Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor's Code and Corrupted the Justice Department - Honig
Interviewed on TIME magazine
Honig, CNN’s senior legal analyst, writes about how the Justice Department bent in improbable ways to cater to President Donald Trump’s needs. Excuses were made, objections created out of whole cloth, legal precedent ignored or sidestepped for four unparalleled years that gave America a special counsel probe, two impeachments, constant churn at the Department of Justice and an insurrection at the Capitol. At the core of the crisis, according to Honig Former Attorney General Bill Barr.
You don’t mince words here. In the introduction, you call Bill Barr “a liar” and “a political partisan with an extremist dystopian worldview.” At what point did you come to this conclusion?
I came to the conclusion gradually as Bill Barr went through his tenure and we started to see incidents—starting with the Mueller Report and then repeatedly over and over again throughout his tenure—where he was dishonest or worse with the American public. As to the part about having this dystopian worldview, that was something I only came to later when I was trying to piece together the question that so many people ask, which is, ‘Why would Bill Barr have taken this job in the first place?’ Bill Barr sees himself really as a culture warrior, as somebody whose ultimate mission was not so much to enforce the criminal laws of the United States fairly and impartially, but to impose his own extremist worldview where the only true way to govern societies is with religious belief at the forefront, and secularism is the root of all evil.
(snip)
Moving outside the formal powers of government, did Trump hire the absolute worst attorneys available to him? The John Dowd voicemail seems so terribly advised. He left this trail that just seems irresponsible at best.
I’m very critical of John Dowd in the book. I think the voicemails that he left for those defense lawyers are very close to—and probably over—the line of witness intimidation. The President’s choice in personal counsel over the years runs from Roy Cohn to Michael Cohen to Rudy Giuliani to John Dowd. I think the President has a clear conception of what he wants in his lawyers. That’s his infamous cry of ‘Where’s My Roy Cohn?’ You’re entitled in your personal capacity to hire whoever you want. You suffer the consequences. But when it comes to picking the government’s top lawyers, whether it’s White House counsel, or most importantly, Attorney General, I think you run into real problems when you’re searching for your Roy Cohn. And I think it’s quite clear that Bill Barr’s audition memo reached Donald Trump and he liked it. In Donald Trump’s mind, he had his Roy Cohn.
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https://time.com/6078167/elie-honig-bill-barr-hatchet-man/
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