Six months after resigning as attorney general, William Barr recently re-entered the spotlight, reportedly telling friendly news correspondent Jonathan Karl that allegations of vote fraud during the 2020 election are bull.  Now that civilian Bill Barr has jumped back into the political fray, it is time to take unflinching stock of the degraded Department of Justice (DOJ) and how it became even further corrupted during Barr's reign.

In reviewing the attorney general's passivity during his tenure, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Barr's inaction was born of anything other than profound fear of the progressive, hydra-headed agency he ostensibly led.  Indeed, during his nearly two years on the job, the nation's top cop repeatedly gave interviews in which he alluded to criminal wrongdoing on the part of the Obama administration and senior leaders of Obama's intelligence agencies, which spied on the Trump campaign and later sought to remove Trump from office on a variety of increasingly implausible and comically specious pretexts.  Yet, despite all of Barr's talk, there was never any accountability for the malefactors. 

Given the elastic timeframes and endless delays concluding the John Durham–led probe into the origins of the Russia hoax-cum-coup that crippled Trump's presidency, it is worth asking whether Barr cravenly provided the president and the public with false assurances that he and Durham were indeed making a good-faith effort to root out the rampant corruption within the DOJ, coupled with false promises that the coup's participants would be brought to justice.  Did Barr make a calculated decision to buy time, carrying water for the administrative state he so fears, while deliberately running out the clock on President Trump?  Did Barr bank his hopes on Trump's defeat in the 2020 election so the entire five-year, government-wide effort to defenestrate Trump could be flushed away down the memory hole?

In reviewing nearly two years of the Barr-led DOJ, it is instructive to reflect on the two-tiered nature of justice at the DOJ.  Several mysterious deaths remain unexplained, among them the 2016 murder of Democrat operative Seth Rich and the "suicides" of the politically connected pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and the Department of Homeland Security whistleblower Philip Haney.  What did these seemingly unrelated events have in common?  The suddenly deceased were all in a position to reveal enormously incriminating information about prominent Democrats.  It is not a "conspiracy theory" to observe that the DOJ seems to have no interest in investigating these highly suspicious deaths.

Similarly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), under the DOJ, continues to sit idly on the information gleaned from Hunter Biden's laptop over the past two years, likely in an effort to conceal the evident corruption of Democrat President Joe Biden.  Further, the DOJ seems unconcerned by the apparent immigration fraud and ballot-harvesting activities of prominent Democrats like Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.  Neither has the DOJ (nor the intelligence agencies) evinced much interest in infiltrating and bringing to justice criminal groups like Antifa, which deploy violent left-wing shock troops to wreak havoc on the nation's streets.  And the DOJ, while searching frenetically under every bed in America for straw men to slay, whether Russian bots or white nationalists (WSEs, whatever those are), has no interest in prosecuting FBI agents who use taxpayer dollars to engage in prurient pursuits like child pornography while on the job.  

Recall the case of John Huber, U.S. attorney and Obama appointee, who closed his nearly three-year "investigation" into connections between the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One with no findings of any illegality whatsoever.  Fellow U.S. attorney John Durham appears scarcely different.  Nearly two years after his appointment to investigate the origins of the Russia hoax, Durham has secured one minor guilty plea (a false statement charge) from somebody named Kevin Clinesmith, more of an extra in a Greek chorus than a key player in the five-year (and counting) effort to destroy Trump.  Occasional leaks from the DOJ to the media indicate that the real key players, former president Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe, are at no risk of being found culpable for any malfeasance.

It seems likely that Barr and Durham slow-walked their probe from the start, in fear of the demonstrated ruthless wrath of the DOJ.  The Potemkin village of an "investigation" into the origins of the Russia hoax will likely be formally disbanded soon, just as Jeffrey Epstein and others were conveniently disappeared.  Then Durham, like Barr, can safely return to private life, out of the crosshairs of the intelligence agencies; write self-serving memoirs; and complain about how he and his investigation were disrespected and obstructed by Trump every step of the way. 

Years of stonewalling from Barr and Durham, redundant pleas for more time, and endless dissembling — and, yes, abject dereliction of duty — can all be rationalized away.  What (if anything) did the two vaunted lawmen accomplish over the past two years, and why do they refuse to release any meaningful findings to the public?

It is crystal-clear that the DOJ is beyond reform, staffed almost entirely by careerist vipers who failed up, pursuing their own progressive political agendas and enriching themselves at the nation's expense.  Law-abiding conservative citizens are now subject to the tender mercies of a new attorney general, Merrick Garland, a warrior for the progressive cause who unambiguously serves at the pleasure of the hard left. 

Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, who essentially forfeited their lives to expose massive surveillance state abuses during the Obama era, never got the pardons they deserved.  But they still have their honor and their dignity.  The same cannot be said of Bill Barr.

Image: Office of Public Affairs via Flickr.

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