But talking to Crawford, Barr took the knife he had already stuck in his old friend and twisted it, using St. Mueller’s prestige against him. He said Mueller, in fact, was not barred from reaching a conclusion, and this is why a “surprised” Barr and his former deputy, Rod Rosenstein, had to step in and reach a conclusion on obstruction, one ending up favoring Trump.

After indicating that Mueller was derelict and misguided, Barr went ahead and belittled him and his dream team as inept.

Dismissively noting he and Rosenstein did not agree with a lot of the legal analysis in the Mueller report, Barr said he applied what he considered to be “the right law,” though he confusingly said he didn’t rely on that when pronouncing Mueller’s evidence “deficient” on the 11 instances of potential obstruction laid out in the report.

When Barr moved on to his investigation of the investigators who worked on the case of possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, he really bared his claws.

About the F.B.I. team that did the investigating, Barr backed up all of Trump’s deep-state rants, saying: “Republics have fallen because of Praetorian Guard mentality where government officials get very arrogant, they identify the national interest with their own political preferences and they feel that anyone who has a different opinion, you know, is somehow an enemy of the state.” He added, ominously, “Things are just not jiving.”

Just as Barr enables Trump, Mueller enabled Barr.

Mueller’s argument seems to be that he can’t report on what his facts mean because the president has immunity from prosecution. But that doesn’t follow. If you believe Trump committed a crime, even if you can’t indict him now, why not say so? Otherwise, what was the point of the investigation? All Mueller was asked to do was to describe what he found and give his conclusions; then the Justice Department and Congress could do what they wanted.

As Walter Dellinger, an acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration, tweeted: “Everyone agrees a president can be indicted once he is out of office. That (in addition to impeachment) is a reason to gather the evidence now while docs are available and memories fresh.”