Former attorney general Bill Barr spoke about the politicization of the Department of Justice and the FBI during a conversation with National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy at the National Review Institute Ideas Summit on Friday.
“There’s nothing that’s happening at the Department or Bureau that isn’t happening at every other institution in the country,” he said, pointing to other industries including medicine, science and media that have also faced politicization. He suggested the FBI and DOJ are actually “far less tainted” by politicization than other institutions.
“These are such sensitive institutions, they’re so important that these faults are very glaring,” he said, adding there is no solution to the problem that is “narrow and targeted” and instead needs to be addressed on a cultural level.
However, part of the problem at the bureau is “careerism among middle management,” he said. Employees are focused on moving onto their next job so they don’t want to “rock the boat.”
There’s “no discipline in the organization,” Barr said, adding that people are “risk-averse because they’re afraid of the woke mob attacking them.”
Barr, who served as the attorney general under President George H.W. Bush and President Donald Trump, suggested the FBI should undergo structural change.
“Some people want to burn it down and start it up again — I’m not sure I’d go that far,” he said, but suggested the bureau could separate the intel side from the law enforcement side as a “catalyst for shaking up the institution” and “reclaiming some of the culture.”
He said the FBI needs to return to holding applicants for bureau positions to a higher standard, saying the physical requirement have been lowered to two-thirds of what they used to be.
Barr’s comments come after the Republican-controlled House formed a Judiciary subcommittee on the “weaponization of the federal government,” including law-enforcement and national-security agencies, back in January.
Representative Chip Roy (R., Texas) said at the time that the panel will go “after the weaponization of the government, the F.B.I., the intel agencies, D.H.S., all of them that have been, you know, labeling Scott Smith a domestic terrorist.”
Smith’s daughter was sexually assaulted in a Loudoun County, Va., high school bathroom. He was convicted of disorderly conduct after being arrested during a heated debate over bathroom policy at a school-board meeting. The National School Boards Association referenced Smith’s arrest among a list of what it called a trend of violence and threats against school officials in a letter to President Biden in September 2021. The letter characterized parents who protest progressive curricula as potential “domestic terrorists” and requested federal help.
Attorney General Garland responded by issuing a memorandum telling U.S. attorneys and the FBI to meet with local officials across the country to discuss “strategies for addressing threats” against school officials and teachers.
Meanwhile at the Ideas Summit on Friday, Barr also condemned Trump’s recent indictment by a Manhattan grand jury. He noted that though the indictment is currently sealed, it appears to be the “archetypical abuse of the prosecutorial function to engage in a political hit job.”
“It’s a disgrace if it turns out to be what we think it is,” he said. “Politically it could be damaging I think to the Republican Party simply because its a no-lose situation for the Democrats,” as much of the public focus will return to Trump amid his legal foes.
“Legally from what I understand it’s a pathetically weak case,” he said.
The indictment accuses Trump of falsifying business records in relation to the hush-money payments. Daniels claimed in the final days of the 2016 presidential election that she had previously had a sexual affair with Trump. Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about her claims.
Prosecutors claim Trump falsified internal business records to conceal the reimbursement payments to Cohen as legal expenses. Cohen claims Trump was aware of the misleading record keeping.