What To Make of Barr's Testimony

Attorney General William Barr testified Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee, the first such testimony in his year and a half in the AG job.  The day before his opening statement had leaked out, and the buzz in the media was how combative and confrontational it was.

When I heard his opening statement, I didn't hear anything combative in it.  It turns out he had toned it down greatly overnight, in response to the negative feedback he'd gotten.  His testimony itself was also predominately low-key.

Since it was so low-key, we must examine it more closely in order to understand it.  When it is so analyzed, we see that Barr is 100% on board with the Trump campaign strategy.  Here are some examples of this.

When asked about his intervention in the cases of Trump cronies Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, Barr said that  "The president's friends don't deserve special breaks, but they also don't deserve to be treated more harshly than other people."  He made a convincing case that the initial DOJ sentencing recommendation in the Stone case, while within the standard federal sentencing guidelines, was outside of normal DOJ guidelines.  He stressed that a 67-year-old first-offender who committed a white-collar crime would never get a sentence as long as what was originally recommended.

Barr repeated Trump's latest talking point that voting by mail is susceptible to large-scale fraud.  He offered no evidence to back this up, and, in fact, there is no evidence that there is any large-scale fraud associated with voting by mail.  Five states have exclusively mail-in voting, with no problems, and this year there will certainly be many more states transitioning to mail-in voting

This attack on voting by mail i part of an ongoing Republican effort to restrict access to the ballot box.  There are many examples of such GOP efforts--closing polling places, ID laws, rejecting ballots based on technicalities, and, in the latest and most outrageous example, sending out fake voting instructions to confuse people.

Barr strongly supported sending federal officers to Portland and other cities, claiming that "violent rioters and anarchists" are conducting "an assault on the government of the United States."  This supports the Trump campaign talking point that "You will not be safe in Joe Biden's America".  Trump has been running ads using this catch phrase for months now.  Trump seeks to portray Portland and other cities as under siege, so as to scare people away from voting for Biden.  He always stresses that these cities are being run by "liberal Democrats".

Although outside of his area of expertise, Barr was asked about the virus testing problem, and he claimed that "the problem of the testing system was a function of President Obama's mishandling of the CDC."  This is blatant (and false) partisan advocacy, which traditionally AG's have avoided.

When asked "Is it ever appropriate, sir, for the president to solicit or accept foreign assistance in an election?", Barr initially said that "It depends what kind of assistance", and then later acknowledged that it is never appropriate.  This kind of hedging is ludicrous, given that there is a federal law specifically prohibiting such assistance!

He insisted that there is no systemic racism problem in US police departments, asserting, without citing any evidence, that "police are less likely to shoot at a black suspect".

All in all, this analysis shows that Barr is nothing more than a political hack, doing everything he can to help re-elect the worst president in US history.