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BooksInterview‘America is not a perfect country’: David Rubenstein on Trump, Biden and a nation’s troubled historyMartin Pengelly In his new book of interviews with influential figures, the billionaire considers the health of US democracy and how it might withstand further attacks@ More
BooksThe Afghanistan Papers review: superb exposé of a war built on lies Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post used freedom of information to produce the definitive US version of the warJulian BorgerSun 5 Sep 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 5 Sep 2021 02.02 EDTIn the summer of 2009, the latest in a long line of US military commanders in Afghanistan commissioned the latest in a long line of strategic reviews, in the perennial hope it would make enough of a difference to allow the Americans to go home.‘The intensity has not changed’: Jason Kander on the fall of Afghanistan – and trying to get friends outRead moreThere was some excitement in Washington about the author, Gen Stanley McChrystal, a special forces soldier who cultivated the image of a warrior-monk while hunting down insurgents in Iraq.Hired by Barack Obama, McChrystal produced a 66-page rethink of the Afghan campaign, calling for a “properly resourced” counter-insurgency with a lot more money and troops.It quickly became clear there were two significant problems. Al-Qaida, the original justification for the Afghan invasion, was not even mentioned in McChrystal’s first draft. And the US could not agree with its Nato allies on whether to call it a war or a peacekeeping or training mission, an issue with important legal implications.In the second draft, al-Qaida was included and the conflict was hazily defined as “not a war in the conventional sense”. But no amount of editing could disguise the fact that after eight years of bloody struggle, the US and its allies were unclear on what they were doing and who they were fighting.The story is one of many gobsmacking anecdotes and tragic absurdities uncovered by Craig Whitlock, an investigative reporter at the Washington Post. His book is based on documents obtained through freedom of information requests, most from “lessons learned” interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), a watchdog mandated by Congress to keep tabs on the hundreds of billions flowing into Afghanistan.In the Sigar files, and other interviews carried out by military institutes and research centres, Whitlock found that soldiers of all ranks and their civilian counterparts were “more open about their experiences than they likely would have been with a journalist working on a news story”.Blunt appraisals were left unvarnished because they were never intended for publication. The contrast with the upbeat version of events presented to the public at the same time, often by the very same people, is breathtaking.The Afghanistan Papers is a book about failure and about lying about failure, and about how that led to yet worse failures, and so on for 20 years. The title and the contents echo the Pentagon Papers, the leaked inside story of the Vietnam war in which the long road to defeat was paved with brittle happy talk.“With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict,” Whitlock writes. “Instead, they chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift.”As Whitlock vividly demonstrates, the lack of clarity, the deception, ignorance and hubris were baked in from the beginning. When he went to war in Afghanistan in October 2001, George Bush promised a carefully defined mission. In fact, at the time the first bombs were being dropped, guidance from the Pentagon was hazy.It was unclear, for example, whether the Taliban were to be ousted or punished.“We received some general guidance like, ‘Hey, we want to go fight the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan,’” a special forces operations planner recalled. Regime change was only decided to be a war aim nine days after the shooting started.The US was also hazy about whom they were fighting, which Whitlock calls “a fundamental blunder from which it would never recover”.Most importantly, the invaders lumped the Taliban in with al-Qaida, despite the fact the former was a homegrown group with largely local preoccupations while the latter was primarily an Arab network with global ambitions.That perception, combined with unexpectedly easy victories in the first months, led Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to believe the Taliban could be ignored. Despite offers from some leaders that they were ready to negotiate a surrender, they were excluded from talks in December 2001 on the country’s future. It was a decision the United Nations envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, called the “original sin” of the war.Rumsfeld declared there was no point negotiating.“The only thing you can do is to bomb them and try to kill them,” he said in March 2002. “And that’s what we did, and it worked. They’re gone.”Not even Rumsfeld believed that. In one of his famous “snowflake” memos, at about the same time, he wrote: “I am getting concerned that it is drifting.”In a subsequent snowflake, two years after the war started, he admitted: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”’The Taliban had not disappeared, though much of the leadership had retreated to Pakistan. The fighters had gone home, if necessary to await the next fighting season. Their harsh brand of Islam had grown in remote, impoverished villages, honed by the brutalities of Soviet occupation and civil war. The Taliban did not represent anything like a majority of Afghans, but as their resilience and eventual victory have shown, they are an indelible part of Afghanistan.Bruised Biden tries to turn the page after US debacle in AfghanistanRead moreWhitlock’s book is rooted in a database most journalists and historians could only dream of, but it is far more than the sum of its sources. You never feel the weight of the underlying documents because they are so deftly handed. Whitlock uses them as raw material to weave anecdotes into a compelling narrative.He does not tell the full story of the Afghan war. He does not claim to do so. That has to be told primarily by Afghans, who lived through the realities submerged by official narratives, at the receiving end of each new strategy and initiative.This is a definitive version of the war seen through American eyes, told by Americans unaware their words would appear in public. It is a cautionary tale of how a war can go on for years, long after it stops making any kind of sense.TopicsBooksAfghanistanSouth and Central AsiaUS militaryUS foreign policyUS national securityGeorge BushreviewsReuse this content More
BooksOur Own Worst Enemy review: a caustic diagnosis of America after TrumpTom Nichols quotes Abraham Lincoln – on how American democracy can only be brought down from within Lloyd GreenSun 22 Aug 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 22 Aug 2021 02.01 EDTLiberal democracy is under attack from within. Institutional trust erodes. Fewer than one in six Americans believe democracy is working well, nearly half think democracy isn’t functioning properly, and 38% say democracy is simply doing meh. Atomization, bowling alone and nihilism have converged at the ballot box.The Reckoning by Mary L Trump review – how to heal America’s traumaRead moreRepublicans are hellbent on shoving the events of 6 January, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked the US Capitol, down a deep memory hole. GOP governors in Florida, Mississippi and Texas remain sanguine as Covid-19 dispatches children to intensive care. Seven months into his presidency, Joe Biden looks to some like Jimmy Carter redux, competence and judgment seriously doubted, allies strained and divided. FDR, he’s definitely not.Into this morass parachutes Tom Nichols, with a meditation on the state of American democracy. Nichols grew up in a working-class home in Massachusetts and is now a professor at the US Naval War College and the Harvard Extension School. He is also a Never Trump conservative.In his eighth book, Nichols is pessimistic. “Decades of constant complaint,” he writes, “regularly aired in the midst of continual improvements in living standards, have finally taken their toll.”The enemy, Nichols asserts, is “us”. Citizens of democracies, he writes, “must now live with the undeniable knowledge that they are capable of embracing illiberal movements and attacking their own liberties”.As if to prove his point, Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, recently made light of Trump’s attempts to have the Department of Justice subvert the election result. Even with Trump out of office, Senator Lindsay Graham continues to play first golf buddy, Renfield to Trump’s Count Dracula. A majority of congressional Republicans voted against certifying the 2020 election.In 2016, Nichols urged conservatives to vote for Hillary Clinton because Trump was “too mentally unstable” – far from the “very stable genius” he would later claim to be.In Our Own Worst Enemy, Nichols quotes Abraham Lincoln on how threats to American democracy always come from within: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” Nichols sees the internet and the “revolution in communications” as the means by which we reached this dark point.Public life has become ever more about dopamine hits, instant reaction and heightened animus. Our fellow citizens double as our enemies. Electronic proximity breeds contempt, not introspection. Social media and cable television provide a community for those who lack a three-dimensional version.Nichols looks to ancient Greece for a reminder that nothing lasts forever. Admiringly, he quotes Pericles, the Athenian general and orator – but observes that Pericles was not around when his city state collapsed. He died two years earlier, behind “the besieged walls of Athens – from a plague”.History can repeat itself.In September 2016, writing in the Claremont Journal of Books under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, Michael Anton declared the contest between Trump and Clinton the “Flight 93 Election”: a reference to the plane that came down in Pennsylvania on 9/11 when passengers attacked their hijackers. Clinton, he argued, simply had to be stopped. First principles of conservatism could therefore be jettisoned.“Charge the cockpit or you die,” Anton thundered. “You may die anyway … There are no guarantees.”What, he asked, must be done “against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality and corruption?” To Anton, for the right, respect for “democratic and constitutional niceties” was ultimately a sucker’s game. Culture was stacked against them.After a stint as a Rudy Giuliani speechwriter, and other stops along the way, Anton joined Trump’s national security council.Later this year the Claremont Institute will honor Ron DeSantis. At a press conference earlier this month, the Florida governor asked: “Would I rather have 5,000 [Covid-19] cases among 20-year-olds or 500 cases among seniors? I would rather have the younger.”A few weeks later, the Sunshine State is getting the worst of both worlds.Simple decency, it seems, is for losers. Amid the last presidential campaign, comparisons between the US and the Weimar Republic were rife. The January insurrection was seen as our “Reichstag fire”. The attackers came from the right.Nichols absorbs and abhors it all. Not surprisingly, he takes particular aim at the populist right, which he says has been the “main threat” to liberal democracy over the past two decades. That is subject to debate, which Nichols acknowledges. Regardless, he writes that the populist right “is a movement rooted in nostalgia and social revenge”.As if to make Nichols’ point, Lauren Boebert, the hard-right, QAnon-adjacent Republican congresswoman from Colorado, recently trashed Biden for having left America’s friends in Afghanistan in the lurch – after voting last month against granting 8,000 immigration visas to Afghans who assisted the US military.‘We dodged a mortar round’: George Packer on America in crisisRead moreOther GOP diehards who opposed the legislation include Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mo Brooks and Paul Gosar. Greene and Gosar were charter members of the de facto white nationalist America First caucus. After a bomb threat on the Capitol this week, Brooks tweeted: “I understand citizenry anger directed at dictatorial socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom and the very fabric of American society.”Considering what ails America, Nichols offers limited prescriptions. He supports bridging the gap between civilian and military life. The progeny of the coastal elites opt for Ivy League colleges over the service academies, reinstatement of the draft isn’t likely and notions of national service all too frequently amount to “little more” than a paid internship, he writes.Concurrently, rightwing “Spartanism” breeds the unsustainable notion that “‘citizens’ and ‘soldiers’ are not the same people”.Nichols urges America’s youth to spend a summer in uniform, exposed to military life and skills. Most won’t join the army, he thinks, but will come away with a better knowledge of the soldier’s life. Right now, he laments, “there is no longer any common experience related to national defense”.Indeed. America has become one nation separated by a common language.
Our Own Worst Enemy is published in the US by Oxford University Press
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BooksThe Reckoning by Mary L Trump review – how to heal America’s traumaA revealing blend of family lore, history, policy and anger casts light on the background and legacy of Donald Trump Lloyd GreenSun 15 Aug 2021 01.00 EDTLast year, Mary Trump delivered a salacious and venomous takedown of her uncle, Donald J Trump. Too Much and Never Enough doubled as awesome beach reading and opposition research dump, before the party conventions. Timing was everything.Trump was ‘in pain and afraid’ during post-Covid display of bravado, niece’s book saysRead moreGoosed by the Trump family’s attempt to stop publication and by simple proximity to election day, the book sold more than 1.35m copies in in its first week. Mary Trump then launched a lawsuit of her own against her uncle and his siblings, alleging they swindled her out of millions. The action remains pending, in court in Manhattan.Too Much and Never Enough had a subtitle: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. A year later, it seems a flashing red light. On 6 January, when Donald Trump’s supporters attacked the US Capitol, literary hyperbole acquired prescience.Now the Trump who doesn’t need a ghostwriter – and who is also a trained psychologist – is back with a second book, The Reckoning. It is a less lurid read but a darker one too. Under a slightly less alarming subtitle, Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal, she delivers a bleak prognosis.The book is a mixture of family lore, history, policy and anger. As expected, Mary Trump’s disdain for her uncle is once again made clear. At her grandparents’ home, the N-word was bandied about. Her uncle, she says, grew up racist and antisemitic. If you’re wondering how such a man might have come to conquer a political party and win the White House, think on this: Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016, has discounted antisemitism in his boss – but declined to deny Trump’s race-baiting.Then there is the bravado Trump showed last October, after contracting Covid-19. “Doing his best Mussolini imitation, he took off his mask in a macho display of invulnerability,” Mary Trump writes, of the moment the then president returned to the White House from hospital, supposedly indestructible. “He clenched his teeth and jutted out his jaw, just as my grandmother did when she was biting back anger or clamping down on her pain. In Donald, I saw the latter.”Mary Trump is happy to wade into policy fights. Her diagnoses of America’s ills and policy prescriptions to tackle them place her squarely on the left. It is “almost impossible to grow up white in America”, she writes, “and not be racist”. Perhaps she is too pessimistic. Yes, many of the founders owned enslaved people. Yes, it took one century to end slavery and another to end official segregation. Yes, the effects linger. Inequality is baked in. Like a ghost, the past will always hover.But the US has undeniably progressed from where it stood 75 years ago, let alone 100 further back. Barack Obama won two terms as president. Kamala Harris is vice-president. Even in the Republican party, South Carolina, for so long a hotbed of sedition and segregation, racism and repression, is represented in the Senate by an African American, Tim Scott.Wading into stormy intellectual waters, Mary Trump embraces the 1619 Project, a proposal to center racism in American history, published by the New York Times. She does admit one of the project’s original claims, that the revolutionary war was fought to preserve slavery, was “a factual inaccuracy”. In doing so she joins leading historians including Sean Wilentz and James McPherson of Princeton as critics of the project.Mary Trump is also in favor of financial reparations to Black Americans in compensation for centuries of oppression, and a vocal opponent of “broken windows” policing. Under that theory, minor disorder is cracked down upon harshly, supposedly as a way of stopping more serious crime at source but disproportionately affecting minority communities.Looking at the impact of the policy on her own city, New York, Mary Trump goes full bore at Rudy Giuliani, once mayor, and Bill Bratton, Giuliani’s first police commissioner. She contends that the impact of “broken windows” policing was minimal at best, and that a reduction in crime in the 1990s was merely part of a larger “national trend”. Loathe Giuliani all you want but he deserves credit. His New York drove that trend.She continues: “In our cities and our schools, we all would have been better off if they’d just fixed the fucking windows.” Unfortunately, Bill de Blasio, the current mayor, can’t even be bothered with that. Parts of Fun City are not terribly fun.Mary Trump puts her positions passionately but perhaps she could pause to consider how such agendas play with voters. Even under the horrors of Covid, Joe Biden was the only Democrat who could have beaten her uncle. James Clyburn, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, has acknowledged that one slogan popular on the left, Defund the Police, nearly cost control of the House.Ohio Democratic primary election: Shontel Brown defeats progressive Nina TurnerRead moreMore recently, in Ohio, Shontel Brown won a House primary against Nina Turner – a harsh critic of Biden. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, leading national progressive voices, were in Turner’s corner. Clyburn had Brown’s back. At the ballot box, moderation matters. So do coalitions.According to Mary Trump, “we are heading toward an even darker period in our nation’s history”. This week, Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, made light of her uncle’s attempts to have the Department of Justice subvert the election result. There is reason for more than just concern. The past five years, the age of Donald Trump, have cast a harsh spotlight on America.Each of us will see what we will see. Our cold civil war continues. With her second book, Mary Trump offers food for thought – and grist for the mill.
The Reckoning is published in the US by St Martin’s Press ($28.99) and in the UK by Atlantic (£18.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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The ObserverBooksInterviewI Alone Can Fix It: Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker on their Trump bestsellerDavid Smith in Washington The Washington Post reporters have unleashed a second startling story of incompetence and malevolence in the White House@ More
BooksMichael Wolff: Murdoch hates Trump but loves Fox News money moreIn book, Wolff says that Murdoch personally approved network’s early call of Arizona, which signalled Trump’s defeat Martin Pengelly in New York@ More
US newsPriscilla Johnson McMillan obituaryJournalist, author and historian who knew both President John F Kennedy and his alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald Michael CarlsonMon 19 Jul 2021 04.54 EDTLast modified on Mon 19 Jul 2021 05.38 EDTPriscilla Johnson McMillan, who has died aged 92 after a fall, was the only person who could claim to have known both President John F Kennedy and his alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. As a young college graduate, Johnson was befriended by Senator Kennedy while she worked in his office; a few years later she interviewed the young Oswald soon after he showed up in Moscow wishing to defect to the Soviet Union.After the assassination, Johnson was given exclusive access to Oswald’s Russian widow, Marina, and her ensuing book, Marina and Lee (1977), became a key document in establishing Oswald as a lone disturbed assassin. It also prompted many researchers to point to Johnson’s close ties to the US intelligence community, not least when she received similarly exclusive access to Joseph Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, when she defected to the US, and worked with her through translating her bestselling 1967 memoir Twenty Letters to a Friend.Johnson’s career grew from her unexpected interest in Russian language and culture. Her father, Stuart Johnson, a financier, was heir to a textile fortune; he was her mother, Mary Eunice Clapp’s, second husband. Patricia was born in Glen Cove, New York, and grew up on the family’s estate, Kaintuck Farm, in Locust Valley, Long Island.She was educated at Brearley school in New York, then at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, one of the elite “seven sisters” female colleges, where she became the first graduate majoring in Russian studies and was active in the United World Federalists (UWF), dedicated to effective world cooperation, primarily to prevent nuclear war.After an MA at Radcliffe College (now part of Harvard University), in 1953 she joined the staff of the newly elected senator Kennedy, researching French Indochina. They became friends; he would call her regularly for chats. She denied any romance, “I didn’t love him; he was mesmerising but he was just someone I knew.” She was rejected when she applied to join the CIA, ostensibly because of her ties to the UWF. Oddly, her interviewer was Cord Meyer, who in 1947 had been the first president of the UWF; now he headed the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, aimed at influencing media. She did translation work for a review of the Soviet press, spending much time in Russia. On Kennedy’s recommendation, she received a grant to study the Soviet legal system, and again did translation work at the US embassy. She met Truman Capote, travelling with a US production of Porgy and Bess, and is mentioned in his book The Muses Are Heard.In 1958 she joined the North American News Alliance (NANA), and in November 1959 arrived in Moscow just a day after Aline Mosby of United Press International had filed a story on Oswald’s defection. The US consul John McVickar, himself a CIA man, recommended she interview Oswald, who was at her hotel; her report on the four-hour session appeared in NANA-affiliated papers.Mosby noted that Johnson lived in the Metropol, unlike other press in their state-assigned office/residence, saying “she was a very nice person and had good connections”. Johnson was one of many journalists expelled from Russia in the wake of the Russians shooting down of an American U2 spy plane; Oswald had been a radar operator at the Atsugi, Japan base from which U2s flew.She became a visiting fellow at the Russian research centre at Harvard, returning to Russia in 1962 and writing a memorable piece for Harper’s magazine about the Soviet writer Boris Pasternak’s funeral. On her return she was interviewed by Donald Jameson, the head of the CIA’s Soviet Russia division, who described her in a memo as someone who could “be encouraged to write the articles we want … but it’s important to avoid making her think she’s being used as a propaganda tool.”Then, in November 1963, came the news of Kennedy’s assassination by Oswald; Johnson gasped as she realised: “I know that boy.” Her 1959 profile of Oswald was immediately reprinted, but with a few changes, including a final line that did not appear in the original: “This was the stuff of which fanatics are made.”In 1964, when Marina was being held incommunicado, under threat of deportation, Johnson moved in with her. With her Russian and knowledge of Lee, she won Marina’s trust, but her book did not appear until 1977. While researching it, Johnson co-edited a collection of essays, Khrushchev and The Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture (1965). She returned to Kaintuck, where Alliluyeva lived while they worked on her memoir.Johnson married the journalist George McMillan in 1966; he covered the civil rights movement in the south, and published, in 1977, Making of an Assassin, showing how Martin Luther King’s alleged assassin, James Earl Ray, acted alone. They divorced in 1980.Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald’s Assassination of John F Kennedy finally appeared, coincidentally, just as the House select committee on assassinations reopened the case. Johnson testified in closed session; large sections of her HSCA testimony are redacted whenever she is asked about her intelligence connections. Her book was a major influence on Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale; Mailer blamed Oswald’s killing of the president on his sexual frustration with Marina, and jealousy of JFK. By this time Marina began to distance herself from Johnson’s conclusions, saying “it was up to Priscilla to fish out all the facts and everything”.In 1988, Johnson added another line to her Oswald interview, telling Dan Rather of CBS that Oswald had told her: “I want to give the people of the US something to think about.” Eventually, Marina would claim she was “misled by the ‘evidence’ presented to me by government authorities … I am now convinced Lee was an FBI informant and did not kill President Kennedy”.Priscilla’s obituary of Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists led to her being asked to write about the hearings that declared J Robert Oppenheimer, the “father” of the atomic bomb, a security risk when he opposed building an H-bomb.She received extensive access to the archives of the Los Alamos Atomic Laboratory, but as with Marina and Lee, the research overwhelmed the writing. When The Ruin of J Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race finally appeared in 2005, it was a year after a massive Oppenheimer biography by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin had won a Pulitzer prize. But her portrayal of the political shift that left Oppenheimer on the outside won praise.On the 50th anniversary of the assassination, Marina and Lee was reissued. Johnson wrote of Oswald’s “unfitness for any conspiracy outside his own head”. Oddly enough, the description also would suit a hapless someone who was, as Oswald himself claimed, a “patsy”.Johnson is survived by a niece, Holly-Katharine Johnson, who is working on her biography.TopicsUS newsUS politicsJohn F KennedyRussiaNew YorkCIATruman CapoteobituariesReuse this content More
BooksHatchet Man review: Bill Barr as Trump loyalist – and fairly typical AGElie Honig excoriates the man who ran interference over Russia. He might have considered attorneys general gone before
I Alone Can Fix It review: Trump as wannabe Führer
Lloyd GreenSun 18 Jul 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 18 Jul 2021 02.01 EDTIn his 22 months as attorney general under Donald Trump, Bill Barr played blocking back and spear-catcher for the 45th president.Landslide review: Michael Wolff’s third Trump book is his best – and most alarmingRead moreOnly when Trump tried to steal the election did Barr grow a conscience. Otherwise, he was a close approximation to Roy Cohn, Trump’s notorious and long-dead personal attorney. Cohn and Barr even attended the same high school and college. But in the end, much as Trump ditched Cohn as he lay dying of Aids, Trump discarded Barr.Elie Honig surmises that Barr’s quest for power and desire to turn the clock back on secular modernity girded his disdain for democratic norms and legal conventions that came to stand in his way.Honig is an ex-prosecutor who became a CNN commentator. His first book, subtitled “How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor’s Code and Corrupted the Justice Department”, catalogs Barr’s misdeeds across 288 pages, interspersed with flashbacks to Honig’s career as an assistant US attorney in the southern district of New York.Honig successfully prosecuted more than 100 members and associates of organized crime, including bosses and members of the Gambino and Genovese families. More recently, he drew a comparison between such “mafia cases” and Trump’s Goodfellas-tinged lexicon.“Calling somebody who provides information to law enforcement a ‘rat’ is straight up mob boss language,” Honig tweeted in late 2018.Suffice to say, the author’s anger toward Barr is real and Hatchet Man is thorough. Barr’s transgressions are laid out in black and white.In March 2019, less than two months after succeeding Jeff Sessions, Barr released his own preview of Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow – a preview notably untethered to fact. Later, Barr put his fingers on the scale in connection with the sentencing of Roger Stone and the early release of Paul Manafort. For a self-professed law-and-order AG, who also served under George HW Bush but who had never prosecuted a criminal case, these were unusual steps, to say the least.The federal bench came to question Barr’s credibility. In an opinion tied to the release of a memo related to Barr’s summary of the Mueller report, US district judge Amy Berman Jackson wrote that both Barr and the Department of Justice had been “disingenuous”.The Biden administration is appealing against the ruling. Preserving presidential authority takes precedence over the public’s right to know. Buffing DoJ’s halo can be left for another day.Another of Barr’s gambits, seeking to toss Michael Flynn’s guilty plea (for lying to the FBI while national security adviser) before he received a pardon, became a lightning rod. US district judge Emmett Sullivan questioned Barr’s legal gymnastics.“In view of the government’s previous argument in this case that Mr Flynn’s false statements were ‘absolutely material’ because his false statements ‘went to the heart’ of the FBI’s investigation, the government’s about-face, without explanation, raises concerns about the regularity of its decision-making process,” Sullivan observed.Yet as Trump-era books go, Hatchet Man fails to sizzle. It is short on news and does not entertain. Those with first-hand knowledge did not share it with Honig. Rather, his book is a lament and a prayer for an idealized version of Main Justice that seldom ever was.The power to prosecute and defend is a potent weapon and politics weighs in the balance. John F Kennedy tapped Bobby Kennedy, his brother, as attorney general. Richard Nixon placed John Mitchell, his law partner, in the job. Alberto Gonzales, George W Bush’s counsel since his days as Texas governor, held on until he was forced out. His tenure was a hot mess. The usual question for attorneys general is not whether they are “political” but rather “how political” they are.Under Barack Obama, Loretta Lynch declined to recuse herself from the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email use while attempting to steer James Comey from the shadows where he tried to do his work. The FBI director criticized Lynch’s attempt to recast the investigation as a “matter”.Seeing the hand of the Clinton campaign in this kerfuffle over semantics, Comey wrote that the FBI “didn’t do ‘matters’” and “it was misleading to suggest otherwise”.At the other end of the spectrum stands Edward Levi, attorney general under Gerald Ford. Appointed to clear the Augean stables after the Nixon years, Levi was a rarity. A University of Chicago professor, he named an independent counsel to investigate a mere rumor that Ford had received illegal contributions from maritime unions. A six-month investigation found no wrongdoing – and may have torpedoed Ford’s bid for a full term in power.Honig lauds Lynch’s trial experience. Levi’s grandson, Will Levi, was Barr’s chief of staff. It’s a small world, after all.An entire chapter of Hatchet Man, meanwhile, is devoted to Barr’s decision to inject the government into a defamation lawsuit brought against Trump by the writer E Jean Carroll.Frankly, We Did Win This Election review: a devastating dispatch from TrumpworldRead moreIn 2019, Carroll wrote that Trump sexually assaulted her more than two decades before. Trump said she was “totally lying” and that he knew “nothing about her”.After Carroll requested a DNA sample, Barr removed the lawsuit to federal court and claimed Trump’s comments were made within the scope of his official duties. Honig calls the government’s arguments “specious”. A federal trial judge agreed.Not surprisingly, the Trump administration appealed. More surprisingly, Merrick Garland, Biden’s attorney general, has declined to drop that appeal. In the words of one commentator: “There’s nothing new about the justice department protecting the executive branch and the president.”Honig writes that the DoJ “must enact new, on-the-books policies out of the ditch” Barr dug, in an attempt to restore post-Watergate norms. Call that wishful thinking. What ails the department is what ails America: division and political warfare. Another piece of legislation or a well-crafted executive order is not about to change that.
Hatchet Man is published in the US by Harper
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