Conservative best-sellers are almost never discussed in The New York Times Book Review. So it was surprising that William Barr’s memoir One Damn Thing After Another was reviewed on Sunday. There was another surprising thing: the reviewer was Jeffrey Toobin.
Let's belabor the obvious. When you want a book reviewer who can inveigh against a “complete disregard for norms” with the highest moral seriousness you do....NOT choose Toobin. When you want a book reviewer who can persuasively decry partisanship in political investigations, you do....NOT choose Jeffrey Toobin, whose first book Opening Arguments was a partisan Democrat hit job as an insider in the Iran-Contra investigation headed by special counsel Lawrence Walsh.
In fact, the highest comedy in this review is Toobin acting scandalized that Barr would summarize the Mueller Report a few weeks before it was fully released. That’s odd – Toobin’s inside-the-Walsh-probe book came out in February 1991, when Walsh’s final report came out in August of 1993.
When the Justice Department got around to releasing the actual report several weeks later, it became apparent that the evidence against Trump was more incriminating than Barr let on, but by that point the attorney general had succeeded in shaping the story to the president’s great advantage.
Somehow, all the power of the liberal media failed to “shape the story” to Trump’s disadvantage.
Nothing in Toobin’s book review sounds the slightest bit different than any everyday garden-variety spin on Barr and Trump than what you have heard on CNN. Toobin is not going to surprise – a la Jon Stewart – with some new, more negative interpretation on the Mueller probe and how it utterly failed to deliver what liberals wanted – an indictment and/or removal of President Trump.
Barr’s hostility to Mueller is painted as a scandal in itself:
Barr refers to the allegations that Trump colluded with the Russians in the lead-up to the election as, variously, the “Russiagate lunacy,” the “bogus Russiagate scandal,” “the biggest political injustice in our history” and the “Russiagate nonsense” (twice). Barr was as good as his word and sought to undermine Mueller and protect Trump at every opportunity. As Barr reveals in his book, Trump first asked him to serve on his defense team, but Barr later figured he could do more good for the president as attorney general. He was right.
It's amusing when Toobin writes "Barr portrays Mueller, a former colleague and friend from their service in the George H W. Bush administration, as a feeble old man pushed around by liberals on his staff." Isn't that an impression that was underlined when Mueller testified before Congress? That he wasn't exactly in command? But Toobin hates it when Barr "shapes the story" against Team Collusion.
The biggest CNN-employee spin line is warning about Barr's culture-war rhetoric and sneering: "Overall, his views reflect the party line at Fox News, which, curiously, he does not mention in several jeremiads about left-wing domination of the news media."
