Thanks to Jimmy Lohman who sent me a private tweet message I have updated this diary.
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Pundits who are asking “whatever happened to William Barr” ought to read the 1991 story from the Florida State University student newspaper written by a someone who knew him. He wrote it when Barr was about to be confirmed for the first time as Attorney General.
I think those who predicted that Barr was an institutionalist who would be beyond politics and expressing dismay wondering what happened to him will end up concluding that what happened was pretty much nothing. He just was serving under George H.W. Bush who wouldn’t allow his true personality to emerge. In Trump he entered into the perfect marriage of malevolent abusers.
I discovered this by following a link at the bottom of this Washington Post column by Ruth Marcus…
Clicking on the Dana Milbank column above I came across this column from June:
Here’s the excerpt that led me back to the 1991 article:
Back in 1991, during Barr’s confirmation to be George H.W. Bush’s attorney general, lawyer Jimmy Lohman, who overlapped with Barr at New York’s Horace Mann School and later Columbia University, wrote a piece for the little-known Florida Flambeau newspaper about Barr being “my very own high-school tormentor” — a “classic bully” and “power abuser” in the 1960s who “put the crunch on me every chance [he] got.”
Nobody noticed the Flambeau piece at the time, but Lohman posted it on Facebook when President Trump nominated Barr in 2018, and it took on “a life of its own,” Lohman told me Tuesday from Austin, where Post researcher Alice Crites tracked him down. The article resurfaces in social media each time Barr does something unconscionable — which is often.
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The 1991 description of 1963 Barr’s harassment sounds eerily like the 2020 Barr. He “lived to make me miserable,” with a “vicious fixation on my little Jewish ‘commie’ ass,” Lohman alleged, because he wore peace and racial-equality pins. He said the four Barr brothers picketed the school’s “Junior Carnival” because proceeds went to the NAACP, and he alleged that Billy Barr, the “most fanatic rightist” of the four, later “teamed with the New York City riot police to attack anti-war protesters and ‘long hairs.’ ”
The 1991 article says Barr, a “sadistic kid,” has “come a long way from terrorizing seventh graders just because they wore racial equality buttons.” The Justice Department didn’t respond to my request for comment.
The link in the first paragraph above takes you to the image of the article of page four in the Florida Flambeau newspaper. You can enlarge the image from my illustration and it is readable although the type is blurry. If you want to read there it scroll to page four and enlarge it as much as you can.
Here are a couple excerpts:
More about Barr from Vanity Fair, 2019
We all agree that the Senate’s failure to convict Trump and remove him from office was worse than a travesty. If justice were to prevail he’d be impeached by the House again and convicted by the Senate whether of not he loses the election. William Barr, head of the Department of Justice, should true justice prevail, should be impeached and removed from office as well. Alas, these would be pardonable federal crimes. Unlike Trump and his organizations I don’t think he committed crimes in New York State,
That won’t happen of course. I think if the Biden DOJ looks hard enough, or even not particularly hard, they will find indictable crimes he committed. He almost certainly lied under oath to Congressional committees but I suspect he did even worse.
The best we can hope for is that he meets the same fate as John Mitchell.
So I don’t leave you without a snarky illustration:
The Poll — I know there are multiple possibilities so please pick you best guess and comment.
Reference: Past D.C. Bar Association chiefs call for probe of William Barr
He was interviewed why Thom Hartmann: