Bill Barr is running law enforcement like a 'middle school bully' because he used to be one: op-ed

Writing in the Washington Post this Wednesday, columnist Dana Milbank writes that if you feel like law enforcement in this country is being run by a "middle-school bully," you'd be right.

"Back in 1991, during Barr’s confirmation to be George H.W. Bush’s attorney general, lawyer Jimmy Lohman, who overlapped with Barr at New York’s Horace Mann School and later Columbia University, wrote a piece for the little-known Florida Flambeau newspaper about Barr being 'my very own high-school tormentor' — a 'classic bully' and 'power abuser' in the 1960s who 'put the crunch on me every chance [he] got,'" Milbank writes.

According to Milbank, Lohman's characterization of Barr "sounds eerily like the 2020 Barr," and goes on to list other op-eds that frame the U.S. Attorney General in the same light, namely Marie Brenner’s writing for Vanity Fair, who said Barr and his siblings were nicknamed the "Bully Barrs," and historian Paul Cronin, who in POLITICO this week, wrote that Barr was part of the “Majority Coalition” at Columbia that fought antiwar demonstrators.

"Now Barr exaggerates violence on a grand scale," Milbank writes, specifically with his claim that the protesters forcefully removed from Lafayette Square were not peaceful, along with his endorsement of President Trump's authority to "use the military against protesters, even as Pentagon leaders recoiled."

Read his full op-ed over at The Washington Post.