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Former WA AG McKenna: Unusual for Barr to resign early, but a ‘wise’ move

Dec 23, 2020, 12:21 PM | Updated: 12:38 pm

William Barr...

(Win McNamee/Getty Images)

(Win McNamee/Getty Images)

U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr decided to resign a month before he had to. So what might have been behind this? Former Washington state Attorney General Rob McKenna joined Seattle’s Morning News to discuss.

“It’s unusual that the attorney general would resign a month before the president leaves office. I can’t remember that happening before; it is surprising. And I assume that he chose to do this to avoid being fired, since Trump was talking about possibly firing him,” McKenna said.

There are numerous rumors that the resignation related to pardons or Barr’s reputation. Is there any credence to this?

“I think it is possible that Bill Barr, loyal as he has been to President Trump, might have decided it was better to get out before he was asked to do something that he would not want to do, that he would tell the president ‘No,’ that would then result in being fired. So I think it was a wise move for him because there’s more and more news being reported about what the president might use his last 30 odd days in office to try to do, including presidential pardons,” he said.

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That said, McKenna believes Barr espoused a theory of authority beneficial to Trump, though had his limits.

“Let’s be clear, you know, Bill Barr has been very loyal to President Trump, and he’s done that in part because he is, as a Wikipedia article about his life tells you, a longtime proponent of the unitary executive theory, which means that the president has nearly unfettered authority over the executive branch of the U.S. government. He’s a believer in a very strong presidency,” McKenna said.

“He was the head of the White House Office of Legal Counsel in ’89 providing legal justification for the U.S. to invade Panama, a country with which we’re not at war, in order to arrest General Manual Noriega for ties to drug traffickers. So he’s a believer in strong executive authority, which, of course, President Trump really liked,” McKenna added. “But even Bill Barr has his limits.”

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As KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross suggested, this appears to have been done in principle, and Barr felt that the executive may have been watered down and he wanted to be part of making sure that, at least for future presidents, there was sufficient authority to act quickly in a pinch.

“Yeah, that’s right,” McKenna answered. “And where attorney general Barr’s come under a tremendous amount of criticism for where he’s taken that idea, and he has used it to shield the president — really kind of act like the president’s attorney — the attorney general is not the president’s lawyer.”

“The president has lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel in White House, a job Barr had back in the late 80s,” he added. “The attorney general of the United States is the attorney general of the United States. It’s like the attorney general of Washington state is the attorney general of this state, not the lawyer for the governor, for example.”

Listen to Seattle’s Morning News weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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Former WA AG McKenna: Unusual for Barr to resign early, but a ‘wise’ move