One Damn Thing After Another Review: Bill Barr’s selfish screed | Books

Jake Bill Barr literally, but not too seriously. A day before the release of his memoir, the former attorney general told NBC that he would vote for Donald Trump for president in 2024, if Trump was the Republican nominee. Despite all of Barr’s protests that the man was unsuited for the job, he continues to resist being banished from Trump’s backyard.

In other words, Barr’s memoir is best considered another strand of Trump alumni performance art.

On reading, One Damn Thing After Another delivers what is expected. Barr praises Trump for galvanizing the white working-class Republican base, satisfying social conservatives and responding to donor demands.

At the same time, Barr lets us know that the suburb came to find Trump offensive and insists that in the end, Trump crashed and burned despite Barr’s best efforts. In the end, like everyone else the 45th president ceased to find useful, Barr was simply spat out — a reality his memoirs at least acknowledge.

The book is instructive – up to a point. As expected, Barr omits relevant facts and engages in settling scores. It’s a first-person reveal, after 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 one of his first jobs, as a high school math teacher at Dalton School, a Manhattan school. Even then, former students said Epstein scared off young women.

Barr served as 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 extension of US government loan guarantees to Saddam Hussein on the eve of the invasion of Kuwait. Barr points to William Safire, the late Nixon’s speechwriter and New York Times columnist, for special sentencing.

A Clinton administration investigation cleared Barr of wrongdoing — a fact he rightly points out. But he forgets to mention that in October 1989, Bush signed National Security Directive 26, which effectively strengthened Iraq as a counterweight to Iran. From there, things didn’t exactly go as planned. The president and his team emboldened Saddam too much. His unprovoked land grab was an unintended consequence of a change in policy.

Barr lets us know that he grew up in a loving home, the product of a Catholic upbringing, piper. He attended Horace Mann School in Riverdale, an affluent part of the Bronx. As Barr notes, the school was liberal and predominantly Jewish.

As an undergraduate at Columbia, he stood up against Vietnam War protesters. His antipathy towards the radical left is old. He joined the Majority Coalition, a group of students and faculty who defended the main administration building. As recorded by the late Diana Trillingsome rioters had no qualms about trashing the school and then claiming academic honors.

Barr did not declare the operational division of the campus, “Staten Island versus Scarsdale”: conservative, often Catholic, students from the blue-collar outer borough versus liberal, often Jewish, students from the affluent suburbs. Although far from the working class, Barr was firmly in the first camp.

Barr came through his conservatism organically. His father served in World War II. His older brother fought in Vietnam. In 1964, Barr helped his father distribute campaign literature for Barry Goldwater’s ill-fated presidential campaign. Amid the turmoil of the ’60s, Barr yearned for the stability of yesterday. He still does: he’s a culture warrior in a Brooks Brothers costume.

He shoots James Comey and Robert Mueller, key figures in the Russia investigation. Of course he does. It also targets Lawrence Walsh, special adviser in Iran-Contra. Barr accuses the now-dead Walsh of torpedoing Bush’s 1992 campaign comeback by filing charges the day before the election against Casper Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary. Barr’s anger is understandable.

But he also offers an unqualified defense of his own decision to drop government charges against Michael Flynn, despite the Trump ally’s guilty plea to lying to the FBI and later requesting martial law. Additionally, Barr isn’t saying a word in response to the volley of criticism he’s drawn from the federal bench.

In the spring of 2020, Judge Reggie Walton, appointed by George W Bush, “seriously” questioned the integrity and credibility of the Attorney General. To drive the point home, describe Barr’s behavior in the face of the Russia reportWalton deployed words like “distorted” and “misleading”.

Emmett Sullivan despised Barr’s legal gymnastics over Flynn. Amy Berman Jackson has decided that the government should hand over a memorandum it relied on to decline to prosecute Trump. His grip was lacerating. Not only was Barr personally “dishonest” in announcing his decision before Mueller’s report was released, Berman Jackson said, but the Justice Department itself was “dishonest with this court.”

Suffice to say that Walton, Sullivan and Berman Jackson do not appear in Barr’s book.

Luckily, however, Barr is targeting Joe Biden for his stance on Russia. “Demonize [Vladimir] Putin is not a foreign policy. Barr writesnor “the way grown-ups should think”.

Really? Looks like Barr didn’t have a Ukraine invasion on his bingo card. Trump’s admiration for Putin, of course, continues.

It turned out that Barr wasn’t the only one to confide in NBC. In a letter to Lester Holtits leaden anchor, Trump wrote about his former attorney general: “He crawls in front of the media, hoping to get the acceptance he doesn’t deserve.”

So true.