But consider: On the first day of his confirmation hearing nearly five months ago, Barr was asked by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas about former FBI director James Comey’s July 2016 news conference on the decision not to indict Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server while secretary of state.

Here is what Barr said in January: “I thought that to the extent [Comey] actually announced a decision was wrong, and the other thing is, if you’re not going to indict someone, then you don’t stand up there and unload negative information about the person. That’s not the way the Department of Justice does business.”

Barr has now directly contradicted what he told the Senate. Why?

The answer has to do with how Barr backed himself into a corner when he cleared Trump of obstruction of justice. Barr was criticized resoundingly for reaching such a determination within 48 hours of receiving Mueller’s report (which was more than 400 pages long). Barr tried to defend himself by explaining that he had had time to evaluate everything because Mueller had told him in a meeting three weeks beforehand that he wasn’t going to reach a decision on obstruction of justice. This has always been a strange claim — that Barr was evaluating the evidence without the report in his hand — but now it gets absurd.