William Barr is a right-wing ideologue, a master of spin, and a pusher of envelopes. He answers, in theory, to both the president and the American people, but for his purposes, only the former really matters. As a result, he is running around the world trying to get friendly foreign leaders to provide evidentiary support for a conspiracy theory about American intelligence services and the 2016 election that is ridiculous on its face. He is unlikely to succeed, but Trump will give him credit for trying.
Barr has some sense of ethics, so he quickly had the DOJ respond negatively when the rough transcript of the Ukraine phone call indicated that Trump would make him available to cooperate with the “investigation.” And there have been no purely political, frivolous prosecutions of Trump’s opponents yet. The operative word is “yet.”
Our system will not work properly with a politicized DOJ. Barr has already moved us several steps in that direction, but the damage, to date, is manageable. Will he at some point cross the line and destroy the very foundation of our system by weaponizing justice in the manner of a latter-day Stuart monarch? We’ll see, but if Trump wins a second term, the danger will go up exponentially.