The news that Attorney General William Barr's worldwide snipe hunt has now been transformed from an administrative nuisance to a criminal investigation is as unsurprising as it is terrifying. After all, Barr's entire career in government has been marked by a fealty to executive power and by an apparently irresistible drive to keep Republican presidents from ever bearing the consequences of their offenses against the Constitution. It was Barr who advised President George H.W. Bush to murder the Iran-Contra investigations by pardoning everyone except Shoeless Joe Jackson on Bush's way out the door.

Now, though, Barr is on active duty, spanning the globe to find corroboration of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago's most dearly held conspiracy theories. (Italy told him to get stuffed.) And anyone who expected Barr to behave differently than he has—sabotaging the release of the Mueller Report and, now, concocting a cover story out of pure paranoid moonshine—should not be allowed to carry their own money or cut their own meat.

(By the way, I'm not inclined to give John Durham, who is the putative head of this investigation, the benefit of the doubt, either, no matter how many of his pals from the DOJ appear on TV to pump Durham's bona fides. We heard the same things about William Barr.)

They truly are capable of anything. Chip Somodevilla Getty Images

But the perils in this latest twist are profound. It's become plain this week that the political defense of an indefensible presidency* is going to wreak havoc all through the government. We have had the Juicebox Meatheads crashing a closed committee hearing. We have had Senator Lindsey Graham, that reliable White House castrato, proposing a meaningless Senate resolution condemning the House investigation, and now this latest abomination. We already have branches of government at war with each other and, to be honest, that was sort of the idea behind the Constitution's structure in the first place.

But it's also clear now that the Republican Senate is going to war with the Democratic House. It also become clear that the internecine war in the House is going to be savage and bloody. This new investigation exists only to provide the Republican side of all those conflicts with a weapon that can be deployed at any time. This administration* is willing to burn everything down rather than surrender its power. This president* is willing to bring all the temples down on his own head. I don't think anybody really understands how terrible the coming reckoning will be.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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