tuesday, did it again, with even less subtlety and more sanctimony. “It was a travesty,” he said of the investigation, and he was speaking not just of the sloppiness and haste of some of the F.B.I.’s actions, with which the inspector general also took issue. He was dismissing the whole effort as rotten.
It was an eerie echo of his efforts last spring, when he sought to neuter Robert Mueller’s findings about the Trump campaign’s openness to Russian help and the president’s attempts to obstruct justice. Give Barr points for consistency. He has bought fully into the idea that the zeal of Trump’s detractors matters more than the presidents’ abuses of power.
But what of the Constitution? What of common decency? Barr isn’t concerning himself with those. To do so would call into question the honor of serving in this administration, the compliment of holding the job that Trump gave him. And he wants that compliment. That pedestal. He prefers to see himself as a holy warrior than as an unholy dupe.
Trump refers to FBI agents as "scum." He then refers to John Durham as "Bull Durham." He then refers to Obama as "Barack Hussein Obama." pic.twitter.com/AxVjDCWk7H— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 11, 2019
Trump's sympathies lie more with organized crime than with the FBI.
Here's Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, a Mafia underboss who confessed to 19 murders, explaining to the Senate in 1993 how he would set up a meeting with Donald Trump. "If we don't know Donald Trump, we have ways to reach him." pic.twitter.com/R4G0wBg5kb— Seth Hettena (@seth_hettena) December 10, 2019
