Bill Barr Isn't Buying It

 

Former Attorney General William Barr appeared on Fox News to say there is no “legitimate reason” for classified documents to have been at Mar-a-Lago and cast doubt on the idea that they had somehow been declassified. Watch: https://t.co/NobM6J2aKR

— CNN (@CNN) September 2, 2022

You could say Barr's institutionalist instincts are tardy, but when they kick in, here, and also with rejecting the Big Lie over widespread voter fraud, they are firm. The man has a quite understandable line: he may be a partisan, but he will not be an idiot. And if a line of argumentation is simply foolish, it doesn't matter what cause it serves if it is beneath one's honor to try to use it.

As with praising Liz Cheney with faint "Damn, girl!", taking note of Barr making a simple acknowledgement of an absolutely obvious thing feels like something I ought to temper before losing my liberal street cred. I am not an utter Machiavellian with respects to how we get by in this political stew, though. It's lovely to think, that, along with a coordinated distancing of various far-right folks who want to move on to DeSantis (Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Laura Ingraham) that Barr is scenting gangrene in the open wound Trump has been and is finally suggesting that the party amputate. 

But maybe he's just saying, damn, The excuses are dumb. It's professionally insulting. As a good lawyer, I see bad everything with this.  And we need to step back and assess the damage before embracing what could be Trump's final fatal stupidity before grounding the whole Republican ship on the rocks. 

And that is all. He isn't here to bury Trump, per se. He's protecting the party. Whether Trump survives isn't his immediate concern. I have to credit his judicious use of honesty over, say, Kevin McCarthy's crawling fealty. Kevin the Feckless vows to watch the watchmen so to speak, to investigate the investigators--

That is to say, in the event of GOP in the congressional majority after the midterms--he means to derail a vital criminal investigation over Trump's misuse of government intelligence no matter what it means to national security. McCarthy doesn't suffer from Barr's scruples--if partisanship demands that he be a fool, he will be a complete one. 

Now me, I am intrigued with the several dozen empty folders revealed by the just-released inventory of things taken from Mar-A-Lago.  They didn't start out their journey with the discontinued Chief Executive empty, I am almost certain, but when were they stripped of their contents, how intentionally, without being restored, and where the whole heck did they go? 

McCarthy doesn't want the answer known. I do. I think the country deserves that answer and if McCarthy doesn't, he needs to leave the political life before he does more to harm to it. I think even Barr knows no one will be happy with the answer, But that doesn't mean we should not know it. We need the facts. A republic cannot survive in the absence of truth. And if Trump has done the unthinkable, it is necessary that we think long and hard about what that means.