The attorney general was cornered.
It was July 2020, and Bill Barr was testifying before the House Judiciary Committee. Months earlier, in February 2020, he had taken the jaw-dropping step of publicly undercutting the sentencing recommendation made by Justice Department prosecutors who had tried and convicted Roger Stone, a longtime political ally and advisor to Trump, on charges that Stone had lied to Congress about his dealings with Russia and the Trump campaign relating to the 2016 election and that he had tampered with a witness. Even though the prosecutors had received internal DOJ authorization to seek a sentence of 87 to 108 months, Barr reached down from his perch as attorney general and publicly overruled them to seek a lower sentence—a move he would make in no other case during his tenure—prompting all four prosecutors who had obtained the Stone conviction to resign from the case.
Even though Barr had been in office as attorney general for nearly a year and a half at the time of his July 2020 testimony, it was, somehow, his first time appearing publicly before the House committee that holds primary oversight responsibility for the Justice Department. Much of the fault for this delay lay with Barr himself, who over a year before, in May 2019, had casually blown off the committee and no-showed for his scheduled testimony, the way a spring semester high school senior ditches eighth-period study hall. The rest of the fault lies with Judiciary Committee Democrats, who responded to Barr’s insouciance not by subpoenaing him but, rather, by holding a farcical empty-chair hearing and eating fried chicken on the floor of the committee room. (Get it? He’s a “chicken” for not showing up!)
But in July 2020, Judiciary Committee Democrats finally had the attorney general in the witness chair, under oath. Representative Eric Swalwell, a former prosecutor, summoned the old courtroom skills and walked Barr right into a trap.
