Attorney General Barr reportedly considering jumping ship before Trump’s term ends
Even one of Donald Trump’s most loyal enablers can’t wait another 45 days for the end of his administration if one is to accept the reporting of The New York Times.
The esteemed newspaper cites three sources familiar with the thinking of Attorney General William Barr as saying that Barr is considering ending his term as Attorney General of the United States and leader of the Justice Department at some point before the presumed end of Trump’s term on January 20th, with one source claiming that Barr could be announcing his departure before the end of the year.
The Times says that it is still uncertain whether the attorney general’s thinking was influenced by Trump’s refusal to confirm that he still had confidence in Barr’s ability to do the job he had been tasked with after the AG confirmed that the Justice Department had not uncovered any widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election that would have affected the outcome of the contest.
The anonymous sources who divulged the gist of the attorney general’s deliberations about his future plans to the press offered differing reasons for the potential premature exit.
“One of the people insisted that Mr. Barr had been weighing his departure since before last week and that Mr. Trump had not affected the attorney general’s thinking. Another said Mr. Barr had concluded that he had completed the work that he set out to accomplish at the Justice Department,” the newspaper writes.
An early departure by Barr would deprive Trump of one of his most willing accomplices in bending the rules of jurisprudence to the departing president’s benefit but could shield the attorney general from having to spar with Trump over his efforts to overturn the election results that he continues to loudly proclaim are rife with fraud, despite no hard evidence to support his allegations.
While the Attorney General has reportedly not yet made a final decision — and neither the White House nor the Justice Department was willing to comment on the report — if Barr were to leave his post earlier than expected, Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy attorney general, would be expected to take over the leadership of the Justice Department until President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in.
While Barr has been quite willing to defend the president throughout his tenure in the Justice Department, it appears that the man who deceived the public on the contents of the Mueller report and tried to drop the prosecution of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn in a transparent attempt to support the president’s allegations that he was the victim of a partisan witch hunt no longer has the appetite to continue to help him in his attempts to dismantle this nation’s democratic principles.
It’s difficult to put such a stunt outside the realm of possibility with a man as vindictive as Donald Trump.
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Original reporting by Katie Benner, Michael S. Schmidt, and at The New York Times.
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