Attorney General William Barr is a key player in the events that have now resulted in an impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump. He has been fingered as the point man in a scheme to solicit foreign intelligence of dubious quality in order to discredit U.S. intelligence assessments of Russian involvement in the 2016 elections. He was cited, by name, as one of the two point men in the pressuring of the Ukrainian government to investigate one of Trump's most likely 2020 campaign challengers. He has led the Justice Department in blocking numerous congressional investigations into Trump and Trump's allies, including investigations of acts in which he himself played a role.
It is difficult to imagine him making it through December without being subject to an impeachment inquiry himself; for his seemingly brazenly illegal cover-up efforts on behalf of the Orange Dotard, the man may yet end up in jail.
So you know what's coming next for Barr. The last refuge of every scoundrel facing possible consequences for their misdeeds, once actually caught: It's time to shriek loudly about Jesus. And about Christianity being oppressed by the secularists and the progressives. It is not that he has been a crooked man, you see; it is that the secularists are trying to oppress him, Trump, and any other of his fellow True Jesus Lovers who just happen to keep being caught in criminal acts.
Or so was his message at the University of Notre Dame last Friday. Mother Jones reported that he said, “This is organized destruction. Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion & traditional values.” And so on and so forth; it was the usual tirade, performed far better over the last few decades by any number of past pseudo-Christian grifters looking to rile their audience into a frothing anger at the secularists and the Hollywood and the science-learners who are all arrayed against good Christians who just want to be able to do their crimes and their cover-ups in peace. Barr wears it like an ill-fitting coat.
As if to remove any doubt that this we-are-being-oppressed dodge is intended as an official message from the Trump government, the Mike Pompeo-led State Department (Pompeo also being up to his eyeballs in the Ukraine scandal) made Barr's Come to Jesus speech the central feature of the State Department website on Monday.
This crowd does not do subtle.
Donald Trump's most reliable base remains the same as it has always been: conservative white evangelical racists of the sort that admire Trump's crookedness and lawbreaking and are absolutely convinced that the United States exists, as a nation, for their religious subsect alone. They are very stupid people, more than willing to believe claims that the academics are out to get them or that the secularists are the reason Uncle Bob has an opioid habit. Barr's move to shore up their support as things began to go well and truly south for Team Trump is predictable, and more than a bit pathetic.