Rick Wilson took Attorney General William Barr to the woodshed on Thursday for being a threat to democracy itself.
For two days this week, Barr has been testifying to Congress in defense of his effort to hide the Mueller report from the American public all while insisting that his three and a half page summary of the 400 page document clears President Donald Trump of all wrongdoing.
Barr’s summary, however, notes that the report does not exonerate Trump entirely and members of Mueller’s own team say it is more damaging to Trump than Barr portrays.
In an op-ed for The Daily Beast on Thursday, Rick Wilson slammed Barr for making excuses to protect Trump and for forcing Democrats to go to court. to get the report.
“Every great authoritarian enterprise comes to its apotheosis more from the soulless, mechanical efficiency of armies of bureaucrats and police than from the rantings of whatever Great Leader or revolutionary firebrand mounts the podium,” Wilson wrote. “A four-hour, spittle-flecked speech in Berlin, Havana, Moscow, or Kigali is, in the end, less consequential than the memos and slide decks of competent people given over to the service of evil.”
Wilson argued that while Trump is a threat, Barr and the other bureaucrats Trump has appointed throughout our government are even more dangerous because they are sycophants who are going to do his bidding instead of doing their duty to defend the Constitution and acting as a check.
Bad governments don’t start as nihilist terror; they’re the work of people who look like your neighbors. They build anodyne policy directives to justify the acidic erosion of the rule of law. They put the tools of government and administration to darker and darker purposes while compartmentalizing inevitable excesses in the name of political expediency.
Wilson concluded by urging Democrats to move faster toward litigation because dragging their feet makes authoritarianism more possible.
“The fact the Democrats aren’t already in court to get the full, unredacted Mueller report is exactly the kind of behavior that happens in nations slipping from democracy to authoritarianism,” he wrote. “They think this is procedural and political, not existential. There are no brakes, no white knight in DOJ to come to the rescue, and unless Democrats get the entire report in court, Barr, Trump, and Fox will write the history of this sorry affair.”
The problem is that Trump may have the courts on his side since he has been stacking them with conservative nominees since taking office, including the Supreme Court. In the end, it may come down to Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision on whether democracy will be saved or not. If not, the American people are left with little recourse except to hope they can change our government through elections or openly revolt and take it back by force.
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