Former White House lawyer suggests Bill Barr is better suited to be attorney general of the Soviet Union

In a conversation with the nation's top government lawyers, former acting-Solicitor General Neal Katyal suggested that if Attorney General Bill Barr wants to serve in a government closer aligned to his values, he should try the Soviet Union.

Thursday afternoon, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace noted that Barr has failed to stand up for the law while working under the Trump administration. While President Donald Trump is advocating for his voters to break federal law and vote twice in North Carolina, Barr stayed silent, Wallace said. When asked if he would allow legal ballots to be counted, Barr refused to even answer if he would do so.

Washington Post reporter Devlin Barrett noted that it's clear Barr also clearly plans to announce charges against the Obama administration just before the election, or at the very least release a "report" of trumped-up accusations against the Obama White House.

New York Times reporter Matt Miller noted the report that Barr also wanted to prosecute mayors of large cities over policy disagreements like "protest zones," and inquired about ways he could indict them.

"And when you combine that with these conspiracies of mail-in voter fraud -- it worries me if the balloting is close, but Trump is ahead and the counting is still going on and the president declares he's won, Bill Barr declares the election is over and does something no Department of Justice has done and tries to stop ballot-counting," Miller said. "I know it sounds paranoid. If you think there's a scenario that's too extreme for Bill Barr and Trump to try to hold on to power, you haven't been paying close attention lately."

Katyal explained that Barr has two fundamental problems:

"Problem one: he doesn't believe in law even though he's the attorney general and our chief law enforcement officer," Katyal said flatly. "Number two, he doesn't believe in the Justice Department's personnel. That's why you have folks resigning and demoralized. Morale is at the toilet level. For him to attack Michael Dreeben, I have no idea what the guy's politics are, even to this day, and widely seen as one of the greatest Supreme Court advocates of our generation. It's ridiculous. He does this to all sorts of people at the top and bottom of the Justice Department. The only way the Justice Department works, because it has very few political appointees, is through the hard work by the career folks. Men and women who generally get it right. And to call them nursery school folks is inexcusable. It breaks my heart. I don't think this man is fit to be attorney general of the United States. Maybe he's fit to be attorney general of the Soviet Union. This is damage to the department, damage to the rule of law, and I think his legacy is set in stone at this point."

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