As I have declared on social media often, former Attorney General William Barr’s new memoir “One Damn Thing After Another” is a must-read book for any rule-of-law Constitutional conservative as well as for anyone who wants to genuinely understand what a Constitutional conservative is, the true strengths and weaknesses of former President Trump and just, generally, American history over the past three decades. It may be the best and is at least the equal of any book making the case for the original understanding of how America was intended to work as improved by the 14th Amendment and the first civil rights era. It’s comprehensive, entertaining, accessible, often very funny, and very, very fair to former President Trump. I spoke with AG Barr for 90 minutes and could easily have gone twice as long but you need to read the book, not summaries or reviews:

Audio:

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Transcript:

HH: And if you’re wondering why I’m introducing former Attorney General Bill Barr, whose brand-new book, One Damn Thing After Another, is number one on the New York Times list with Paul Simon’s Bubble Boy, it’s because it is the only song mentioned in One Damn Thing After Another other than Scottish music. Am I right about that, Mr. Attorney General? And welcome back.

WB: Yes, Hugh, you’re right about that, and it’s good to be with you.

HH: It’s great to have you. Normally, I always use the music that are mentioned in the books, but you were particularly parsimonious in that category…

WB: (laughing)

HH: I was glad to find one song I could use. We’ll come back from break with bagpipes. First question, are you surprise you’re number one on the New York Times bestseller list?

WB: A little, a little surprised, yeah, and grateful.

HH: Oh, it’s terrific.

WB: Yeah.

HH: We were talking about it with my boys last night at dinner. And the one who’s a politico said everybody wants to read what he has to say about President Trump. And I said what they really want to read is the whole thing, because it’s really an amazing book, General Barr. Let me begin with a question not in it. Would you ever do it again, be the Attorney General, I mean?

WB: No, I think twice is enough for anybody, so I don’t think I’d ever do it again.

HH: Would you work with a transition, because I think the thing that crippled the Trump administration more than anything other than the President’s personality is that they were poorly served by the initial staffing in the administration. What do you think about that assertion? And would you serve in a transition?

WB: I think, I think that that’s absolutely right. That’s very observant. And of course, I’d serve in a transition. Anything to help a new administration. But I think you’re right. I think some of the personnel decisions made up front really showed a lack of understanding of how the federal government operates. And I think they would have benefitted from some better people on the transition.

HH: 100%. Now I’m going to begin with the book in an unusual place. And I’ve actually read the book very closely. I may be the only person in America who read John Kerry’s book, but yours is actually a joy. I mean, I did. I read the whole damn thing, but yours is a joy. And I want to begin with something I don’t remember – Talladega.

WB: Yeah.

HH: And I want to begin with Talladega, because you say on Page 102, “It was the most significant accomplishment as attorney general.” Would you tell people about Talladega, because it’s a fascinating story. I told it to my boys last night and their colleague in the military, and they were just transfixed by this story.

WB: Sure. I was, I was acting attorney general when Dick Thornburgh, who had been attorney general, went off to run in the Senate race in Pennsylvania. And Clarence Thomas’ confirmation was coming on Capitol Hill, and things were on essentially hold until that was through, and I was sort of filling the gap in August of 1991. And 120 Marielito Cubans who had come over during the boat lift, and these were people that had been let out of prison, and in with this particular group, and they were sociopaths, most of them, committed heinous crimes while they were over here. And we were going to deport them back to Cuba. And Fidel Castro agreed to take them, and they thought they were facing death in Cuba, and they may well have been. Anyway, they took over, we were holding them in this prison in Alabama, which they took over a federal prison, and they had 11 hostages initially, ended up with 9 hostages because they released two of them. And they were inside the prison wing, building, a unit which was like a big concrete fortress. And in any event, this came to me while I was acting attorney general, and I realized we wouldn’t be able to negotiate with them, so I told the FBI to prepare a hostage rescue plan, and they used the hostage rescue team. This was the first time the hostage rescue team had actually rescued a hostage. It had been established after the Munich Olympics in the 70s. And after nine days, you know, I made the decision, you know, we were worried about the safety of the hostages. The group was starting to get a little wild and talking about playing Russian Roulette with the prisoners. And so I ordered the hostage rescue, and it worked. And they blew their way into the prison compound at 4:00 in the morning and got to the, got to the hostages in time. Very close call, because the people who were assigned to kill them when there was a rescue, you know, were pushing through the door and we’re almost, had almost gotten to the hostages when the team got in.

HH: It’s absolutely riveting. And there’s a new show on, I don’t know if you watch any streaming platform, called The Mayor Of Kingston, which is based, basically, on Jackson, Michigan, where a giant federal prison and state prison complex is.

WB: Yeah.

HH: And you review this, and the first person that wants to organize it is a Bureau of Prisons guy, and you say no, we’re not going to go with you. We’re going to go with the FBI. But then, there’s a guy inside the building, the tapper. Would you explain what the tapper did?

WB: Right. Sure. So for nine days, we were trying to figure out where the hostages were inside the facility. We needed to know exactly where they were, because the nightmare scenario would be if they were spread around in one of the, like 150 cells in the building. So we were hoping they were concentrated and in one place. And one day, one of the FBI people who was on the cordon around the facility noticed an American prisoner, not a Cuban, who was in that unit, but was in his cell. And he was tapping his head, and he kept on tapping it. And after hours and hours of watching him, we figured out he had a very primitive code, which one tap being A, and two taps being B. and he thought that the guy was tapping out INS, INS. And that led us to believe that they were being held in the INS room, which was the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and they did have a room there in that unit. And we got some confirmatory information, and that helped us locate it. After the operation was successful, I found out he was an American Indian. He had a lot of time left on his sentence, and we, we were able to get him out of prison as a reward for helping us.

HH: I want to quote this on Page 103, and important endnote, you wrote. “I found out who the head tapper was.”

WB: Yeah.

HH: “He was a Native American convict with a very long time left on a long sentence. I took the necessary steps to have him released.” And I wrote down is that just, Mr. Attorney General?

WB: Is it just?

HH: Yeah.

WB: Yes. It’s just, and it’s also practical and smart, because in the future, you want people, prisoners who have long times on their sentences, if there’s something they can help us on, especially if it involves the lives of hostages, they’ll be rewarded.

HH: That’s what I thought. I thought it was to incentive cooperative behavior down the road. But obviously, it depends on what he was accused of. You don’t, what he was convicted of, not accused. You don’t detail that.

WB: Right.

HH: So I would love to know that off-air sometime. Let me move on. You mentioned Justice Thomas, who’s in the hospital this morning, and our prayers are with him.

WB: Yes.

HH: And I hope he’s recovering. There are reports that he is recovering, it’s just influenza or something like that. But in the course of the Thomas hearing, you had to call Mike Luttig, now-Judge Mike Luttig, back from vacation in Hawaii. I find that very, that gives me a great deal of pleasure that you had to bring Mike Luttig back from Hawaii.

SB: (laughing) Yes. Yeah, it, I remember vividly. I got on the phone, a messenger from Capitol Hill came into my office from Strom Thurmond’s office. He was the ranking Republican at the time on the Judiciary Committee. And this was after the initial hearings were held on Thomas, and it looked like things were going to move forward, and he was going to get through. And then Anita Hill made these, had made these allegations which were then leaked. And anyway, the messenger showed up with this affidavit from Anita Hill, and it looked like it could create some problems, and probably lead to another set of hearings. So I called Mike, who had helped Clarence through the first set of hearings, and worked with him. And he was, Mike was at the Justice Department at the time, but he had also been confirmed for a judgeship on the 4th Circuit, which was centered in Richmond. And he hadn’t yet been sworn in as a judge. And I called him up and I got him on the beach in Hawaii, and I read him the affidavit. I said Mike, you think we have a problem? And he said yeah, I think we have a problem. I said well, you’d better get back here, because we really need your help. And he agreed and came back, and he helped Clarence go through the next set of hearings.

HH: I also liked the fact that you sent him to St. Croix when it was basically a war zone. I can’t imagine sending Mike Luttig to a war zone. Honestly, I don’t…

WB: Yeah (laughing) Yeah, so I mean, I was half-joking with him, but we were sending down, a hurricane had essentially wiped out all the buildings on St. Croix, and law and order had broken down. And we were sending down, again, the HRT, the FBI hostage rescue team, and the marshall’s special operations group to help restore order. And he was flying down on the plane with all the legal papers that we needed the governor to sign and have a conversation with the governor. One of us had to go down, and I said Mike, you can go down. And he said why me? And I said well, because I have kids, and you don’t.

HH: (laughing)

WB: (laughing)

HH: So I love this book. I sent Luttig a note saying I knew you were friends with General Barr. I didn’t know you were this good of a friend. And so it’s very, it’s very good when it comes to individual. I must say you were kind to people. You run over some folks. Like William Sessions as FBI director is not going to, you know, give this book to people. And Anthony Fauci is now a one-dimensional character. He’s been flattened by the Bill Barr steamroller. He can now be pasted on my wall. So there are a few people who get run over here. But generally, you don’t do that. You’re not settling scored in this memoir, which is why I like it as a memoir.

WB: Well, thank you. I mean, I, and even when you say I flatten these people, you know, I just really don’t mention Sessions much.

HH: Right.

WB: I just say I didn’t have a high regard for him. But I really don’t attack people personally. My attitude in writing this memoir is that if I didn’t have something good to say about someone, I really wasn’t going to discuss them at length. So…

HH: Oh, that’s interesting. I’m not mentioned in this book, so I guess I’ll take a message from that. I did do an interview with you, only one. I’m going to come back to that later.

WB: Okay.

HH: And I’m going to score you a little bit about your media approach. You were served by the best media person in America, Kerri Kupec.

WB: I think that’s true.

HH: And you did very little media. Why was that?

WB: Because I didn’t want to, you know, I, partly because the Department of Justice, our work doesn’t really lend itself too much to getting me out there. We, a lot of what we do, we have to keep under wraps. But I think the main reason was I didn’t want to, you know, wear out my welcome on the public airwaves, you know? I thought that I would have more impact if I came out only occasionally and said things.

HH: It’s going to be an interesting conversation, because I believe your central argument in the book about the decline of the West and what is going on with progressive extremism ought to have been made when you were in office, because now, people need to read the book. I read the whole chapter, by the way, in the first hour, I’m so impressed with the introduction to Part IV of your book, which is buried deep. It’s almost Straussian. Are you a Leo Strauss guy?

WB: A little bit, yeah. I mean…

HH: Ah.

WM: I haven’t studied him that closely, but no, I was, one of my mentors was Mike Uhlmann…

HH: Yes.

WB: And he was a Straussian, and it’s why I think through osmosis, through his teaching, I picked a lot of it up.

HH: Well, what people know is that ordering of chapters matters a lot in a Straussian’s view of a book, so I read the book that way. When we come back from break, I’ll continue to talk with Attorney General Barr during the break and after the show, and we’ll play more of it tomorrow. Don’t go anywhere, America, except to Amazon.com. One Damn Thing After Another. I’ve just gotten through page one of an eight-page outline, of a 30-page outline after a 475-page book. So don’t miss any of this. It’s distilled Bill Barr coming up on the Hugh Hewitt Show.

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HH: I’m back now with Attorney General William Barr talking about his brand-new book. And this is off-air of the radio, but it’s on-air on the podcast. I might play it tomorrow. General, we are in the middle of a confirmation hearing. Justice Brown Jackson is inevitable. Mitch McConnell said on this show last week that she’s going to be confirmed. I am, are you surprised by that at all?

WB: No. No, I’m not.

HH: No, it’s not news. She’s going, she’s going to be confirmed. I want to go back to when Justice Scalia, your friend, died. And Mitch McConnell made the decision to hold that seat open. Do you think Mitch McConnell saved the Constitution when he did that?

WB: Yes, I do. I thought that that was a very courageous move by him, and we’re the beneficiaries of it today. That’s what I, I think very highly of the Leader. I think he, he gets it from both sides, but he has to herd cats up there, and he does a very good job.

HH: And…I’m a McConnellist, and if you’re playing the long game, you’ve got to be. But that decision kept the Court from careening off in a direction that we would never have gotten it back. Now it doesn’t mean the end of the republic. It just meant the end of the Constitution. We would be living with a living Constitution, the majority of nine unelected judges. So I want to go back to something you talk about in the book – Souter V. Jones. And I learned for the first time you and Mike Luttig were against Thornburgh and Humphrey, but John Sununu was with you voting for Edith Jones. And what happened? What was George H.W. Bush thinking?

WB: I mean, I don’t know for sure, because Thornburgh, I didn’t go to that meeting. Thornburgh reported on it to us. But I think the president didn’t want to use up a lot of capital if he could help it and get a conservative on. And so it was this idea of a stealth conservative. And you know, there were some conservatives who thought that Souter would be conservative. And initially, Sununu suggested that he might be, but at the end of the day, I think Sununu wanted to go for the tried and true, and Edith Jones from the 5th Circuit, who is definitely a conservative, instead of taking a chance on Souter, which I think should have been a, you know, should have been a warning flag to the president on that.

HH: Do you think Roe V. Wade will be overturned? We have 30 seconds until we come back, A.G. Barr.

WB: I think it’ll be eventually left to the states.

HH: That’s what I think.

WB: Yeah.

HH: Yeah, and I think they’ll do it, we’re going to come back and talk about SCOTUS a lot, but I think they’ll do it in this case coming up. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back with more Attorney General Barr when we return to the Hugh Hewitt Show.

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HH: The bagpipes are playing, because former Attorney General Bill Barr is an accomplished pipe player. Have you ever walked in the Scottish walk in Alexandria Old Town, Mr. Attorney General?

WB: Yeah. My band did it once back in the, back in the mid-80s. So you know…

HH: It is, it’s always rousing. I’m there every year that I’m in town. Let’s go back to the memoir. Flight 103, Lockerbie – you were deeply involved in the decision to respond and how to respond with George H.W. Bush to this Libyan terrorist attack on Flight 103. And you wanted a military response. H.W. mused about what was going to happen, decided not to do. Then, you jump ahead to military tribunals and what happened after 9/11. Evidently, H.W. rethought Lockerbie after 9/11?

WB: I was told he did. I was told that he had commented to a number of people that he wished he had taken stronger action in the wake of 103. I, you know, the, we took two or three years of painstaking investigation to establish that it was the Libyans, and there’s no doubt in our mind that it was the Libyans. We had the evidence to prove it. And when it came time to indict the Libyans, the Libyan intelligence officers, I briefed the National Security Council. And I was a little bit surprised that everyone started talking about the idea of, you know, putting pressure on Libya to surrender these particular intelligence officers. And I said that can’t be the whole response. I mean, does anyone really think that these intelligence officers went off and did this by themselves? This was Qaddafi’s operation, and we should respond. This was an attack by Libya for the very purpose of killing hundreds of Americans. And so at that time, it was the biggest terrorist attack ever against the United States. And so I urged that we conduct a bombing campaign to destroy the intelligence headquarters, and also go after Qaddafi, if possible. And for a number of reasons, I think people were sympathetic to the idea, but we didn’t go that way. We increased sanctions against Libya.

HH: Now I want to jump ahead, Attorney General Barr, to the military tribunals that followed 9/11. The book, One Damn Thing After Another, has many arresting statements in it. The most arresting sentence in the book is when you say the fact that KSM, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has not been tried, “suggests that we as a nation have lost our will to survive.” Now you don’t have to persuade me of that. I think that’s true.

WB: Yeah.

HH: But would you expand on that for the radio audience why you think our paralysis at Gitmo suggests the country has lost the will to survive?

WB: Well, I preface that by going through the episode and contrast with the episode of the German saboteurs that landed during World War II in the United States. And we picked them up within, two of them turned against the operation and reported to the FBI and helped roll up the rest of the group. And we charged them, tried them before military tribunal, and executed them all within 60 days or so. And I said that’s when in this country, we didn’t kid around. Here, we have KSM and the other co-conspirators charged, and it’s been over 20 years and nothing has happened to them. We can’t even get a trial underway down in Guantanamo. And now, there are reports in the newspaper that the administration in order to get guilty pleas, which by the way, they were willing to do very soon after they were apprehended, but is willing to give up the death penalty for these people. So they’ll be spending the rest of their life, if they take it, they’ll be spending the rest of their lives in, you know, taxpayer expense at a federal prison.

HH: But does it suggest that we as a nation have lost our will to survive?

WB: Because we’re not, you know, we’re not willing to mete out a punishment, justice, to people who attack the United States as part of a terrorist attack. We’re not willing to deal with terrorists decisively.

HH: It’s the most obvious thing in the world to me that a country that will not execute people that attack it, after a fair trial…

WB: Yeah.

HH: We can’t even get the trial going, and that’s because of Justice Kennedy. You’re very diplomatic about Justice Kennedy, way too diplomatic, in my view. But he screwed up all the military combatant jurisprudence, didn’t he? I teach these cases every year.

WB: Yeah, in the Boumediene case, you know, we basically have extended Constitutional protections that we give to criminal defendants, and, who are members of our political community here, and we extend them to foreign enemies when they were attacking the United States. It’s quite absurd. I mean, there’s no historical precedent for it in either British or American law. And it was just absurd.

HH: Do you expect the Supreme Court to turn over those cases, General Barr?

WB: Well, as I say in the book, I think the next Republican administration is going to have to push on that front and get a lot of those very bad precedents reversed, because they’ve tied the hands of the military. We are the only military in the world, and I mean, look around. We don’t take prisoners anymore. Starting with that decision, you know, we had these big sweeps in Afghanistan. We didn’t take prisoners. And it was sort of, we caught them and then released them. Or if we thought they were really bad guys, we would give them over to the Afghans. But we ourselves don’t take prisoners anymore.

HH: No, we don’t.

WB: Because the law’s all screwed up.

HH: Although, there is one example, which I told this story at dinner last night, because I love this story. I will not forget this story from One Damn Thing After Another. The Beatles, the ISIS Beatles – John, Paul, George, and Ringo, people have to realize we nicknamed four terrorist killers who beheaded Americans George, John, Paul, and Ringo, because they were all English. It turns out two of them were in a Syrian prison being patrolled by the Kurds. And you call over to Team Esper, and you want to get them out when ISIS, when that area is going to be overrun by Turkey, and the fighters, the terrorists are going to be freed. And Team Esper says no, we’re not going to do that. And so you go to the White House. Tell people what happened next.

WB: Yeah, just, it wasn’t Mark. It wasn’t Mark that I had the conversation with, but the military commanders were reluctant to use Special Forces to secure the Beatles, who we had charged in federal court. So we wanted to bring them back to the U.S. to try them. and they were in danger of escaping. And I, also, we also had a list of other bad actors who we didn’t want to escape. And after I was told that we weren’t going to protect them, I mean, we weren’t going to retain custody of them and secure them, I just jumped in the car and went over to the White House. One of the things about the president was he was very available. And so I just went into the Oval Office, and he was in the back room with national security people, including DOD people. And he said what do you want? And I said look, I said you know, we have ISIS prisoners, thousands of ISIS prisoners being held by the Kurds. And if the Kurds retreat, we’re going to lose those prisoners. And he said you want me, do you want to send them to Guantanamo? And I said well, not yet, not all of them. Ultimately, I do, but right now, I have an emergency. We have to secure these two guys, these guys who beheaded the Western hostages. And he just looked over at the DOD guys and said go get them now. And a few hours later, we had them.

HH: He also said anybody else you want, Bill?

WB: Yeah, is there anyone else you want? I said I’ll get back to you on that one.

HH: Well, I was afraid you would name some journalists. That’s good you didn’t. They could have been picked up.

WB: (laughing)

HH: It would have…

WB: Well, no, that’s, people, I give the president a lot of credit in the book. It’s been presented as mostly an attack on him, which it is not. But I think one of the things about his impulsiveness, which is a good side of it, there’s a bad side to it, but the good side of it is he would cut through, you know, the inertia of the bureaucracy and use common sense and get things done very quickly.

HH: You know, people don’t read books, and they come up, they come up with summaries of Bill Barr attacking Donald Trump. This is the most balanced treatment of Donald Trump I’ve read – the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful. And his penchant for action and his availability are two of the good things, General Barr.

WB: Yeah.

HH: And I really do think this is the, this explains Trump better than anything I’ve read.

WB: Well, thank you. Thank you. I tried to be fair, and I think he played an important historical role. I think you know, there are aspects to his persona that I don’t like, but I think at the juncture we were at, at 2016 Election, he may have been a necessary figure to put the brakes on what I felt was the progressives’ march, you know, pushing America over the abyss. And he put on a full goal line stance and stopped that. And that, I think, is a historical achievement.

HH: It is, and he saved the Supreme Court.

WB: Yes.

HH: And I point out to everyone our country doesn’t survive without the Constitution. The Constitution doesn’t survive without a Court that respects its original intent. And the three justices he put on there is his most significant, enduring legacy, even more than the Abraham Accords, I believe, even more than Operation Warp Speed. Those three justices, if they do their job, do you think they will, General?

WB: I think generally, they will, and I agree with you. As I say in the book, just on the issue of the Supreme Court, I would have voted for Trump and supported Trump. And I think, you know, they may not on every single case vote to my liking, but I think in a broad sense, they will, you know, they will put the Court on a conservative, lawful trajectory.

HH: Aside, you don’t deal with this in the book, Sebelius V. National Federation of Small Businesses, I am the only conservative I know of who applauds the Chief Justice’s opinion in that. Are you with me on that, or are you with every other conservative who thinks it was bad?

WB: Uh…(pauses) Tax, his ruling on the taxes?

HH: Yeah, the upholding Obamacare by virtue of rewriting the statute to find it to be a tax bill.

WB: Well, I actually did research on the tax issue myself, and I think he was wrong on the tax issue. I don’t think, simply because I don’t think this could have been a direct tax that the federal government could have enacted. But, so I thought he was wrong on that.

HH: Now as a prudential matter, if he was persuaded that he was right, doesn’t the Constitutional doctrine of avoidance oblige him to punt?

WB: Yeah, I think there’s an argument, an argument to be made, yes, that if it can be sustained on other grounds, you know, you should sustain it on those grounds. My objection was it was not, it was not a legitimate tax.

HH: So the Chief Justice comes under heavy weather all the time. He’s a friend of mine, as is Mike Luttig, as is all the White House Counsel alumni.

WB: Yeah, and by the way, John is a friend, John Roberts is a friend of mine, too.

HH: Yeah, he swore you in. He swore you in. It’s in the book.

WB: Yeah.

HH: So I’m just curious what you make of the conservative critique. They love to hate on Roberts, and I point to Citizens United and say his concurring opinion on stare decisis is probably the most important opinion I’ve read in 20 years.

WB: Yeah, I’m sort of like you, Hugh, in the sense that you know, I think these are, John Roberts is an intellect, intellectually honest guy who does his best in the conservative tradition to apply the Constitution. And not every case I’m going to agree with him on, but I don’t get particularly exercised or personally angry at justices who disagree, or with whom I disagree on particular cases. I look at their overall record.

HH: And his is really quite salutary.

WB: Yes.

HH: Let me now turn to the two big themes. There’s a lot of individual things I want to talk about. I want to talk about MS-13 and the 18th Street Gang, and I want to talk about many things. But the two big things, 30,000 foot assessments, one is that public education has become a bastion of secular absolutism, basically a state-sponsored religion. I have heard this argued many times by people who do not have your credentials, General Barr. Do you think this theory has a chance of prevailing? Because if it did, it would radically change education to the good in America. Either people would get out of the indoctrination business into which they have fallen, or public schools would go away.

WB: Yes, I do think it has a chance if people stop and think about it, and including the justices on the Supreme Court. We’ve basically finessed the problem for a long time, because basically, schools taught a sort of watered-down version of Christianity as the basis for personal morality. But that stopped in the 60s. And then we had a period where they tried to strip out Christianity. But what’s happening in the public school is really a microcosm of what’s happening in the West generally, in a society, which is that the moral system no longer has a foundation. It was founded on Judeo-Christian tradition, and when that disappears, there’s a temptation to come in and substitute some other ism, some other metaphysical system to support the morality that you’re trying to teach people. And mostly in the West, we think of education as more than reading, writing, and arithmetic. We think of it as also contributing to the moral formation of people. And that creates a problem when we provide education through state systems, because then the state in order to substitute some kind of belief system for Christianity is going to be teaching some kind of ideology, and we’re going to move into indoctrination. And that’s what we see happening. I call it secularization by addition versus secularization by subtraction. They’re trying to offer an alternative explanatory system as to why people should behave in certain ways. And when you stop and think about it, I don’t think the state has that power. You know, the state has an interest, maybe, in saying we want kids, it’s in our interest and we want to promote reading, writing, and arithmetic so people can communicate with each other and make, and you know, perform the basic functions we need in society. But in terms of teaching a particular ideology or ism, I don’t understand why the state would have that power. We don’t think of the state. We think of the state as a limited institution. And it doesn’t have the right to sort of form people in their own image, which is what we have now. And the idea that they can trump the rights of parents, so when people stop and think about it, I think they will say yeah, in our system, the only way to, you know, the only way to handle a pluralistic system like ours is to let people choose their schools. And as long as the schools are accredited because they do a good job of teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, they can be raised within a religious tradition.

HH: And I 100% agree, but I’m a Catholic school kid.

WB: Yeah.

HH: I just want people to understand the Jacobites have taken over education. And as you detail in the second, I just found, I read the whole chapter, the introduction to Part IV on the air in the first hour, because it is, in succinct fashion, what has happened to the Democratic Party, which is now nested within this radical, radical leftism. It’s not democratic liberal order. It’s not Jack Kennedy. It’s not Lyndon Johnson. It’s not even Jimmy Carter. It’s Obamaism, and it is hardcore replacement of basic Western civilization tenets. And that is an Establishment Clause problem. And you argue that. Have we argued that in any papers anywhere, yet?

WB: I don’t think, no, I don’t think that’s been argued, yet. But I think it’s become much clearer by this point because it’s one thing to teach things that are scientifically, you know, that reflect scientific consensus and so forth and so on. But now, they’re teaching clear ideology. So for example, to teach a kid that there are more than two genders, and you can get to pick your gender, and no one else can tell you, you know, it’s what you feel, that is not supported by science, clearly. And it is, you know, an ideology.

HH: It’s a state-supported religion.

WB: Right.

HH: I mean, the real climate crisis is not the CO2 crisis. The real climate crisis is the crisis of education where the climate of moral relativism has become a state-sponsored theory.

WB: Right. That’s right.

HH: About the Philadelphia case, one of our listeners is Archbishop Chaput, who is a friend of mine, old friend of mine, probably a friend of yours.

WB: Yes.

HH: And he brought the adoption case, and we won. But you indicate in One Damn Thing After Another that you were disappointed. I’m not, because I think Amy Coney Barrett just served warning. I think she said the next one, we’re rewriting Smith.

WB: Right.

HH: We’re overturning Smith. Do you agree with me on that?

WB: Hopefully, yeah, I’m hopeful about it, and I think you’re right. And I think I sort of suggest in the book that although they didn’t go as far as I would have liked them to in Philadelphia, I think the handwriting’s on the wall. And I think they will move in that direction.

HH: They need a new test.

WB: Yes.

HH: They’ve got to bury Lemon, which, they’ve just got to come up with a new test.

WB: Right.

HH: And she basically said come hither, come all, give me a test, and we’ll study it. And I think they’ve got six votes. I think the Chief Justice will be in on that when it comes. So back to the second big 30,000 foot. We are the product of classical ideas, common law, English wisdom, American Revolution and Constitutionalism. This cannot be overstated. I begin my law school class every year with you ended up here by two paths. Bill Barr’s path is Ukrainian Jews leave Ukraine and come to New York. And Irish Catholics leave Ireland and they come to New York. And Mr. And Mrs. Barr meet. Where did they meet? They met in a funny college somewhere. Where did they meet?

WB: They met in the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri during the war when my father had been sent there by the Army to learn Italian. He already knew how to speak German, but they were going to teach him Italian, because we were invading Italy and we would have a lot of Italian prisoners. So…

HH: And he was OSS. This is the unlikeliest parent story…

WB: He went into the OSS. Hmm?

HH: Yeah, this is the unlikeliest parent story I’ve ever met. During World War II, the Ukrainian Jew meets up with the Irish Catholic girl at the University of Missouri, and they birth an attorney general. So that’s kind of an unlikely story. I like that. But people have to read the beginning. I read the beginning is fascinating. I want to go, though, to the second part of the 30,000 feet. You level legacy media. Now I have been living as a missionary in big media for the last 30 years. Now, I’ve become a refugee from it and I only do Fox and my own radio show. But I tried. There is no point of view that’s acceptable except the hard left point of view in legacy media. Do you agree with that?

WB: Absolutely. Yeah, it is a corrupt, it’s a corrupt institution. It’s gone beyond bias. It is an activist, partisan, ideological operation. There are individual journalists who I think have retained their integrity and their professionalism, but institutionally, they work, you know, they work for entities that are corrupted.

HH: Now I’m just curious. Their ratings are declining. The three networks, CNN, MSNBC, they’re all falling off. Only Fox is thriving. Don’t the shareholders have an argument that they’re destroying the value of the companies in which they invested?

WB: Yes, I think they, you know, they do, but that’s something that, you know, presumably the shareholders should enforce through their votes. And they don’t do that.

HH: All right, let me, let me, you can I could bitch about the media all day long. Let’s not. I want to tell people about MS-13 and the 18th Street Gang. I’m pretty well informed. I had never heard of the 18th Street Gang until I read your book. I covered MS-13 when I was doing the nightly news in L.A. for 10 years. These are not minor problems. At the beginning of your book, you talk about street gangs. The second part of your book, you talk about MS-13 and the 18th Street Gang. The third part, you’re talking about narco-states and the cartels.

WB: Right.

HH: They’re all connected, but boy do we have a problem, General Barr.

WB: Yeah, we have a huge problem, a huge problem. The, and in some ways, this reminds me of H.W. Bush’s administration where the focus was on the Gulf War, as it should have been. That was a critical operation and issue we were dealing with. But then when the war was over, people started focusing on domestic issues. And right now, we’re focused on Ukraine, but we also have to remember that we have a whole slew of pressing domestic problems. One is violent crime. Part of that violence comes from these terribly vicious gangs that come up from Central America. And we also have a massive drug problem where we’re now looking 100,000 people, I think it was 104,000 last year, on overdoses. A large share of those overdoses, a growing proportion of those overdoses are due to fentanyl, which is murder, because you know, they put just the tiniest amount of that can kill someone, and they drizzle it into all kinds of drugs and people don’t know what they’re taking. But we have the drug problem and the cartels acting with impunity down in Mexico. And then we have the violence, just the regular street violence. And crime is going up, and I don’t see anything that’s going to turn that around coming out of this administration or the local cities where this is a problem.

HH: And it’s no longer about money. One of them is a death cult. I mean, you are very explicit. There should be a PG-13 warning on this book, because it’s going to be very disturbing to people. So I have a question for you. Narcotics are pleasurable, escapist, and addictive, as you point out. Why not legalize them, General? Why not, and I was never here until I’ve finally begun to focus on 100,000 dead. I’ve begun to focus on the amount of money that we are enriching the narco-states. We have a failed state on the southern border. We have gangs that are running countries. And there’s no end in sight. Why not take their money away? The addicts are going to be the addicts. Why not give up and let people go full brave new world and zone out rather than subsidize these people?

WB: Well, first, I mean, enforcement is necessary for, you know, generally, people aren’t going to be able to get off and receive, you know, rehabilitation and so forth unless you have the hammer of enforcement. You take enforcement away, and the ability to require people to go into rehabilitation and so forth, you’re not going to have that. So once they’re into the drugs, it’s going to be very hard to get them out without a strong enforcement regime. But more fundamentally, you really, look what has happened with marijuana. It has not reduced violence. It hasn’t taken illegal operations out of business. There still is a black market where unregulated marijuana trades, and then there are all the externalities of marijuana use, you know, car accidents and other things like that, intoxication. And then you start thinking, how would you actually be, how would it be distributed? The more restrictions you place on it, like you know, preventing sales to pregnant women, or whatever the restrictions are, you know, you’ll have an operation that comes up that doesn’t have those restrictions. You’ll have the black market for them. And when you’re starting to deal with really destructive, I mean, I think marijuana is destructive, but you start dealing with methamphetamine, which is a hideous drug, you know, the social costs of that are immense.

HH: They are, but we’re getting them anyway. And so the negative externalities of the enforcement regime, I’m not wedded to this. I’m not a libertarian crazy.

WB: Yeah.

HH: I’m just worried…

WB: Right.

HH: …that the existential threats, and they’re piling up – Big Tech, China, narco-states, if we take the financing of the narco-states off the table by legalizing it, now I know you point out that they’re still trading in marijuana, which would be counterintuitive to what I’m arguing, did you ever have a roundtable at that big conference room on the 5th floor where the endless meetings occur on Friday morning and talk about should we consider, you know, Soma for everybody? That’s the Aldous Huxley fake drug.

WB: Yeah, no, we never had that. We never had that discussion. I think that you know, that would finish us off as a society. But you know, even the externalities we have now, you know, law enforcement keeps some bit of a lid on things, but, and all the programs, all the prevention programs and rehabilitation programs, you know, nip away at the margins. It’s just that we really haven’t decisively addressed it. And from my standpoint, we haven’t addressed the supply side. And you know, we have to deal with that. We have to, the, you know, coke is something that can only grow in certain limited areas of the world.

HH: You point that out, yeah. You point that out in the book.

WB: Yeah, and we could, we could, if we really put our mind to it, you know, take out all of that coke. And we’re trying to do that in Colombia. It’s just that the American bureaucracy is very slow. You know, we did have an administration in Colombia that was willing to take out, eradicate all the coke in Colombia, which is most of the coke that comes into the U.S. And we didn’t, never got around to doing it. We didn’t…

HH: The problem now, though, is fentanyl. I mean, the only conversation I had, I had two conversations with Jared Kushner, who by the way is portrayed very well, as is Ivanka, in this book. And I found it that he was a very reasonable and smart guy. And one of those occasions was I was opposed to the First Step Act. He called me up and asked why, and it was because it didn’t deal with fentanyl hard enough. They were going to let fentanyl dealers out. That changed in the course of the negotiations. I don’t know if Jared changed it or not, but that was my objection, so I changed. Would you have voted for the First Step Act if you were in Congress?

WB: I would have tinkered with it a little, but generally, I didn’t have a problem with the First Step Act, because you know, it did essentially keep mandatory minimum sentences for drug distribution and other serious crimes. It kept them in place. You know, it undercut them a little bit, but only in tangential opinion. So I would have gone, I would have supported it.

HH: Yeah, let me give some spicier stuff here. Special counsels. I’ll come back to John Durham in a minute. Let me talk about Lawrence Walsh. Thank you for doing that. I’ve been making this argument about Lawrence Walsh forever and nobody listens to me. He intervened in the 1992 Election. Candy Crowley intervened in the 2012 Election with her debate fiasco. Russia intervened in 2016, and Facebook intervened, and Twitter, in 2020 by censoring Hunter Biden. Of those four interventions, which was the most material? I don’t know that any of them except maybe Walsh materially affected the election, but how do you assess their materiality to the result?

WB: Well, the ones that stick with me are Walsh and the laptop, the intelligence officials suggesting that it was Russian disinformation in order to essentially keep a cork in it until after the election. I do think that that, given how close the election was, you know, I think that that probably affected the outcome, or at least is a very distinct probability of that. The same, I think, with Walsh. You know, the, Bush was, all the polls were showing Bush picking up momentum going into the last weekend before the election. He was essentially tied, and that Friday, you know, Walsh dumps an indictment with Bush discussed in the indictment, although he’s not indicted. But it was some, and the media essentially created the illusion that Bush was somehow wrapped up in illegal conduct. And the bottom fell out. The bottom fell out of the polls, and Bush lost. So that was a very bitter pill.

HH: Well, the special counsel law was so bad. I, you served for Judge Wilkey on the D.C. Circuit as a clerk. I served for Roger Robb and George MacKinnon.

WB: Right.

HH: And Robb was part of the three-judge panel that selected special counsels. And we had to select a special counsel for Ed Meese, for whom I later worked. And he picked Jake Stein on the theory that Jake Stein was a busy guy and he wouldn’t screw around, and he’d get it done, and he did. He got it done in three months.

WB: Right.

HH: And it was done. If you hire an old retired judge, he milked that for six years. What were they thinking?

WB: Right. There was a bad selection. There was a bad selection there on Walsh. And Walsh had personal animus, just watching him and what I picked up while I was there. It was clear to me he had some personal animus toward Bush.

HH: Did you know Roger Robb and MacKinnon, by the way? Did you work with them at all when you were a clerk?

WB: Yes, both were still on the court when I was there. Yeah.

HH: Great men. Great men.

WB: Yeah, yeah.

HH: Let me turn to Big Tech. Have you read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age Of Surveillance Technology?

WB: No, I haven’t.

HH: She is a Marxist HBS professor, but she’s good on this. And you talk about not just the concentration of economic power, but of cultural and ideas power combined with AI. And it’s the most sophisticated discussion of the threat that I’ve read between two covers, yet. Here’s my problem. China controls their AI and their social tech, and they have 1.3 billion people. Don’t we have to allow concentration of data in order to keep up with China on AI?

WB: No, I mean, AI is certainly improved, the more data it gets to chew on. But it doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t necessarily have to be this, the kind of personal data that consumers, you know, that relate to consumers. So I don’t think it’s, it can be data that we get from elsewhere. So I don’t think that allowing the centralization of all personal data involved in people’s interactions with the internet, you know, have to be centralized in one place for us to compete on AI.

HH: You know, your three possible approaches to Big Tech excluded a fourth, which is on my menu, which is expropriation. I mean, just buy it. Just take over Facebook and Twitter and everyone, and Google. What do you make of that? Is that just too big to swallow?

WB: You mean the government take it over, or…

HH: Yeah, just buy it.

WB: Well, and then what would you do with it?

HH: You’d run it like an airport. You would have like the Washington metropolitan area transportation authority, because I don’t want private people running it. I know Mark Zuckerberg. I’ve had dinner with him. He’s come to the Nixon Library. I know these guys. I know Peter Thiel. They’re not, they’re not unpatriotic, they’re just self-interested capitalists, and they’re progressive. They’re lefties, though except Peter. And I don’t want to screw them, and I don’t want, I don’t think the regulators are smart enough, are they?

WB: Well, the thing there is the government would then be making the decisions. I’m not sure I trust the government to make the decisions unless you had a regime that was locked in that essentially, you know, that essentially had them run it as a bulletin board where there is no control over content.

HH: Yeah, but if the government ran it, the 1st Amendment would apply, right? And so would due process and all the other Constitutional protections. The problem is that they’re unregulated governments.

WB: Well, yeah, they’re unregulated public square. They control, we’ve privatized the public square, or we are privatizing the public square, and then they get to make the decisions. But I think we’ve reached a point where I think an argument is starting to emerge, and I think it could be a valid argument, that when the government “jawbones” these companies, to be “more responsible” and pushes them, as this administration is pushing them to exercise their censorship, then the censorship is state action. So I think the way the government is now pushing the companies to be responsible and to use its censorship in certain ways makes it state action.

HH: I 100% agree with you on this. If anything comes out of One Damn Thing After Another, it will be the conservative rethink of their approach to Big Tech. So compliments on that.

WB: Yeah.

HH: Again, I’ve got a lot of things I want to move through. I’m not going to do the whole book, but I want people to understand why they want to read it. Have you read Peggy Noonan’s essay on the unprotected versus the protected?

WB: No.

HH: She wrote an essay in 2016 that predicted Trump’s win, because America’s divided into the protected people like you and me, people who have money and resilience and status, and those who don’t and get screwed by COVID and everybody else. And Trump was their tribune, and this is my way into Trump.

WB: Yeah.

HH: You refer to the mysterious workings of his stream of consciousness. He’s a developer, General Barr. And I’ve dealt with developers. They were my clients for years. They’re whatever they need to be in whatever room they walk into. There’s no obstacle that is insurmountable. They get done what they need to get done, and then they change. But at the point that he arrived, he was the tribune of the unprotected. Is that a fair assessment?

WB: Yeah, using Noonan’s nomenclature, yes. I don’t use it in the book. I talk about, you know, the American working class and middle class, and the, you know, the more smug elites that the system works for. They know how to work the system, and it works for them, and they really don’t care about anybody else. And you know, that, there was definitely a seed of that in Reagan. So it’s not new with Trump.

HH: Correct. Yeah.

WB: And most, yeah, I consider Trump’s agenda, the Make America Great agenda, the America First agenda, pretty much to be sort of Reagan Republicanism with sort of two areas maybe a little juiced up. One is he puts more of an emphasis on fair trade and looking at some of the implications of free trade before you, you know, before you jump in. And the second area is probably, he’s ratcheted up the populist strain to go after the elites for more. But Reagan used to talk about the elite, the coastal elites.

HH: Yeah.

WB: And so I think that basically, the framework has been Reagan Republicanism with a strong element of populism.

HH: I’ve got to tell the audience who are listening why you want to read One Damn Thing After Another is that all of Trump in the round is presented here. I still talk to the President occasionally, but he cleared a path on his desk with me when I was in the Oval the one time with him like he did with you in order to kind of drill you. I got that.

WB: Right. Yeah.

HH: He put Scotch tape on your tie.

WB: Yeah.

HH: He told you not to lose too much weight. He criticized every one of my media appearances that he ever saw. He called, I mean, I’ve got Trump tattoos, not as many as you, but I’ve got a few Trump tattoos.

WB: Right.

HH: And a hyperactive generator of ideas, most of them bad. And I am not comparing him to Churchill, but I wish to point out that Churchill readily admitted to having 10 ideas a day, 9 of them were bad. And so idea generators are not a bad thing. You just can’t act of them.

WB: Right. And also, I think you have to be open to listening to other people and appraising their, you know, their criticisms. And he wasn’t, frequently, He would just listen to the people who tended to agree with him. He was less open to reason, and more open to his own self-interest. In other words, if you made an argument saying look, this is not in your interest because this will come back and bite you in this way, he would listen to that.

HH: Right.

WB: But if you tried to sort of do public policy arguments based on logic and sort of overall impact of the policy, it wouldn’t be very persuasive to him.

HH: You know, I’ve often said, General Barr, I found him ignorant on many issues, but he’s not a stupid man.

WB: No, he’s not.

HH: And that the media made, he’s a very brilliant man, in some respects, but he’s intuitive and he does not discipline his search for facts.

WB: Right.

HH: And as a result, in fact, you called it the poker game at the frat house which never ended.

WB: Right.

HH: I loved that analogy, by the way. I didn’t belong to a frat. Which frat were you in, by the way, General?

WB: Sigma Nu.

HH: Okay, and so there was this frat game going on, and so Madeleine and Molly granted easy access to the President. You could walk in. The TV was always on. Do you know anybody else who has a TV always on?

WB: No, I don’t.

HH: I do. Jeff Zucker did.

WB: Zucker. Oh, yeah.

HH: Everybody in media has a TV always on. He talked to you about ratings and his, I found it fascinating that you talked to him about the briefings. And I saw it in real time. He was destroying himself with the briefings. But he said the ratings were good. He didn’t understand that was not a good thing.

WB: Right. No, yeah, you know, there were issues that everybody was united on in trying to persuade him to stop, and one of those was those briefings. I mean, initially, it was good. He actually got some benefit from it. But as they went on and on and on, they were hurting him, and they were clearly hurting him.

HH: Before I go to China, Mr. Attorney General, I want to talk to you about my biggest Constitutional argument with you. I thought you should have relitigated the Census question. I wrote a column in the Washington Post. I then got a call from someone at Justice telling me to shut up, I was wrong, so I shut up. I actually, I got a call, actually, it was one of the senators called me up and said you’re wrong, stop. But I don’t think I’m wrong. Luttig agreed with me, by the way, that you should have gone back with another question for the Census. And I know you ran out of time and it would be embarrassing to admit that you had, you actually hadn’t run out of time. Do you regret that?

WB: No, not at all, because I think that, I didn’t agree with the opinion, Roberts’ opinion, but I thought Roberts clearly thought this was the end of the case, because the Justice Department had said emphatically that we couldn’t go beyond a certain date, and we had already gone beyond that date. And for us to go back and try to relitigate this, remember, the only reason we got to the Supreme Court was we went from the district court all the way up to the Supreme Court. We hopped over the Courts of Appeal, which is pretty unusual. And we did it because of our saying that we were running out of time. If having lost in the Supreme Court we then went back again to square one as if we didn’t have any time constraint and could push off the Census, there’s no way, I think, the Supreme Court would have again taken the case on an expedited basis. We would have, we would have just been burning up time, and I think it would have backfired and irritated the Supreme Court. But then, we had a practical problem, which was actually the issue of whether we could do it without starting to print the questionnaires for the Census, and would we really have to delay the Census. And I think logistically, we couldn’t come up with a way of doing it.

HH: I think the argument would have been, you know, I’m Bill Barr, and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn, but I know how important the Census is. And if we include non-citizens, it’s going to fundamentally change the distribution of political power in the United States, so we’re going to have to delay the Census. Have you watched the Ohio Supreme Court, General, and what they have done with the maps in Ohio? They’re basically ruling Ohio like a banana republic.

WB: Right.

HH: So the Census, the Census being on time is not mattered to the Ohio Supreme Court or the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. They’re all just screwing around with it. So why don’t Republicans play to win on the Census the way that Democrats do?

WB: Well, I think generally on elections, elections and election integrity issues and so forth, we should. But what got us in trouble on this, by the way, is the, and the tendency of Trump and his administration was they take things a little bit too far, and they’re too cute by half. Had this thing just been handled in the normal course, there wouldn’t have been a problem. But they went for extra credit in the ration…

HH: (laughing) You didn’t use that line in the book, I don’t think.

WB: What?

HH: I don’t think you used the extra credit line in the book. That’s good.

WB: Yeah, they went for extra credit, and they tried to, you know, and I suspect that there were people at the White House sort of saying you know, we need to, and I won’t say who those people probably were, but they were probably pushing, you know, to structure this thing in the way it was ultimately structured. And unfortunately, they created a legal vulnerability when they did that. Otherwise, as Roberts said, there are plenty of reasons to ask this question. You didn’t have to conjure up a false one that really wasn’t the reason. And that’s what happened.

HH: I agree.

WB: They would’ve…

HH: I just would have gone back…

WB: Then went for, yeah, they went for extra credit, and they screwed it up.

HH: It was clearly, it was clearly a façade.

WB: Right.

HH: And so they should have started over. So let me go back to the legal team surrounding President Trump, because you are very critical of Rudy Giuliani’s legal advice. At one point, you say, “Good morning, Mr. Mayor, good to see you.” I lied. That’s about as…

WB: (laughing)

HH: See, I read closely, right?

WB: Yeah.

HH: And what happened to Rudy?

WB: You know, I really don’t know. I don’t know, and the extent I have suspicions, I wouldn’t, you know, wouldn’t say them about another person.

HH: Because my first day at the Department of Justice was his last day as associate attorney general. He gave the longest farewell speech I ever heard in my life. Bill Smith almost fainted standing up.

WB: Yeah.

HH: And he was a tremendous lawyer. But as you, I mean, I can’t use the language, because this may play on the FCC-regulated Hugh Hewitt Show on the radio and not just the podcast, but your assessment of the President’s legal team at the end during the crisis of 1/6 was that it wasn’t really a legal team.

WB: Right. It was a PR, it was a PR team, and even then, it was a bad one. So you know, I think the people that he had running around the Oval Office and advising him at the end was just sort of surrealistic. And yeah…

HH: Yeah, let me ask you about David Margolis, one of my funny questions from the book. I didn’t know Mr. Margolis when I was at Justice. He was, for the benefit of the audience, the head of the career division of prosecutors. When he was dying, he requested to see two people – you and Merrick Garland, which is a pretty unusual circumstance given that he didn’t know that Merrick Garland was going to be the Attorney General. And then you remark that the Russian fiasco, Russiagate, would not have happened if David Margolis had not fallen ill. Why?

WB: Well, just, you know, his family notified me and asked me, you know, told me that if I wanted to see him, I would have to get over to the hospital, and I did. And then I think they did likewise to Merrick Garland. That’s how we both ended up as the last non-family people there. But because I don’t think he, I think he would, this would have been, you know, in the first part of the Trump administration. I don’t think he would have allowed people to go down the route of bringing in a special counsel, Mueller, to look at this.

HH: I agree.

WB: I think he would have, yeah.

HH: Okay, that’s what you meant.

WB: Yeah.

HH: He would have just kept it in house, because…now you remark that when you met with Bob, who you knew forever, Bob Mueller, he didn’t look well, and that the Senate hearing did not, or the House hearing did not go well. Did he run that investigation, in your opinion, or did his career staff run that investigation?

WB: You know, I was concerned that he wasn’t supervising it. He was not on top of it.

HH: And at the beginning, and on Meet The Press 20 different times, I said wait for the Mueller investigation, wait for the Mueller investigation. I never thought we would get two volumes that do not, it’s almost unethical. And I wanted to ask you about this. The second volume is in my view an unethical departure from the Department of Justice standards. Do you share my view?

WB: Well, I wouldn’t, you know, I’m not going to use the word unethical, but you know, it was a departure from the Department’s practice. But I felt the whole thing was outrageous, because I think by the time he came in, which was May of 2017, it was pretty clear that the dossier had been completely discredited. And there really didn’t appear to be any basis for the collusion thing. And rather than you know, quickly decide the collusion issue, he embarked on essentially a two-year, and I think, as I say, it’s not very different than a witch hunt, to try to get the President on some kind of obstruction of justice. And it was continuous bootstrapping. They started out with two things that clearly were not obstruction – the firing of Comey, and a comment the President made about, you know, to Comey about seeing your way clear to let Flynn go. Neither of those could possibly be obstruction of justice. And yet they started with those, and then as they stretched the thing out for two years, every time the President threw a tantrum, they investigated that as an obstruction. It was an outrage. And then, you know, I do think that Mueller, to give him credit, he would not go along with trying to indict the President or suggest that the President was indictable at some point for obstruction. He didn’t go that far, because I think there was disagreement on the team, and they ended up just throwing this stuff out in the public domain. And you know, I think that was irresponsible.

HH: I thought it was a vendetta. And the career lawyers surrounding a less-than-top-of-his-game Bob Mueller took it forever to the great detriment of the country. And I think you share that opinion at length as to why it did hurt us. Let me ask you about the 1/6 Committee. My friend, Liz Cheney, and I disagree about this. And I do like Liz Cheney. I’ve known her a long time, and her dad, I worked for her mother when I was general counsel of NEH. And I love the Cheneys, but I think the 1/6 Committee is a miscarriage of justice. What do you think, General Barr?

WB: Well, I think that, what I disagree with Liz Cheney on is I think once the leadership decided that Republicans weren’t going to have anything to do with it because it would become inherently political, if I had been in her shoes, I think I would have supported the leadership. But by not going that way, it gives it a patina of bipartisanship. So I worried about it being used as a political tool during this election year.

HH: That’s what I think is happening.

WB: The other thing is, the other thing is that if there really was evidence from which someone might be able to make a case that the President did something illegal, then the people to get to the bottom of it is the Department of Justice who have grand juries available.

HH: And they’re getting them. They’re getting the conspiracy. The seditious conspiracy indictments are finally showing up.

WB: Right. And so they’ve been, right, they’ve been going down there. There’s no sign that they have evidence that would link higher ups to it. But if there were, that’s the venue to pursue it in, not Capitol Hill. That’s one of my concerns.

HH: You know, one of the things I’m going to use One Damn Thing After Another is to teach legal ethics about the Roger Stone sentencing. It’s a very compelling portion, General, because everyone deserves one rule, one rule of law.

WB: Right.

HH: Not, and I don’t like Roger Stone. I’ve never met him. Karl Rove warned me about him when I was a freshman in college in 1974.

WB: Right.

HH: And I have stayed the hell away from Roger Stone as a result for 45 years. But he deserved the same sentencing that another person would have gotten, and you make a very eloquent case for that.

WB: That’s right. I, you know, I personally don’t like Roger Stone at all. I thought he did violate the law, and he deserved to be convicted, and he deserved to go to jail, in my opinion. But he didn’t deserve to go to jail three times longer than anyone else in his position would have.

HH: Yes. It’s called the rule of law. Let me, I’ve got two more things while I have time. One, Tim Garrison was a U.S. Attorney for, I think, the Western District of Missouri, good friend of mine.

WB: Yes.

HH: And he told me once about Operation Legend.

WB: Right.

HH: And I said what? I said what? And he couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of Operation Legend, because I’m a Beltway journalist. And it turns out you’re very proud of Operation Legend, but now I know why I didn’t hear about it, is because President Trump didn’t care about it.

WB: (laughing) Yeah, there were days where he cared about it, but then when push came to shove, you know, he didn’t seem to pay much attention to it. But we were trying to help various jurisdictions in big cities keep the violent crime wave down by sending in more federal agents and setting up these joint taskforces and going after the real violent people. And then we were trying to do this in the middle of COVID, which made it difficult. But we were getting some very good results, including in Missouri. And the President, the President, one of his problems was he’d go out every day and give a stream of consciousness news, you know say things to the press, and he’d cover 15 different issues, and the media would pick out one that was “controversial”, and they’d focus on that. And that would be the news of the day. And that prevented any message discipline. We couldn’t talk about violent crime or anything, because it would be just swept away with something that the President said off the top of his head to a journalist that day at the White House. And I complained to the President about that. I said we have no message discipline. And he said well, no one gives a damn about Legend anyway, at which point the press secretary said no, Mr. President, it’s actually getting a lot of good local coverage, and people like it out there.

HH: You have a kind word for Kayleigh McEnany, and a kind word for Stephen Miller at that point. I was impressed with your detail about that meeting.

WB: Yeah.

HH: I want to finish before I run out of time. The most important subject in the book is China.

WB: Yeah.

HH: And it’s China, because that’s our existential threat. And so realistically, in 1992 when you left Justice, you reassigned 900 counterintelligence agents because of the end of the Cold War. Do you regret that?

WB: No, no I don’t, because I mean, there’s no reason to think at that point we’d be facing the kind of threat we’re facing now from China at the point I did that.

HH: The…

WB: And those people were people who were, well, you know, we had a lot following the Russians at that point, and we could afford to cut back on the extent to which we were on top of the Russians.

HH: You know, when you were AG the first time, did you, I was Bill Smith’s and Ed Meese’s special assistant for FISA applications. Did you have one, or had National Security Division taken that over by the time you were Attorney General?

WB: The National Security Division had taken that over the second time. On the first time, it was still in Criminal.

HH: Okay. There was no, there was no National Security Division when I was at Justice, but I was stunned by the breadth and depth of the Soviet effort, and the East Germans, and the Cubans to penetrate America when I got the classification. I think it’s dwarfed by the CCP. Am I right?

WB: Right. And as you know, the way it was traditionally done, it was basically run out of embassies by the Foreign Intelligence Service. So in the case of the Communist Russians, you know, they would have intelligence officers working out of their embassy and recruiting people to serve as spies, essentially. The Chinese use what we call traditional collectors. And they use graduate students, for example, sometimes businessmen, so forth, who come over here and get involved in activities of intelligence interest and report back to China. So you might have a research project at a university in agricultural science, which is one of the areas the Chinese want to lead the future in, and there might be a graduate student on the project, and he could be reporting back, you know, stealing secrets and reporting them back to China.

HH: Well, just your quick summary of the two entrepreneurs who went to graduate school, stole the coding technology and then took it back to China, and you got one because of a sealed indictment. That is just one example of thousands of cases. So my question is, is it too late? Can we overcome their espionage effort in the United States?

WB: Well, it’s not too late if we were to, you know, double down, essentially, and keep up the aggressive enforcement that we had. But this administration has terminated the program because of complaints from universities. I think the actual, the actual problem for us isn’t the intensity of what the Chinese are doing. It’s the fact that American institutions don’t care anymore. I point out that in World War II and in the Cold War, we’re not a regimented society, but we voluntarily came together – academia, business, and government, to face these existential threats. But this one, we’re not. Businessmen are out busily trying to make as much money as they can with the Chinese, even though they know at the end of the day it’s a losing game. And academia is desperate for Chinese bucks and Chinese students because that’s the only way they can survive. So you know, the government doesn’t find partners the way, easily, in either academia or in business world that they used to be able to.

HH: So I want to conclude on political violence, General Barr. You write in One Damn Thing After Another that the FBI is concerned with both the far right in America and the far left, as it should be, but that for institutional reasons, it’s much more competent when it comes to the far right than to the far left. Can you explain why that is?

WB: Well, part of it, I think initially, part of it was just the institutional memory, that every time they got in trouble and they were raked through the coals by the media and by Congress, it was because they spied on left wing activities.

HH: Yup.

WB: So they, like during the Cold War, you know, the Russians were pumping a lot of money into the peace movement. And when the FBI sort of tried to look at that, they were attacked. They were attacked for penetrating the civil rights movement and so forth. So institutionally, they’ve really been hammered whenever they go after left, they’re on the lookout for left wing extremism. But no one pushes back when they go after right wing extremism, so you probably have a situation in the country now where, I mean, not probably, I mean, the FBI has a very, very good handle on right wing extremist groups, but does not have similar handle on left wing. So as a result, the intelligence flow coming into the Department of Justice tends to be weighted toward right-wing extremism, because those groups are, you know, carefully monitored. But…

HH: I also think the left-wing people extremists are smarter than the right-wing extremists.

WB: Oh, there’s no question.

HH: I mean, they, go ahead.

WB: Yeah, well, there’s no question. I mean, someone said well, you know, why, why have they arrested all these people on Capitol Hill and so forth? Now you know, it could be that in some cases, they’ve gone too far. But I said, well basically, because you know, the people who went up on January 6th were, you know, with violence in mind, you know, they dressed distinctively. They had their faces observable, and they went into environment with hundreds of cameras. And so there’s no question that they were involved in the violence, okay? But out in Portland, they all dress alike, they’re all in black, they all have masks, they operate at night, and while they’re surrounded by a crowd, you know, these bricks and other projectiles that come flying out, it’s very hard to identify and deal.

HH: And they use end to end encryption.

WB: Yes.

HH: And Apple won’t help you open up. I mean, you again toast Apple, and I’m so angry that they would not help you after the Pensacola…I didn’t know that, by the way, Attorney General Barr, that they would not help you unlock the Pensacola shooter.

WB: Yeah.

HH: That is so stunning. It happened in San Bernardino when I lived in California, and I couldn’t believe that Apple wouldn’t help local authorities unlock the Apple phone of that killer. But the Pensacola killer, who’s a Saudi, a foreign national, they wouldn’t help you. What is wrong with them?

WB: Well, it really goes to the way they design the phone, and that’s what we’re basically objecting to. They’re designing something that no one can open except the user. And their argument is we can’t even open it. And what we’re saying is you know, that’s irresponsible to put something like that out, and the company should have the keys to it so that when we get a warrant based on probable cause that criminal activity is underway, we should be able to have you open it. And so intelligence and law enforcement going forward is going to be blinded.

HH: So let me close. I told you 10:00, and I’m keeping my word. Afghanistan is covered in this book, as is Russia, as is why we would possibly before Ukraine wanted to have done a deal with Russia. That’s all covered in the book. But Afghanistan, you are very clear. President Trump left open the conditions under which he would have left. He has told me on the air that he would have kept Bagram, that he hasn’t said that in other places, but he said it here on the air. Do you believe that Afghanistan would have ended up the same way? I know your answer to this but tell the audience if it had been Donald Trump reelected as opposed to Joe Biden.

WB: Yeah, I think again, he had, the President had some, I think, bad impulses here, which is just sort of cut and run at one point. And he put out an order to that effect. But he was talked out of it by Mike Pompeo and by Robert O’Brien. And personally, and so by the time he left office, he had not made a final decision on how he would have withdrawn. My guess is based on sort of what I picked up, my guess is he would have, we would have left maybe 25, 100 Americans supplemented by maybe 5,000 NATO troops, so probably about 7,500 troops, and we would have kept Bagram Airbase. Part of those troops would have been protecting Bagram. And we would not have withdrawn the way we did.

HH: We would have in essence been the biggest warlord. I believe that’s your phrase.

WB: Right.

HH: And that would have been smart. Okay, last question. Kash Patel and the attempt to take over the FBI, I don’t want to get into the details here. I just want people to know that sometimes, the only thing you can do is say no and leave the room.

WB: Right.

HH: Isn’t that one of the most important things in the world is to say no and leave the room?

WB: Yeah, and I had to do that a few times. And that was one of the times where you know, the President was trying to push me to put somebody as the number two at FBI that had never been, I mean, it just, a non-agent could not be the chief operating officer of the FBI. And he wanted to put in Kash Patel, and I said no and left the room. So…

HH: And they set up a, it’s just a wild thing. I think Meadows did a pretty good job as chief of staff. O’Brien’s one of my closest friends, and Secretary Pompeo is. Of all the Republicans running, do you have a favorite, yet? Because Cotton and Pompeo are buddies of mine. DeSantis is obviously talented. Tim Scott’s going to run, Rick Scott’s going to run. The Vice President, Pence is going to run. Do you have any favorites in this, General Barr?

WB: Not at this time. I mean, like you, a lot of them are, almost all of them are my friends. And some are better friends than others. But I do want to see sort of, see them in action and how they play.

HH: So very last question for a future attorney general. Should they come on the Hugh Hewitt Show more often?

WB: Definitely. (laughing)

HH: (laughing)

WB: And that will actually be one of the criteria that we use.

HH: (laughing) The book is One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs Of An Attorney General. It’s the most comprehensive statement of Constitutional conservatism in 2022 available. I really enjoyed it, General. Thank you for spending all this time with me.

WB: Thank you so much, Hugh. I really appreciate it.

HH: Be well.

End of interview.