Attorney General Bill Barr during an event with the president in the Rose Garden of the White House, July 11, 2019 (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

We’ve seen another freak-out over Bill Barr this week, this time over his NBC News interview, which was supposedly outlandish, gratuitous flaking for Trump while disputing his own IG and throwing the FBI under the bus and floating conspiracy theories. All of this is nonsense. Barr has every right, indeed an obligation, to speak out after outrageous abuse of the FISA process was exposed. His description of the surveillance of the Trump campaign as spying was entirely defensible (it’s a more charged word for the same thing). His characterization of the Russia investigation getting launched on the thinnest predication jibes with the Horowitz report, rather than contradicting it (Horowitz says that the FBI could handle the opening of the investigation the way it did, which is different from saying it should have). And as for the FBI, Barr says he has confidence in its current leadership team, but is rightly excoriating about its past misconduct. Remember when people were always saying Robert Mueller knows more than we do? Well, the same is true of Bill Barr, and if he is implying that we could learn more about this whole episode that is even worse, we should take note.