True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump by Jeffrey Toobin

Author:Jeffrey Toobin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2020-08-03T23:00:00+00:00

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By May 2018, when Mueller completed his first year on the job, he was no longer perceived as the hero, with bipartisan acclaim, that he had been when Rosenstein named him. Trump and Giuliani had gone to war against Mueller, and that opened the way for attacks from every corner of the Republican universe. Some of the criticism of Mueller even came from his old friends, like William Barr.

Nearly three decades earlier, Barr had been the attorney general for the last year or so of George H. W. Bush’s term, and Bob Mueller was the assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division—one of his top advisers. They met daily, and became friends, but they were always very different personalities, and they came at issues in different ways. Barr came from the Office of Legal Counsel—the constitutional voice of the department—and he was focused on big conservative ideas, especially about the need to protect the prerogatives of the president against congressional encroachment. Barr focused on the big picture, and he was more enmeshed in political combat with Democrats than was Mueller. As a Republican political appointee, Mueller was a member of Barr’s team, but he was more comfortable discussing the details of his investigations than engaging in partisan conflict with Democrats. His prosecutions rarely had an obvious political dimension. Barr, who began his legal career at the CIA, twitted the former marine about his dour earnestness. After Bush lost, the two men went their separate ways. Mueller stayed in law enforcement, first as a line prosecutor in Washington and then as Bill Clinton’s U.S. Attorney in San Francisco and ultimately as FBI director. Barr went into corporate law, first as general counsel to GTE, the telephone company, which became Verizon; he left in 2008 with about $28 million in deferred compensation. Barr mostly just dabbled at that point, serving on corporate boards, supporting Catholic charities, working part time at Kirkland & Ellis, an elite stronghold for conservative lawyers, and joining the rightward drift of the Republican Party. He and Mueller stayed friends, if not close ones. They went to the same Christmas parties, and their wives attended the same Bible study class. While Mueller was leading the FBI and then the special counsel’s office, Barr was mostly at home, stewing about the immoral, disorderly drift of American government and society.

For those who knew Barr, especially in recent years, his letter of June 8, 2018, was not a great surprise. On that day, he delivered a nineteen-page single-spaced memorandum of roughly eight thousand words to Rosenstein and Steven Engel, who had Barr’s old job, leading the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Even the subject line—“Mueller’s ‘Obstruction’ Theory”—dripped with contempt for his old friend. It was the work, first of all, of a man with a lot of time on his hands, but also one who had deep and fundamental disagreements with how the special counsel was doing his job. “I am writing as a former official deeply concerned with the institutions of the Presidency and the Department of Justice.

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