Modified Limited Hangout
By 
Bill Barr has a new doorstop coming to a Barnes & Noble remainder table near you, and it appears to be an epitome of the “principled opposition to Trump as soon as it was clear he wasn’t going to win” genre:
More critically, Barr writes, Trump and his legal team, including Barr’s nemesis, Giuliani, pushed absurd claims of mass voter fraud. “His legal team had a difficult case to make, and they made it as badly and unprofessionally as I could have imagined,” Barr writes. “It was all a grotesque embarrassment.”
Once again, Barr engaged in some of the same conduct he now decries. In September 2020, he grossly exaggerated the facts of a small fraudulent-ballot case in Texas, and a few weeks later he told Trump about a nascent investigation in Pennsylvania involving fewer than 10 ballots found in a trash can. The president immediately touted the Pennsylvania case as proof of pervasive fraud, but it turned out to be simple human error.
Trump’s legal efforts were a clown car of incompetence, but for a time Barr rode in that car. Before resigning in December 2020, Barr told the president in blunt terms that his mass-voter-fraud arguments were bunk.
By comparison, the chapters Barr devotes to more conventional issues like school vouchers come as a kind of relief, even if they often read as an airing of grievances for conservative lawyers — a Festivus for the Federalist Society. He also repeats his 2020 claim that some states’ coronavirus restrictions were “the most sweeping and onerous denial of civil liberties” since slavery — the kind of factually inebriated argument sure to infuriate historians of segregation or the World War II internment of Japanese Americans.
See, instead of Trump, we need moderate, reasonable, thinking man’s Republicans who will compare having to wear a mask while grocery shopping during the pandemic to slavery!
As Jennifer Szalai puts it in her own entertaining review, “it’s clear that Barr has something else in common with Trump — a shrewd ability to recognize when certain people are no longer useful for his purposes, and a willingness to dispense with them accordingly.” But he’ll always be in Trump’s clown car.