With his compliant attorney general, the man in the White House is taking aim at the constitutional balance of powers

William Barr, the attorney general, came face to face this week with Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, at the Capitol in Washington. Shaking her hand, Barr was said to have joked: “Madam Speaker, did you bring your handcuffs?”

'This is the endgame': how Trump has helped turn the tide against abortion Read more

The remark, at a ceremony honouring fallen law enforcement officers, was a riposte to Pelosi’s quip a week earlier that if all members of the Trump administration were arrested, the jail in the Capitol basement would be overcrowded. (There is in fact no such jail.)

But it was also indicative of how Barr, and his paymaster in the White House, are perceived to be laughing in the face of congressional oversight and the rule of law. Indeed, following the sporting maxim that attack is the best form of defence, Trump had adopted the language of a tinpot dictator, denouncing the Russia investigation as a failed “coup”, branding his pursuers as traitors and threatening to lock them up.

“My Campaign for President was conclusively spied on,” he tweeted at 7.11am on Friday. “Nothing like this has ever happened in American Politics. A really bad situation. TREASON means long jail sentences, and this was TREASON!”

He’s attempting to create a counter-narrative based on conspiracy theories in which the FBI is cast as the villain Sidney Blumenthal

The intention, critics argue, is to turn the tables and delegitimise the case laid out against him in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference, or at least crank up a giant fog machine that leaves the electorate weary and confused. But one side-effect could be a slide into an imperial presidency.

“Investigate the investigators!” has been the battle cry of Trump, Republicans and media allies ever since Barr produced a four-page summary of Mueller’s report that misleadingly implied Trump had been completely cleared of collusion and obstruction of justice. In fact the report documented numerous contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russian officials and identified 11 instances in which Trump or his campaign attempted to illegally impede the investigation.

On 25 March, the day after Barr’s letter was released, the Fox News host Sean Hannity bristled with self-righteous indignation and thirsted for vengeance.

“This must be a day of reckoning for the media, for the deep state, for people who abuse power, and they did it so blatantly in this country,” he told viewers in a furious 25-minute monologue. “If we do not get this right, if we do not hold these people accountable, I promise you, with all the love I can muster for this country and our future for our kids and grandkids, we will lose the greatest country God has ever given man. We will lose it.”

That set the template for Trump, a regular viewer. Having spent two years trying to discredit Mueller’s work as a witch-hunt and hoax, he stepped up demands for an investigation into its origins and pushed the claim that the FBI spied on his 2016 campaign.

Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, said: “He’s attempting to create a counter-narrative based on conspiracy theories in which the FBI chiefly is cast as the villain of the deep state. It’s what is known as chaff. It’s to throw people off of the actual object itself and distract them from his well-documented crimes of obstruction of justice in the Mueller report.”

Trump is backed by Republicans, eager to grab ammunition that comes to hand. They have falsely claimed the investigation was triggered by a dossier from the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, which included reference to a so-called “pee tape” in Moscow, and cited anti-Trump text messages between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page to allege inherent bias.

But it is Barr who has emerged as the president’s most indispensable ally, his improbable Darth Vader. Testifying on Capitol Hill earlier this month, the attorney general used the incendiary word “spying” to describe FBI surveillance of the Trump campaign, a term later rejected by the FBI director, Christopher Wray.

Barr has asked John Durham, the US attorney in Connecticut, to examine whether the FBI erred in seeking a special federal court warrant to conduct surveillance on the former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. An investigation into the legality of the warrant is already under way, led by the justice department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, who is due to release his findings in coming weeks.

Barr is also working with Wray, the CIA director, Gina Haspel, and the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, to review intelligence-gathering techniques used to investigate the Trump campaign. In the meantime, ever loyal to Trump, Barr continues to defy Congress’s demands for the release of the unredacted Mueller report and underlying materials.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Carter Page, the Trump adviser who was surveilled by the FBI. Photograph: Yuri Kochetkov/EPA

Democrats sense a crude ploy by Trump to deflect and distract, parry and prevaricate. Congressman Jared Huffman of California said: “It’s a smokescreen, obviously an attempt to change the subject like everything else he does. I almost don’t want to dignify it because it’s so preposterous that any time someone investigates Donald Trump or disagrees with Donald Trump they are being treasonous or they need to be locked up.

“This is a slippery slope to a banana republic if this is where we’re heading. And I think most Americans get that. You just don’t call for your political enemies to be investigated and jailed in the United States.”

Huffman called for an impeachment process and hearings.

“If [Richard] Nixon was the imperial presidency, this is the imperial presidency on steroids without any sideboards or adult supervision of any kind,” he said. “It’s a real crisis. I still believe we’re going to get through it because I think the institutions and the fabric of this country are still rooted in the rule of law and democracy and checks and balances, but we’re being tested like never before and I would be lying if I said I didn’t worry about it.”

‘Trumpification of the DoJ’

One of the rich ironies of Republican claims of bias in the FBI is that during the election the agency kept its Trump investigation secret but talked openly about its scrutiny of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. The then director, James Comey, held an extraordinary press conference in which he branded Clinton’s handling of emails as secretary of state as “extremely careless”. Eleven days before the election, Comey announced the FBI was reviewing more Clinton messages. Many Democrats have still not forgiven him.

Barr says Trump’s campaign was ‘spied’ upon. Trump claims treason. Both are incendiary. Neither is true Adam Schiff

Adam Schiff, chairman of the House intelligence committee, tweeted on Friday: “Barr says Trump’s campaign was ‘spied’ upon. Trump claims treason. Both are incendiary. Neither is true. Barr suggests a finger was put on the scale to affect the election. But the Trump probe was kept secret; the Clinton one wasn’t. It’s the Trumpification of the DoJ.”

Matthew Miller, former director of the office of public affairs for the justice department, said: “There are a few galling things. First, it would have been crazy for the FBI not to investigate [Trump’s] campaign given what Mueller found. Second, it would have been very easy for the FBI to stop Trump becoming president if that was their intention by leaking what they found. Third, the FBI publicly criticised his opponent: the FBI did have an impact but it was to hurt Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump!”

Miller, now a partner at Vianovo and justice and security analyst for MSNBC, added: “It’s a brazenly cynical strategy by the president and his allies. He hasn’t had a great explanation for what he did so what he’s done for two years is attack the investigation.

“The notion has existed since Watergate that there should be a separation between the White House and Department of Justice. It’s been erased. It’s just gone. It will probably come back when there’s a Democratic president, because they tend to be more sensitive to elite opinion, but the next Republican president will [not] see any reason to restore it.”

Just as the justice department is succumbing to Trump, so Congress is also struggling to maintain its status as a co-equal branch of government. The White House continues to stonewall House subpoenas for documents and hearings, not only regarding the Mueller report but Trump’s tax returns and other matters. The Democratic-led House judiciary committee has voted to hold Barr in contempt of Congress but the party is divided over whether to impeach his boss.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trump meets the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, at the White House. Photograph: Chris Kleponis/POOL/EPA

Max Bergmann, a former state department official, said: “We’re seeing an effort by the president to neutralise this as an issue for the 2020 election. He sees a gap because the Democrats have shown reticence in their willingness to prosecute the case against him. We have a situation where there is a vacuum and Trump sees an opportunity to attack the investigation, partly because Democrats aren’t using the results of it to attack him.

“The problem with not using the levers of congressional power is that it lends credence to the arguments Trump has been making. In the public’s mind, it might seem that because Trump is not being impeached, maybe he was exonerated. What is amazing about the Republican side is the ability to manufacture outrage over nothing; they eat, sleep and breathe scandal politics. Democrats are terrified of it and and run from it, even when it’s the biggest political scandal in American history. The inaction over the last four weeks has been unconscionable.”

‘We’ve crossed a Rubicon’

It was perhaps no coincidence that Trump hosted Viktor Orbán, strongman leader of Hungary, at the White House this week.

Trump tax returns: Steven Mnuchin refuses to comply with subpoena Read more

Bergmann, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress thinktank in Washington, and director of the Moscow Project, charting Trump’s involvement in Russian attacks on US democracy, said: “We’ve crossed a Rubicon. For the past two years, Trump has not been able to use the justice department to seek revenge against his opponents and as a political tool.

“Now he and his team have learned, and Trump has appointed someone in Barr who is a Washington insider, knows the justice department and is able to operate as the president’s hatchet man. For the past two years, we’ve said the institutions have held. Now we’re at a critical pivot where Trump has learned how to use the institutions to his advantage.

“It’s a dark turn. With the decline of our institutions, the decline of our moral authority, Trump is trying to turn the the moniker of an ‘imperial presidency’ into an autocratic presidency along the lines of Viktor Orbán or Vladimir Putin.

“The stakes couldn’t be higher for the future of American democracy in 2020.”