Barr allowed the Mueller probe to reach its conclusion unmolested. The extent of his alleged interference was, prior to the release of the report, summarizing its findings in a way that wasn’t harsh or detailed enough for Trump’s critics.

Finally, he declined to prosecute former Department of Justice official and frequent Trump target Andrew McCabe for lying to investigators. If Barr is really Trump’s Roy Cohn, his personal enforcer masquerading as a top law-enforcement official, nailing McCabe would have been his Job One.

No, all the evidence suggests that Bill Barr is doing his best to render fair justice in the treacherous environment created by a president of the United States who routinely comments on pending criminal cases and investigations and by the Justice Department’s own politically fraught, overly zealous intervention in the 2016 election and its aftermath.

Anti-Barr polemics dwell on the parade of horribles that might come from his tenure at Justice, without pausing to consider that a norm-busting violation of the rules targeting a politically inconvenient individual already occurred — it was the abusive FISA surveillance of former Trump campaign official Carter Page.