Asessing Barr's behavior as though he were born two years ago

When Barr was nominated to be attorney general, many argued that he should not be confirmed or only confirmed if he agreed to recuse himself from overseeing the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election, as well as possible obstruction of justice by President Trump into that investigation. Those calls were largely because Barr had written a now infamous 19-page unsolicited memo to the deputy attorney general overseeing the investigation that was subsequently shared with Trump's legal team. The memo explained why, in Barr’s view, many of the publicly known facts about Trump’s conduct could not constitute the crime of obstruction of justice.

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I was one of several alumni of the Department of Justice who was inclined to give Barr the benefit of the doubt. In my experience, people like Barr who have worked for decades within the DOJ understand the unique importance of its independence and integrity and the need for the public to have faith that decisions made at DOJ are based on facts, evidence, and law and not political considerations.

  The Daily Beast

How are people still writing about this as if Barr weren't AG under Pappy Bush and urged him to pardon all the criminals of the Iran-Contra deals? What could be more political than that?

In my experience, the pull of DOJ helps ensure that people, in the words of my former boss and friend Preet Bharara, “do the right thing, in the right way for the right reasons.” And so it is with some sadness that I say, Barr did absolutely the wrong thing, in the wrong way, and one can certainly infer bad reasons in his handling so far of the special counsel's report.

Indeed.

He went one giant step further than Mueller and made his own determination—a conclusion based on a flimsy legal analysis—that because there was no "underlying" crime established, and because many of Trump’s acts were public, no intent to obstruct could be established.

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Coming from the man who had written the 19-page memo saying Trump couldn’t commit obstruction, this looked pre-determined and political -- like a lawyer trying to protect his client, not a public servant trying to get the truth and facts where they belong.

It looked like that because that's exactly what it was.

Perhaps most shocking, we learned from the Washington Post that the report may have been prepared “so that the front matter from each section could have been released immediately — or very quickly.... It was done in a way that minimum redactions, if any, would have been necessary, and the work would have spoken for itself.” If that turns out to be correct, and Barr simply ignored this option, his conduct goes from looking bad to worse.

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At this point, whatever Barr’s intentions—and I am no longer inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt—in order to salvage what is left if the integrity of the process, he must immediately release the Mueller-prepared summaries and work with Congress to ensure that the whole report is turned over to Congress, and as much as legally and safely possible to the American public.

He won't. And the question is: why won't he? We need that answer.