Barr Code

Bill Barr is the prototypical Project 2025 official. A second Trump term would bring the "Judeo-Christian moral system" he called for back to government, at the expense of our collective liberty.

On June 8, 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller filed superseding charges against Paul Manafort, the former chair of the Trump campaign, and his longtime colleague, Konstantin Kilimnik—who we later learned was moonlighting as a Russian intelligence officer. The new charges were obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

By then, Mueller had already secured guilty pleas from Mike Flynn, George Papadopoulos, and Manafort aide Richard Gates; raided the home and office of Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen; and intimated that his team was investigating Donald Trump for obstruction of justice relating to the firing of FBI Director James Comey. This caused great anxiety in the West Wing, as Trump certainly was, by any objective measure, guilty of obstruction in that instance. Mueller, it seemed, was closing in.

That same day—June 8, 2018—a memo began to circulate among Trump officials: a 20-page screed decrying the Mueller investigation, particularly as it related to obstruction of justice over the Comey termination. “Mueller should not be able to demand that the President submit to an interrogation about alleged obstruction,” the memo argued. “If embraced by the Department, this theory would have potentially disastrous implications, not just for the Presidency, but for the Executive branch as a whole and the Department in particular.” Indeed, the whole Special Counsel exercise was “fatally misconceived.”

The author of that memo was William Pelham Barr, who served as U.S. Attorney General, not without controversy, from the summer of 1991 until the end of George H.W. Bush’s term in office. Barr had expressed similar sentiments before: in a May 2017 op-ed in the Washington Post, and in an interview with The Hill a month later, when he dismissed any idea of Trump being guilty of obstruction for sacking Comey as “asinine.” But Trump had not been seeking a new Attorney General in the spring of 2017; a year later, Jeff Sessions was on his way out, Matthew Whitaker was on his way in, and the then-president badly needed the DOJ headed by a loyalist with legit bona fides. Thus did Bill Barr, on Valentine’s Day 2019, become the first person since before the Civil War to serve as AG in non-consecutive terms.

At the time, I did not know what to think about this turn of events. Barr had not served in government in 25 years. Who was this guy? And why was he returning to public service now? Did he really believe what he wrote in his memo, or was that merely a feint, to convince Trump to hire him? Rumor had it that Barr’s wife and Mueller’s wife were good friends, and the two men were on good terms. On that basis, some suggested that Barr was a “white hat.” Was he? Or was something more sinister at play?

White hat? More like white phosphorus. Bill Barr spent his tenure at the Justice Department protecting Trump, serving as his de facto legal counsel, and expanding the powers of the presidency. As I wrote in December of 2019, in one of my first PREVAIL pieces, “Barr does not seem to believe in democracy at all. ‘Might makes right’ is his credo. And he has made it his mission to ensure that the president’s might rivals that of a Saudi king, medieval Pope, or Roman emperor. He is, at best, a monarchist, and at worst, a raging fascist. He is not just a traitor. He is an apostate, rejecting completely the prevailing faith of his countrymen—our American faith in democracy.”

Something else happened in June of 2018. Justice Anthony Kennedy, quite out of the blue, announced his retirement. By then, Leonard Leo, the radical Catholic weirdo who was Trump’s “Court whisperer”—and whom I’ve covered extensively on these pages—had already installed Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court. Now he’d have another crack at it.

What few observers realized in the moment, but is now obvious, is that Leo and Barr were pals, practitioners of the same virulent strain of extreme Catholicism, and fellow travelers in the push to bring “the Judeo-Christian moral system” back to public life in the United States—whether the American people wanted it or not.

Whether Bill Barr is Opus Dei is largely a question of semantics. With Leonard Leo, Barr served on the board of the Catholic Information Center, the Opus Dei stronghold on K Street, a few blocks from the White House. That’s what Barr was busy doing from 2014 until Trump became POTUS three years later.

As such, he must have been influenced by the former head of that same Catholic Information Center, Father C. John McCloskey, an Opus Dei priest. McCloskey was singlehandedly responsible for recruiting a number of powerful Washington insiders to a radically retrograde brand of Catholicism. This is from a piece Charles P. Pierce wrote about “The Crusaders” for the Boston Globe in 2003:

There is a glow to the priest when he talks…He is talking about a futuristic essay he wrote that rosily describes the aftermath of a “relatively bloodless” civil war that resulted in a Catholic Church purified of all dissent and the religious dismemberment of the United States of America.

“There’s two questions there,” says the Rev. C. John McCloskey 3d, smiling…“One is, Do I think it would be better that way? No. Do I think it’s possible? Do I think it’s possible for someone who believes in the sanctity of marriage, the sanctity of life, the sanctity of family, over a period of time to choose to survive with people who think it’s OK to kill women and children or for—quote—homosexual couples to exist and be recognized?

“No, I don’t think that's possible,” he says. “I don’t know how it’s going to work itself out, but I know it’s not possible, and my hope and prayer is that it does not end in violence. But, unfortunately, in the past, these types of things have tended to end this way.

“If American Catholics feel that’s troubling, let them. I don’t feel it’s troubling at all.”

Barr echoed these sentiments in his controversial speech at Notre Dame in October of 2019, the full text of which is available on the DOJ’s website. “I think we all recognize that over the past 50 years religion has been under increasing attack,” he told the audience of sympathetic lawyers. “On the one hand, we have seen the steady erosion of our traditional Judeo-Christian moral system and a comprehensive effort to drive it from the public square. On the other hand, we see the growing ascendancy of secularism and the doctrine of moral relativism. By any honest assessment, the consequences of this moral upheaval have been grim. Virtually every measure of social pathology continues to gain ground.”

What Barr finds “grim” is, basically, the expansion of rights for women, people of color, and the LGBT community. And boy, is he butt-hurt about it:

[T]he force, fervor, and comprehensiveness of the assault on religion we are experiencing today…is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values. These instruments are used not only to affirmatively promote secular orthodoxy, but also drown out and silence opposing voices, and to attack viciously and hold up to ridicule any dissenters.

One of the ironies, as some have observed, is that the secular project has itself become a religion, pursued with religious fervor. It is taking on all the trappings of a religion, including inquisitions and excommunication. Those who defy the creed risk a figurative burning at the stake—social, educational, and professional ostracism and exclusion waged through lawsuits and savage social media campaigns.

Barr, basically, is aggrieved that the laws of the United States no longer allow religious beliefs—which, at the end of the day, are arbitrary, discretionary, and subject to change—to have more weight than the gender, skin color, ethnicity, and sexual orientation we are born with. He doesn’t like that he can’t legally discriminate against gay people on religious grounds.

Too, he hates the idea of the government helping people in need. Barr believes that social welfare programs have made us dependent on the government, and therefore we should do away with all that nanny-state crap:

But today—in the face of all the increasing pathologies—instead of addressing the underlying cause, we have the State in the role of alleviator of bad consequences. We call on the State to mitigate the social costs of personal misconduct and irresponsibility.

So the reaction to growing illegitimacy is not sexual responsibility, but abortion. The reaction to drug addiction is safe injection sites. The solution to the breakdown of the family is for the State to set itself up as the ersatz husband for single mothers and the ersatz father to their children.

The call comes for more and more social programs to deal with the wreckage. While we think we are solving problems, we are underwriting them. We start with an untrammeled freedom and we end up as dependents of a coercive state on which we depend.

Barr’s philosophy is encapsulated in this single sentence: “The problem is not that religion is being forced on others. The problem is that irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith.”

Needless to say, he’s got it completely backwards. It is religion, in the person of Leonard Leo, who packed the Court with radical Catholic extremists. It is religion that did away with Roe, with the result being the unnecessary suffering and death of pregnant women in red states. It is religion that insists homosexuality, bisexuality, or any sexuality that doesn’t involve a husband and wife having sex only for purposes of procreation is against the will of God. It is religion that demands punishment for sins—hence Barr’s inveterate hard-on for incarceration and mandatory sentencing, and his resurrection of the federal death penalty.

None of these positions are popular with the American people. Barr’s is a minority view. But his view is shared by very powerful people: by Leonard Leo, by six Justices on the Supreme Court, by Heritage Foundation head Kevin Roberts, and by many of the authors of Mandate for Leadership, the guidebook for Project 2025.

In October of 2022, the Catholic Information Center held a black-tie dinner to bestow the John Paul II New Evangelization Award on Leonard Leo. This was a few months after Leo’s six radical Catholic Justices overturned Roe. In his forthcoming Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church, Gareth Gore reports that Bill Barr recorded a video expressing his congratulations: “It’s particularly fitting that the very year in which Dobbs was decided we are honoring Leonard Leo. No one has done more to advance traditional values and especially the right to life than Leonard.”

These radical Catholic weirdos were all congratulating themselves, feting each other, and celebrating women’s rights being taken away.

Barr was a bad Attorney General the first time around; he protected so many powerful players that William Safire, of all people, dubbed him “Cover-up General.” His second AG stint was an outright abomination. I cannot even fathom a third. But that is what we have to look forward to—or, more accurately, backward to—if Trump is re-elected.

The “Cover-up General” is the prototypical Project 2025 official. A second Trump Administration would be littered with Bill Barr clones—sneaky Catholic extremists with pleasant manners and medieval worldviews, hellbent on destroying our democracy to establish the theocracy of their dreams.

We’re not going back.

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Photo credit: President Donald J. Trump walks from the White House Monday evening, June 1, 2020, to St. John’s Episcopal Church, known as the church of Presidents’s, that was damaged by fire during demonstrations in nearby LaFayette Square Sunday evening. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)