Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. There is January 6th insurrection news on at least two fronts today. We have the first felony sentencing for one of the insurrectionists. 38-year-old Paul Hodgkins of Florida will serve eight months behind bars for crimes including carrying, not an American flag but a Donald Trump flag into the Senate chamber on January 6th. The sentence could set a template for others there who did not commit actual violence against other people.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has named four Republicans to the select committee to investigate the attempt to overturn the election, notably Congressman Jim Jordan, who is likely to somehow minimize the events of January 6th, and defend Trump as not inciting the riot and not lying about massive election fraud. However, if the Republicans on the Select January 6th committee want to continue to claim massive election fraud was real, one former ally has now jumped the shark, Trump's loyal Attorney General William Barr.

Barr, of course, was so loyal that a new book about him by CNN legal commentator and former federal prosecutor Elie Honig is called Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor's Code and Corrupted the Justice Department. Barr has joined the long list of names on Donald Trump's enemies list since Barr proclaimed back in December that he saw no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020 election. He resigned a short time later. With me now is Elie Honig, CNN legal commentator, former federal prosecutor, and author now of Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor's Code and Corrupted the Justice Department. Thanks for coming on again, Elie. Welcome back to WNYC.

Elie Honig: Thanks for having me, Brian. Look forward to discussing this and all the January 6th news with you.

Brian Lehrer: You say Barr's on a self-image rehab tour regarding Trump's election fraud lie, but in the book, you say he actively promoted that lie in the months before the election, which people forget. Can you start by telling what Barr did before November?

Elie Honig: Sure. The timing is so important here because, as you said before, in December, let's just fast-forward to the end here. Three weeks after the election, Bill Barr did publicly come forward and say he and DOJ have seen no evidence of substantial election fraud. Now, that's important. I talk about that in the book. It did mark a break from Donald Trump and now Bill Barr is out there giving these one-sided, I think softball interviews where he's reminding us of that turnabout.

What he's not reminding us of and what's not included in some of these softball interviews is the fact that for about six months leading up to the November election, Bill Barr was one of the main cheerleaders fanning the flames of the big lie of election fraud. I can give you a couple of examples that I lay out in the book. First of all, Bill Barr went and did an interview on NPR where he talked about the massive threat of counterfeit ballots coming in from foreign actors, and there's nothing we can do about it.

Later, NPR had to issue essentially a retraction where they spoke with real election fraud experts who said the Bill Barr statements about election fraud were, "False, preposterous," and "nuts." Bill Barr then went in front of Congress, repeated the same spate of lies fanning the flames of election fraud again, at the time when Donald Trump was really building public momentum behind this lie. He said this, and Bill Barr said the same things to Congress. He was asked, as he was always asked in NPR and elsewhere, "What proof do you have?" His answer was, "It's just something I know. It's just obvious. It's just common sense."

Then Bill Barr went on CNN where I'm a contributor in September, and he sat down with Wolf Blitzer and repeated the same lies, and Wolf pushed back. At one point, Bill Barr said, "We've indicted a case involving 1700 fraudulent ballots." Now, Brian, when I watched that, I sat up and thought, "Wow, okay, well, that's substantial." Turned out it was, first of all, not a federal case but more importantly, it did not involve 1700 fraudulent ballots. It involved one single fraudulent ballot in Texas. DOJ then had to walk it back and issue a correction and they blamed it on some low-level staffer. Brian, you can see how important it was. This is during the formative months of the big lie and Bill Barr, not only did he fan the flames, he did it as attorney general. He used the Justice Department.

Brian Lehrer: Elie, if he was that in the tank, why did he flip on December 1st, which was more than a full month before January 6th, which really brought shame on the party?

Elie Honig: I think it's an image rehabilitation. Look, by the time Bill Barr flipped in December, any sane, rational, wise thinking person, and certainly Bill Barr qualifies, could see that it was over, that Donald Trump had lost the election, that Donald Trump and his administration only had a few more weeks before they'd be out the door. I think Bill Barr made a conscious rational decision that, "I don't want to get lumped in with the true crazies. I don't want to get lumped in in the historical memory and public perception with Rudy, and Jenna Ellis, and Sidney Powell, people who are out there just making fools of themselves." Bill Barr is a smart enough guy and cares enough about his reputation that I think he tried to save face. That's really all I think it came down to.

Brian Lehrer: There were reports that I've seen of a meeting between Barr and Trump, around that time around December 1st, that have been described as expletive-laden. Do you have anything on that?

Elie Honig: Yes. I've seen those same reports, where Barr stood up boldly to Donald Trump. Some of this reporting is coming explicitly from Bill Barr himself and his-- He always has these tales where he's the hero standing up to Donald Trump, again, asking us to forget the almost two years he's been doing nothing but defending Donald Trump. One thing I do want to add is, while Bill Barr had this break from Donald Trump behind the scenes in December, Bill Barr then undermined his own courageous stand when he sent his resignation letter to Donald Trump, which was this really fawning, sycophantic letter where he praises Donald Trump as his bold, courageous leader.

He throws Donald Trump a very important concession. He says in the letter, "Mr. President, as I've just informed you, we continue to investigate the possibility of election fraud." He really undoes some of his own principled stance and allows Donald Trump to say, "Oh, they're still looking folks, they're still investigating." Even the time Bill Barr showed some backbone, he undermined himself very quickly.

Brian Lehrer: Tell me more about this letter, because I was struck by that too. Barr resigned later that month, December last year, reportedly while Trump was considering firing him over not being his hatchet man on election fraud. Barr wrote this, as you call it, sycophantic resignation letter. I'm going to read listeners a few lines from it. Bill Barr wrote, this is in quitting his job he wrote, "To the President, your record is all the more historic because you accomplished it in the face of relentless implacable resistance. No tactic, no matter how abusive and deceitful was out of bounds. The nadir of this campaign was the effort to cripple if not oust your administration with frenzied and baseless accusations of collusion with Russia."

My question for you, Elie is, why did Barr bend his knee like that on his way out the door to a self-image rehab campaign, bend his knee like that to a president that he believed, at the time in December, was trying to subvert our electoral process?

Elie Honig: Yes, it's a great question. It's the two faces of Bill Barr, the rarely seen courageous side, which occasionally flash itself and then the sycophantic side. That letter, I want listeners to understand just how outrageous that letter is, for an attorney general to wax on about how courageous and bold this President has been, and to lash out at the President's perceived political enemies. This is one of the main points of my book, that attorneys general should not and historically do not overtly play politics and parrot political rhetoric, like we see from Bill Barr, in this letter.

By the way, one other thing that jumped out to me about that letter, I don't know if you happen to have the whole thing in front of you, but you're going to have to read towards the very, very end, essentially, the last sentence of the substantive bar before he gets to the Happy Holidays part, where he even mentions the thousands of women and men, prosecutors, investigators who work at the Justice Department who make the Justice Department, operate day-to-day.

I think that's very typical of Bill Barr's approach where he had this arrogance, and I lay it out in the book. This isn't just an ad hominem attack. The way Bill Barr approached his job showed a real arrogance, a real disregard for the, what I call the real prosecutors, which I once was. A real disregard for them and this almost omnipotent view of himself as this all-powerful being who can do whatever he said, and carry the entire might of DOJ at his fingertips. I think that letter tells us a lot about Bill Barr's character, and about his sycophancy towards Donald Trump.

Brian Lehrer: Here it is. I just called it up. It did take a lot of scrolling through this letter to find the part that you're referring to. It's pretty striking even beyond what you just said. He wrote, "During your administration," again this is Barr writing to Trump, "During your administration, the Department of Justice has worked tirelessly to protect the public from violent crime, work closely with leaders in Mexico to fight the drug cartels, or get the immigration thing in there, crackdown on China's exploitation of our economy and workers, defended competition in the marketplace, especially the technology sector," and here comes this tiny little thank you to the rest of the department" and supported the men and women of law enforcement who selflessly and too often thanklessly risked their lives to keep our community safe." Is that the line?

Elie Honig: Yes, that's what I'm talking about. Any Attorney General, any leader of any prosecutorial office or law enforcement agency, you start with that, and you put it in throughout. I don't want this to seem trivial, because Bill Barr also had this disrespect for his own prosecutors throughout his tenure. I talked in the book about the time when he publicly kneecapped his own prosecutors who have been thoroughly vetted and approved within DOJ when he undermined them on famously the Roger Stone case, the Michael Flynn case, the Mueller case, even. It's not just that Bill Barr treated his people poorly and didn't write about them nicely, that matters, but the fact that he showed no respect, no regard for their actual work.

Brian Lehrer: It actually strikes me, now that I've looked at it, as being even worse because he's not even thanking the people who work in the career Justice Department, prosecutors, and staff. It sounds like he's really thanking police officers around the country, not that there's anything wrong with that in and of itself, but he says "Trump, you supported the men and women of law enforcement, who selflessly and too often thanklessly risked their lives to keep our community safe." That's fine, but that doesn't sound like it's the people who work in the Justice Department.

Elie Honig: You're right, Brian. Also, I think you've hit on something else here. The portion you just read, if you notice, the accomplishments that Bill Barr ticks off, they just so happened to track exactly with Donald Trump's talking points. Cracking down on China, and guarding against the unrest in the streets and that kind of thing, and dealing with Mexico. Bill Barr does this throughout his tenure in ways at times that you really were humiliating to Bill Barr, and to the AG's office and I lay some of these out in the book. For example, there comes a point where Bill Barr-- Do you remember the thing were Donald Trump suggested that perhaps people may try to vote twice in North Carolina, right?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Elie Honig: Bill Barr gets asked about that publicly, "Is it okay for people to vote twice?" He feigns ignorance. I hope he's feigning. Either he is ignorant, or he was feigning ignorance and he says, "I don't know. I don't know what the law says." This is the interview with Wolf Blitzer and then Wolf just goes, "You can't vote twice." Everybody knows that, but Bill Barr was too afraid to publicly say anything different than what Donald Trump said. There was a similar thing where Donald Trump started suggesting he had the power to move the election date, which of course he does not. Only Congress has that. Bill Barr was asked about that in a public forum as well and said, "I haven't looked at what the Constitution says there." Again, either he's ignorant, or he's feigning ignorance to appease Donald Trump.

Brian Lehrer: This all brings us to what you might consider Bill Barr's original sin in corrupting the Justice Department. Listeners, if you're just joining us. My guest is former federal prosecutor and CNN legal commentator Elie Honig whose new book is called Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor's Code and Corrupted the Justice Department. This Bill Barr original sin, his misleading statement to the American people about the Mueller report before the American people got to look at it ourselves. Here's the 32nd centerpiece of that infamous statement.

Bill Barr: The report recounts 10 episodes involving the president and discusses potential legal theories for connecting those activities to the elements of an obstruction offense. After carefully reviewing the facts and legal theories outlined in the report, and in consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel and other department lawyers, the deputy attorney general and I concluded that the evidence developed by the special counsel is not sufficient to establish that the President committed obstruction of justice offense.

Brian Lehrer: Elie, how do you explain that statement in your book?

Elie Honig: He's in the bag for Donald Trump and he told us he was in the bag before he got the job. We have to rewind here about six months before Bill Barr became Attorney General. This is the middle of 2018, it's obvious Jeff Sessions is a goner. Donald Trump is publicly berating and humiliating Jeff Sessions every day. The midterms are coming up. Bill Barr sends him what I call the audition memo. This is a 20-page memo, nobody asked him to write, he does it on his own. He sends it into DOJ. We now know it made its way to Donald Trump. Bill Barr says Robert Mueller's theory of obstruction of justice is and I quote bill Barr here "fatally misconceived," fatally meaning dead.

Donald Trump sees that, of course, his eyes light up, "This is the guy I need." He chooses Bill Barr, Bill Barr gets through on an almost straight party-line vote then he does exactly what he told us he was going to do, he guts the Mueller report. A, he lies to us in that four-page memo. I use the word lie very carefully. In the law, in the media, you don't just call someone a liar, I do it in the book because it's not just me. Robert Mueller later accused Bill Barr of misstating his conclusions and the facts, and federal judges later found the Bill Barr was disingenuous, lacked candor, lacked credibility, all the polite ways of saying lies.

He lies about, first of all, Robert Mueller's findings regarding Russia. "Is there a criminal conspiracy?" Robert Moeller says, no. However, Russia tried to interfere with the election. They did it to help Trump. Trump's campaign knew about it, they expected to benefit from it, and dozens of times they tried to make contact with Russia. Bill Barr sanitizes that, he leaves all that out and gives us only the good part for Donald Trump. He leaves out all the bad for Donald Trump. Then on the clip you just played, Brian, Bill Barr says no obstruction. To this day, he has never explained how that is legally justifiable as a conclusion. I am one of over 2,000 former federal prosecutors served under both parties who said this absolutely is obstruction of justice. To this day, all we have is those few sentences, very conclusory, just Bill Barr sweeps it all off the table and says, "My deputy agrees with me." I think he's just dead wrong there.

Brian Lehrer: He even acknowledged, going into the section of the statement that we played the clip from, that there were 10 instances described in the Mueller report that, in effect, look like [laughs] acts of obstruction of justice. He acknowledges that there were 10 instances of things like that, but then concludes that they didn't add up to anything. I want to go on to another aspect of your book because I think it's really interesting and really important, and that is you accuse Barr of using the position of Attorney General "To impose his own legal and philosophical views on how civil society ought to function." You mean a larger philosophy than just this specific question of whether Trump colluded with Russia or obstructed justice, like an authoritarian or just supporting Republicans because he's a partisan?

Elie Honig: I do mean more than that. Brian, I argue in the book, Bill Barr, is not one of these guys who I think worships Donald Trump, who thinks Donald Trump is sort of this special being. There are some folks out there who I think-- You know, the way that Matt Gaetz looks at Donald Trump. I don't think Bill Barr ever looked at it that way. I think Bill Barr looks at Donald Trump as a vehicle through which bill Barr tried to realize two of his own what I call extremist views. One of those is legal. Bill Barr has this view, the Federalist Society endorsed view of what we call the unitary executive, this idea that the executive branch should be the most powerful branch, and the President is the executive branch.

Problem is, Bill Barr took that to an outrageous extreme to where he was constantly arguing the president should be above any investigation, above any subpoena, should be essentially above the law, and he was rejected over and over in the courts. Bill Barr got a terrible record in the courts. The other thing though, that I was really shocked to find when I dug into the research here is, we found things that Bill Barr had written and said publicly in the 1990s. He had been AG by the way of the United States from '91 to '93 and during that time, and after Bill Barr really exposed himself as what I call a culture warrior.

For example, in one speech he talked about and I quote, "God's law." He decried bigotry against Catholics. He wrote, "We are being pushed steadily off the battlefield than have been for the last few decades. What is our larger strategy for preserving the church and seeing it prevail? How will we get back on the battlefield?" He blasted what he called "The homosexual movement," he blasted "Militant secularists" and he blamed those things for essentially the downfall of society, everything from mental illness, to drug addiction, to suicide rates.

Bill Barr is really this old-school, extremist, religiously driven culture warrior. I think it is important to say he is not a member of this fringe group Opus Dei. I say that in the book, that's a persistent rumor. He's not part of that group. However, he absolutely was driven by this notion that the church needs to regain primacy, not just in our private lives or religious lives, but in public life.

Brian Lehrer: I'm so glad that you get into that in the book because we talked about it on the show a little bit while he was Attorney General, but I don't think it ever took center stage like maybe it should have to understand who the attorney general of the United States really was at that time, that Barr wasn't just a judicial conservative. He comes from this political theological grounding in the religious right. People think of that philosophical framework or set of biases, if you want to look at it that way, as pertaining to social issues like LGBTQ rights, abortion rights, not things like election interference and obstruction of justice, or blackmailing the president of Ukraine. Do they overlap?

Elie Honig: They do. I mean look there's a direct line, like you say, Brian, to some of the positions that Bill Barr took. His DOJ argued in the Supreme court against recognizing equal rights for LGBTQ people, he lost that argument. He went on a killing spree on his way out the door. I'm not saying that's particularly religious, but the church and Bible, in some respect, can be seen as being in favor of capital punishment. He went on the string of 13 executions on his way out the door, including some that were scheduled for just and carried out days before Donald Trump left office. But more broadly speaking, I think that motive, that drove him to protect Donald Trump because he needed Donald Trump to remain in power. He couldn't have Donald Trump impeached and removed and convicted and remain in power. I think it all was part of the power play and it was also consistent with his view of the law that at least he adopted during Trump's administration, that would put the president essentially above and beyond any kind of accountability.

Brian Lehrer: We are almost out of time with CNN legal commentator and former federal prosecutor Elie Hoenig. His new book Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutors' Code and Corrupted the Justice Department. A couple of quick things before you go, one to put the Barr-Trump relationship in the context of right and wrong and American history generally, I think many Americans, and I'll include myself in this, still don't understand where the line really is supposed to be between an attorney general being independent from the president who appoints them or serving the president's policy agenda. I mean Eric Holder talked about having Obama's back and certainly on civil rights and other key legal questions they were philosophically aligned. You don't expect a Joe Biden to a point to Bill Barr, and you don't expect a Donald Trump to appoint an Eric Holder. There could be many other examples. Where is that line?

Elie Honig: Let me propose this. There is a line between policy and prosecution. As you say, Brian, every president of course is going to appoint an attorney general who is generally aligned with him ideologically, politically, and that kind of thing. No attorney general, by the way, has been pure as the driven snow. I don't argue that. If a new administration comes in and they say, "We want to emphasize this, we want to be more aggressive or less aggressive when it comes to police reform. We want to be more aggressive or less aggressive when it comes to policing for opiates, you name it." Across the board, that to me is all fair play.

Where I draw the line, where the president should have zero interaction, zero influence is in the prosecutorial function of DOJ. If a president does try to cross that line, the attorney general, I believe has a duty to resist, to fight back ultimately to resign if necessary. That line, the prosecution line, was constantly breached as between Trump and Barr, starting with Trump himself on the Mueller report, where Barr not just welcomed it, but made it happen, extending over to the Michael Flynn case, the Roger Stone case, we had Trump constantly commenting on those cases publicly. We had Bill Barr snapping to attention and carrying out Donald Trump's will. Now we're learning more and we need to still learn more about subpoenas that were served on the media and that kind of thing. That's the line between policy and prosecution.

Brian Lehrer: Finally, in our last minute with the January 6th committee getting its work underway, for you as a former prosecutor, and we have a conviction now of at least one January 6th rioter, what can the criminal proceedings uncover about January 6th? What would they not discover that the House Investigation Committee would need to look at separately in order for the American people to actually learn? The Republicans say this whole thing is unnecessary because there are so many prosecutorial investigations going on with hundreds of defendants that they don't need this, and this is all political to set up a narrative for the midterm elections next year. For you, as a former federal prosecutor, what are the limits of that?

Elie Honig: I think that's a nonsense argument that we're hearing from some of the Republicans because DOJ obviously has a very important role in all of this. They need to charge the crimes that are applicable and also bigger picture, help us make a historical record. The DOJ's job here is only to charge the crimes. There's so many aspects of this story that are not criminal that DOJ, it's not their job to tell them they won't tell. For example, what was the police response? Was this properly coordinated? Was this held back for some reason? What was happening in the White House? What were the communications among top advisers with Donald Trump? May or may not be criminal, but let's assume for the moment it's not criminal. Those are all crucial parts of the story that DOJ is not in position to tell, and it's not DOJ's job to tell. I reject this argument from politicians of, "Well, DOJ is doing its work. They'll tell the whole story. We don't have anything more to do here."

Brian Lehrer: Elie Honig, former federal prosecutor, CNN legal commentator, and now the author of Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor's Code and Corrupted the Justice Department. Elie, Thanks so much.

Elie Honig: Thanks for having me, Brian. Good to talk to you.

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