Even before Attorney General William Barr released his four-page summary of the Mueller report, lawmakers and concerned citizens alike were worried that his bias for Donald Trump would lead him to act less like the top lawyer for the federal government and more like the president’s personal attorney. (Why else send a 19-page, unsolicited memo to the Justice Department calling the special counsel’s inquiry into potential obstruction of justice “fatally misconceived” and “grossly irresponsible”?) Those fears were not at all dispelled when Barr declined to prosecute Trump for obstruction, despite the 10 incidents laid out by Robert Mueller in which the president tried to do just that, or when he claimed that Trump couldn’t have had corrupt intent, when Mueller actually found numerous compromising episodes involving Russia and the Trump campaign that the president would have preferred to keep hidden.

In case there was any remaining doubt that William Barr sees his job as protecting Donald Trump, his testimony before the Senate Judiciary committee on Wednesday—the first of two days of public hearings on Capitol Hill—made perfectly clear where the attorney general’s allegiance lies. Even in a case where Trump literally instructed a White House lawyer to lie on the record (obstruction) to hide the fact that he tried to fire the man investigating him (obstruction).

“You . . . have a situation where a president essentially tries to change the lawyer’s account in order to prevent further criticism of himself,” Senator Dianne Feinstein told Barr during her allotted five minutes, pointing to the fact that the president told former White House counsel Don McGahn to lie to investigators about Trump instructing him to remove Mueller. Why, she wondered, is that not obstruction of justice? To which Barr responded, “Well, that’s not a crime.”

“So you can, in this situation, instruct someone to lie?” Feinstein asked.

“We felt that in that episode the government would not be able to establish obstruction,” Barr replied. “If you look at that episode . . . the instruction said ‘Go to [Rod] Rosenstein, raise the issue of conflict of interest and Mueller has to go because of this conflict of interest.’ So there’s not question that whatever instruction was given to McGahn had to to do with conflict of interest . . . To be obstruction of justice the lie has to be tied to impairing the evidence in a particular proceeding. McGahn had already given his evidence and I think it would be plausible that the purpose of McGahn memorializing what the president was asking was to make the record that the president never directed him to fire. And there is a distinction between saying to someone, ‘go fire him, go fire Mueller’ and saying ‘have him removed based on conflict.’”

At this point, Feinstein, speaking for all of us, asked, “And what would that conflict be?”

To which Barr responded, “The difference between them is that if you remove someone for conflict of interest, another person would be presumably . . . appointed,” failing to acknowledge that had McGahn complied with Trump’s request, the president would have likely continued to find “conflicts of interest” with every new special counsel.

Maybe Barr, the nation’s top law-enforcement official, just isn’t qualified to judge! “I’m not in the business of determining when lies are told to the American people,” he told Senator Richard Blumenthal at another point in the hearing. “I’m in the business of determining when a crime has been committed.” And if the lie is the crime? Look, we’re splitting hairs.

Elsewhere in the hearing, Barr:

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