Dang I Did It Again Jane Stop This Crazy Thing
T ake Nib Barr literally, but not as well seriously. One day before his memoir was published, the sometime attorney general told NBC he would vote for Donald Trump for president in 2024, if Trump were the Republican nominee. For all Barr'due south protestations about how the man was unsuited to the job, he continues to resist beingness banished from Trump's garden.
Said differently, Barr'southward memoirs are all-time viewed as just one more installment of Trump-alumni performance art.
Equally a read, One Damn Thing Afterward Another delivers the expected. Barr gives Trump a thumbs-upward for galvanizing the Republican white working-class base, satisfying social conservatives and meeting the demands of donors.
At the aforementioned time, Barr lets us know suburbia came to find Trump offensive and insists that in the terminate, Trump crashed and burned despite Barr'south best efforts. Ultimately, like everyone else the 45th president ceased to find useful, Barr was simply spat out – a reality his memoir does at to the lowest degree acknowledge.
The volume is informative – to a point. Equally expected, Barr omits relevant facts and engages in score-settling. Information technology's a first-person tell-all, later on all.
Barr records the suicide in federal custody of Jeffrey Epstein, predator and friend of presidents Trump and Clinton. He makes no mention of the fact that his own father, Donald Barr, gave Epstein 1 of his first jobs, as a high-school math teacher at the Dalton school, a tony Manhattan establishment. Fifty-fifty then, former students have said, Epstein creeped out young women.
Barr was attorney general for the first time under George HW Bush. In his book, he attacks Democrats and the media for their pursuit and coverage of "Iraqgate" and the U.s.a. government's extension of loan guarantees to Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the invasion of State of kuwait. Barr singles out William Safire, the late Nixon speechwriter and New York Times columnist, for special condemnation.
A Clinton administration investigation cleared Barr of legal wrongdoing – a fact he rightly emphasizes. But he neglects to mention that in October 1989, Bush signed National Security Directive 26, which finer additional Iraq every bit a weigh to Iran. From there, things didn't exactly work out as planned. The president and his team overly emboldened Saddam. His unprovoked land grab was an unintended consequence of a policy pivot.
Barr lets us know he grew up in a loving dwelling, a product of a Catholic education, a thespian of the bagpipes. He attended the Horace Isle of man school in Riverdale, an flush part of the Bronx. Equally Barr notes, the school was liberal and predominately Jewish.
Equally a Columbia undergraduate, he stood against Vietnam state of war protesters. His contempt toward the radical left is longstanding. He joined the Majority Coalition, a group of students and kinesthesia members who defended the main administration building. Every bit recorded by the belatedly Diana Trilling, some rioters had no qualms almost trashing the school, so enervating academic honors.
Unstated by Barr is the operative campus divide, "Staten Isle v Scarsdale": conservative, frequently Catholic students from the blue-collar outer borough versus liberal, often Jewish students from the well-heeled suburbs. Though far from working course, Barr was firmly in the showtime camp.
Barr came by his conservatism organically. His father served in the 2nd world war. His older brother fought in Vietnam. In 1964, Barr helped his dad distribute entrada literature for Barry Goldwater's ill-blighted presidential entrada. Among the turmoil of the 60s, Barr yearned for the stability of yesterday. He still does: he is a culture warrior in a Brooks Brothers suit.
He takes shots at James Comey and Robert Mueller, central figures in the Russia investigation. Of course he does. He also takes aim at Lawrence Walsh, special counsel in Iran-Contra. Barr accuses Walsh, at present dead, of torpedoing Bush'south campaign improvement in '92 by filing election-eve charges against Casper Weinberger, Ronald Reagan's defence force secretary. Barr's ire is understandable.
But he also offers upward a full-throated defense of his own decision to driblet authorities charges against Michael Flynn, despite the Trump ally'due south guilty plea to lying to the FBI and, afterward, demand for martial law. Furthermore, Barr says nary a discussion in response to the volley of criticism he earned from the federal bench.
In spring 2020, Judge Reggie Walton, a George Westward Bush appointee, "seriously" questioned the attorney general'due south integrity and credibility. To drive home the point, to describe Barr's behavior over the Russia written report, Walton deployed words like "distorted" and "misleading".
Emmett Sullivan scorned Barr's legal gymnastics over Flynn. Amy Berman Jackson ruled that the government had to plough over a memorandum it relied upon in declining to prosecute Trump. Her accept was lacerating. Not simply had Barr been personally "disingenuous" by announcing his decision before Mueller's report was released, Berman Jackson said, but the Department of Justice itself had been "disingenuous to this court".
Suffice to say, Walton, Sullivan and Berman Jackson practise not appear in Barr'due south book.
As luck would have it, though, Barr does take aim at Joe Biden for his opinion on Russia. "Demonizing [Vladimir] Putin is not a foreign policy," Barr writes, nor "the mode grown-ups should recall".
Really? Looks like Barr didn't have an invasion of Ukraine on his bingo bill of fare. Trump'southward admiration for Putin, of class, continues.
As it turned out, Barr wasn't alone in spilling his guts to NBC. In a letter to Lester Holt, its pb ballast, Trump wrote of his former attorney general: "He is groveling to the media, hoping to proceeds acceptance that he doesn't deserve."
So truthful.
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1 Damn Thing Afterward Some other: Memoirs of an Attorney General is published in the US past HarperCollins
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/12/one-damn-thing-after-another-review-bill-barr-donald-trump-attorney-general
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