THE SWAMP

WHY ATTORNEY GENERAL BARR NEEDS OUR PRAYERS

Exclusive: Craige McMillan pinpoints AG's CBS-interview quote that gives him hope

I don’t pay a lot of attention to the backgrounds of most politicians and senior bureaucrats. 

I find them, for the most part, boring and predictable. 

They seem to fall into just a few categories:

• Do-gooders, with other people’s money;
• Partisan hacks, whose decisions are made in line with party dogma; and
• Ruthless power-seekers, whose ideology is their own advancement over their fellow citizens.

You probably have your own favorite categories. 

It seems rare when someone enters public service today who has the nation and its citizens anywhere above the very last line of his or her to-do list. 

I believe William Barr does.

This CBS interview by Jan Crawford with William Barr is worth reading or watching in its entirety. 

Here’s the interchange we will look at for this column, which occurs near the end:

Crawford: But when you came into this job, you were kind of, it’s like the U.S. attorney in Connecticut. I mean, you had a good reputation on the right and on the left. You were a man with a good reputation. You are not someone who is, you know, accused of protecting the president, enabling the president, lying to Congress. Did you expect that coming in? And what is your response to it?

Barr: Well, in a way I did expect it.

Crawford: You did?

Barr: Yeah, because I realize we live in a crazy hyper-partisan period of time, and I knew that it would only be a matter of time if I was behaving responsibly and calling them as I see them, that I would be attacked, because nowadays people don’t care about the merits and the substance. They only care about who it helps, who benefits, whether my side benefits or the other side benefits. Everything is gauged by politics. And as I say, that’s antithetical to the way the Department [of Justice] runs, and any attorney general in this period is going to end up losing a lot of political capital, and I realize that and that is one of the reasons that I ultimately was persuaded that I should take it on, because I think at my stage in life it really doesn’t make any difference.

Barr was deputy attorney general from 1990-1991, and attorney general from 1991-1993. 

It’s important to note that this tenure was prior to 9/11 (2001), when the walls between domestic and international intelligence operations came down. 

Before 9/11 everyone in the intelligence community knew that it was illegal to wiretap or otherwise spy on an American citizen on American soil. 

The Constitution says you need probable cause and an individual warrant from a judge for that activity. 

Privacy was valued by our founders. 

Barr would have been very familiar with this, since he worked for the CIA from 1973-1977. 

I think we can characterize William Barr as “old school.”

The National Security Agency has always had a formidable intelligence-collection capability. 

The world can be a dangerous place, and limiting NSA to overseas operations was perhaps a reasonable decision. 

After 9/11 there was much talk of the “walls coming down” and “better cooperation” between intelligence agencies and the FBI.

In the wake of 9/11, the walls did come down. 

Secret FISA warrants were thought to provide adequate protections to Americans for their personal communications. 

But the era of “unmasking” had arrived. 

The time between 9/11 and the 2016 elections, when an incumbent president’s team authorized total surveillance of another party’s presidential candidate, was 15 years. 

It’s probably less; I think Romney in the 2012 presidential election was the test case.

That’s all to give you context for why I find William Barr so interesting. 

He presided over a (presumably) functioning Justice Department and FBI earlier in his career. 

He knew both now have problems, and yet he was persuaded to return to the job. 

I find myself wondering, what can it possibly be like to have left an organization that was following the law and return to find one so lawless that it was using the nation’s own espionage organizations against the successor to a (retiring) president?

William Barr is a very interesting man. 

I wish people like him would write books, not public relations hacks employed by former politicians intent on convincing us of how great they were.

Barr needs our prayers on this, folks. 

It’s got to be a gut-wrenching job. Let’s also pray that he succeeds. 

Unless the people who did this are held accountable, the nation is already lost. 

In a very real sense, America’s future depends on a president who fought back, and an attorney general who believes that the law applies to everyone. 

If Barr is a glimpse into our future, it is very bright, indeed!

Read more at https://www.wnd.com/2019/05/why-attorney-general-barr-needs-our-prayers/#jt74KGAzwp7iFtvx.99