Shocking News: Attorney General Claims to Be Head of the Justice Department

Like much of the press, the Washington Post has walked away from its honorable role as a liberal but generally honest reporter of the news, and has become instead a relentless bullhorn for the Biden campaign and anything it thinks will assist that campaign.  Today’s breathless story starts off with, “Attorney General William P. Barr delivered a scathing critique of his own Justice Department on Wednesday night, insisting on his absolute authority to overrule career staff, who he said too often injected themselves into politics and went ‘headhunting’ for high-profile targets.”

What have we come to?  The AG thinks he can overrule a GS 15?  Gads, I need my smelling salts.The Post’s article continues:

Speaking at an event hosted by Hillsdale College, a school with deep ties to conservative politics, Barr directly addressed the criticism that has been building for months inside the department toward his heavy hand in politically sensitive cases, particularly those involving associates of President Trump.

“What exactly am I interfering with?” he asked. “Under the law, all prosecutorial power is invested in the attorney general.”

Barr’s comments were remarkable in that the head of the Justice Department catalogued all of the ways in which he thought his agency had gone astray over the years, and in its current formulation harms the body politic. Barr has drawn considerable criticism for intervening in criminal cases in ways that help benefit the president’s friends.

What’s actually remarkable here  —  indeed mind-blowing  —  is that the Post would appear to suggest that the ultimate authority over, and thus the ultimate responsibility for, federal prosecutions would reside anywhere other than the Attorney General.

For years, we have been told, correctly, that prosecutors need to be accountable to the public over whom they have so much power.  OK, fine.  Question: To what part of the public is a career DOJ attorney accountable?  Answer: Correct, none.  Indeed it’s very unusual for the public even to know the name of career attorneys involved in a case.  The Attorney General, by contrast, is nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, and can be called before either house of Congress to give testimony on virtually any aspect of the Justice Department’s operation (as Barr recently spent hours doing before the House Judiciary Committee).

The attorney general said it was he, not career officials, who have the ultimate authority to decide how cases should be handled, and he derided less-experienced, less-senior bureaucrats who current and former prosecutors have long insisted should be left to handle their cases free from interference from political appointees.

You gotta love the phrase, “free from interference from political appointees.”  I was a career DOJ attorney for 25 years, and it never occurred to me to think of supervision by my superiors, either higher up on the career ladder or politically appointed, as “interference.”  Newsflash to the Post:  That’s what they’re there for.  I wrote the draft; they edited it, or sometimes changed it wholesale, or sometimes told me to start over.  That’s called having a boss.

The whole article seems to be nothing more than an attempt to make a scandal out what has been standard, and correct, operating procedure for decades if not forever.  Those supporting Mr. Biden should be hoping his allies in the press can do better than this.

UPDATE:  Paul Mirengoff adds his typically insightful take here, noting, among other things, that what’s really remarkable about the Attorney General’s speech is that a public official would speak the truth so directly.