Last night, I watched Joy Reid’s MSNBC show, and she did an interview with one of my favorite lawyers/legal commentators, Neal Katyal. Katyal made a really great point that throughout the Trump administration, the American people could never count on the Attorney General. The first AG under Donald Trump was treason elf Jeff Sessions, who was basically fired by Trump for not being corrupt ENOUGH. Then Trump appointed Bill Barr, who turned the AG position into what closely resembled a consigliere to a mob boss. The list of Barr’s corruption is long, and it includes misrepresenting Robert Mueller’s report, using DOJ resources to shield Donald Trump from a rape lawsuit, punishing DOJ and FBI officials who were not sycophantic enough to Trump, and on and on. Barr was never OUR lawyer. He was Trump’s lawyer.

I’m not going to claim that Barr was some kind of paragon of electoral integrity, but I was surprised by his relative hands-off approach to the election. Sure, he made noise about “punishing” voter fraud and I’m sure he was trying to ratf–k behind the scenes. But Barr largely left Trump to swing. We also found out that Barr did one thing right: he hid the fact that federal authorities are investigating Hunter Biden’s taxes. Which is what the DOJ is supposed to do – not be politicized, not be used as a political tool by either campaign. But truly, Barr is a terrible f–king person and he can rot. One or two okay decisions don’t make up for the fact that he was the worst AG in decades. And now… he’s gone. Fired in the last five weeks of the decrepit, treasonous Trump administration.

President Trump said on Monday that Attorney General William P. Barr would depart next week, ending a tenure marked by Mr. Barr’s willingness to advance the president’s political agenda and by criticism that he eroded the post-Watergate independence of the Justice Department. Mr. Barr had in recent weeks fallen out of favor with the president after acknowledging that the department had found no widespread voter fraud. Tensions between them escalated this past weekend when Mr. Trump accused his attorney general of disloyalty for not publicly disclosing the department’s investigation into President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter Biden during the campaign.

Mr. Trump sought to play down their differences on Monday, saying in a tweet announcing Mr. Barr’s departure that “our relationship has been a very good one, he has done an outstanding job!” The decision to quit was Mr. Barr’s, not the president’s, a person familiar with the matter said, and the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, helped to facilitate his exit on cordial terms with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Barr reciprocated the praise in a resignation letter devoted to commending Mr. Trump’s term, saying that the Justice Department was pursuing some accusations of voter fraud and mentioning that he and the president had met on the issue on Monday afternoon. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to elaborate on its work on the accusations or how it fit with Mr. Barr’s earlier assertions that it had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

Still, Mr. Barr’s resignation allows him to avoid further confrontation with the president over his refusal to advance Mr. Trump’s attempts to rewrite the election results or his efforts to interfere in criminal inquiries into Mr. Biden’s family.

Mr. Barr also praised Mr. Trump in the letter for overcoming what the attorney general said was an unprecedented effort by his political opponents to take down the president.

“No tactic, no matter how abusive and deceitful, was out of bounds,” Mr. Barr said. “The nadir of this campaign was the effort to cripple, if not oust, your administration with frenzied and baseless accusations of collusion with Russia.”

Jeffrey A. Rosen, the No. 2 at the Justice Department, will take over as acting attorney general when Mr. Barr leaves on Dec. 23. Richard Donoghue, an official in Mr. Rosen’s office, will become the deputy attorney general.

[From The NY Times]

So it ends with a treasonous whimper and not a bang. Imagine being the Attorney General of the United States, America’s top lawyer, getting sh-tcanned for not being corrupt enough, and then writing that sycophantic letter claiming that haters were always trying to take down Russia’s useless idiot.

As for what Trump is doing right now – there is no grand plan. Trump is just a petty, immature bully and he wants to “punish” all of the people who were “mean” to him. This is score-settling, not a larger plot involving pardons and criminal conspiracies. If Barr had stayed, he wouldn’t have had any problems with Trump pardoning everybody.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.