How Barr poisoned the Mueller rollout

This was entirely preventable — if only Barr had acted with greater care and caution, and with greater concern about his own potential contribution to the further degradation of our already rapidly decaying political norms.

That doesn’t mean that Trumpworld would have accepted a mixed or negative report without considerable nastiness (even if it fell short of recommending prosecution for collusion with a foreign power). The reaction to criticism from the special counsel was always going to be severe. But if Trump’s own Republican attorney general had formed a united front with the Republican special counsel in carefully explaining to the American people that, although Trump’s presidential campaign didn’t actively collude with Russia, it did do numerous things that were deeply worrying and far beyond the bounds of normal and acceptable behavior, that could have done an awful lot of good.

It would have shown that it’s still possible for us to govern ourselves fairly — to uphold high standards for both political officeholders and those who investigate their alleged wrongdoings. Instead, we have just the latest incident in the sleazefest that American politics has become.