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Summary
Summary
Attorney General William Barr turned the Department of Justice into a private law firm that shielded one client: the president of the United States.
In Hatchet Man, former federal prosecutor Elie Honig uncovers Barr's unprecedented abuse of power as Attorney General and the lasting structural damage done to the Justice Department. Honig uses his own experience as a prosecutor at DOJ to show how, as America's top law enforcement official, Barr repeatedly violated the Department's written rules, and those vital, unwritten norms and principles that comprise the "prosecutor's code."
Barr was corrupt from the beginning. His first act as AG was to distort the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, earning a public rebuke for his dishonesty from Mueller himself and, later, from a federal judge. Then, Barr tried to manipulate the law to squash a whistleblower's complaint about Trump's dealings with Ukraine--the report that eventually led to Trump's first impeachment. Barr later intervened in an unprecedented manner to undermine his own DOJ prosecutors on the cases of Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, both political allies of the President. And then Barr fired the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York under false pretenses. Finally, Barr amplified baseless theories about massive mail-in ballot fraud, pouring gasoline on the dumpster fire battle over the 2020 election results and contributing to the January 6 insurrection that led to Trump's second impeachment.
In Hatchet Man, Honig proves that Barr trampled the two core virtues that have long defined the department and its mission: credibility and independence - ultimately in service of his own deeply-rooted, extremist legal and personal beliefs. Honig shows how Barr corrupted the Justice Department and explains what we must do to prevent this from ever happening again.Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
CNN legal analyst Honig debuts with a sharp-edged account of how former attorney general William Barr violated Justice Department norms to benefit President Trump, wage war against the "evils of secularism," and "implement extreme view of executive authority." Expressing regret for his initial positive comments about Barr's appointment in 2019, Honig accuses Barr of deliberately distorting the conclusions of the Mueller Report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, and intervening on behalf of Trump loyalists Michael Flynn and Roger Stone to overrule charging and sentencing decisions authorized by Justice Department lawyers. Honig also delves into Barr's controversial ouster of the interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, whose office was reportedly investigating Rudy Giuliani's "business interests in Ukraine and other shady financial dealings." Throughout, Honig draws on his own career as a federal and state prosecutor to make clear the extent of Barr's violations, and he offers a list of useful reforms, including explicit limits on communications between the Justice Department and the White House. Though Honig doesn't break much new ground, this is a comprehensive indictment of one of the most controversial figures of the Trump administration. (July)
Kirkus Review
A full-throated condemnation of the recently departed attorney general. If former Southern District of New York prosecutor Honig, now a CNN analyst, has any use for William Barr, you wouldn't know it from these barbed pages. For one thing, Barr has "never, never tried a single case, in the trenches, as a prosecutor." In that, he was like many in the Trump administration, lacking the credentials required to do the job. But Barr had numerous things in his favor, insofar as securing the gig was concerned. For example, "as a private citizen," he wrote his famous "audition memo," in which he questioned the legitimacy of the Mueller investigation and advocated executive powers so extensive that the president was on the verge of becoming a dictator. This ties in with Barr's virulent, theologically based fundamentalism, which, among other planks, militated against rights for gay people and other marginalized minorities. Barr politicized the Justice Department to become an instrument of power for Trump, even after his electoral loss in 2020. "As Trump cast about for some basis on which to contest the outcome," writes Honig, "Barr instructed prosecutors that they were now free to pursue election fraud cases even while certification of election results was still pending." The author prefaces his damning, convincing account by enumerating characteristics "that infected Barr's approach to his position as the nation's top prosecutor." He is "a liar" and "an eager political partisan" who "used the attorney general position to impose his own legal and philosophical views on how civil society ought to function." As for his surprise resignation just before Trump left office? Self-serving self-preservation, writes Honig, perhaps with a smattering of concern for legacy behind it. Even so, Barr went out the door having accelerated the schedule for the execution of federal prisoners, one more sign of his "thirst for power, fueled by a religious certainty in his duty and right to impose order on the world." A resounding excoriation of an unquestionably corrupt operator. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A former federal and state prosecutor now serving as a CNN legal analyst, Honig argues that the two key qualities of a good prosecutor are credibility and independence--qualities that William Barr did not exhibit as an attorney general. With a 75,000-copy first printing.
