The most important thing Barr did for Trump, though, involved the arms-for-dirt-on-Biden Ukraine scandal — which should have prompted a full-blown criminal investigation with a special counsel. Any U.S. attorney’s office would fall over itself to investigate, for example, a state governor who, while running for reelection against a former mayor, so much as hinted to the mayor’s successor that, say, highway funds would be restricted unless the current mayor were to announce an inquiry into her predecessor’s alleged corruption.
But instead of investigating the Ukraine shakedown, Barr’s Justice Department immediately gave the president a
clean bill of health. Saving Trump from that criminal investigation was more than what Roy Cohn ever did for any of his clients.
...
To the contrary,
as his (and my) friend Fox News host Laura Ingraham put it, “Barr was basically telling Trump, don’t worry I got this.” In other words, don’t blow this by calling attention to all that I do for you.
Don’t say the quiet part out loud.
...
But the president will never listen, and what Barr does for him will never be enough. Now having been acquitted by the Senate, Trump thinks he’s bulletproof, legally and otherwise. He now brags, as he tweeted on Saturday, that he is “‘the King’” who was targeted but not taken down. And, drawing on a story in the New York Times that suggested he is stained but unshackled, Trump boasted that he has indeed survived “'
triumphant'” and “'
emboldened'” and “'focused'” more than ever on prosecuting “'his case of grievance, persecution, and resentment.'”
So Trump wants to say the quiet part out loud; he wants to say
he’s got this. And there’s no one to stop him now.
