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Trump's former attorney general wants his party to rethink its favorite.

The first review is out for Differ We Must. Kirkus says the biography is “admirable” and “satisfying,” and I’m satisfied with that. The book, which is out October 3 and available now for preorder, tells Lincoln’s life story through his meetings with people who disagreed with him. I felt that writing it would help me understand how Lincoln managed his divided society—and might offer insight on our divided society, which I cover for my day job.

The guests on Morning Edition last week included William Barr, who always provokes polarizing reactions. I’ve talked with him three times—once while he was attorney general in the Trump administration; once when he published a memoir that made plain his disappointments with that administration; and this past week, when he assessed the federal indictment of the president who nominated him.

Each time, Barr drew critics on social media and elsewhere, in some cases before the interview was broadcast. Some critics argued that he wasn’t credible due to his record in the Trump administration. Others spoke in revealing language, saying that we were “platforming” the wrong person, because it would “legitimize” the wrong opinions—as if the news was propaganda, and should be limited to approved views.

I think a good news organization is an intelligence agency for citizens, keeping track of friends and adversaries alike. It’s worth covering people who have real-world influence, which Barr does, as a two-time attorney general who’s been a meaningful player in Republican politics for decades.

I don’t think Barr particularly cares about the progressive critique of him. In interviews, as well as in his book, he goes out of his way to describe people on the left as the greatest danger the country faces. He’s even indicated that he might vote for Trump again, if forced to choose between Trump and a Democrat in 2024. (He stopped a little short of that in our most recent interview, joking instead that “I’ll jump off that bridge when I come to it;” but he said his choice would “never” be Biden.)

Barr is not, in other words, on the path of Richard Painter or David Brock—Republican figures who became Democrats. He’s not even on the path of columnist George F. Will, a onetime Republican, who said Trump’s misgovernment was so severe that voting for Democrats was the necessary corrective.

Barr is playing a different game. He wants to persuade his fellow conservatives. He’s hoping that Republicans will not nominate Trump, that “reason will come to the fore,” and they will avoid any risk of a presidency that “will be a mess” as Trump uses his power in a bid to quash his indictments or convictions.

In our latest conversation, Barr addressed the right-wing talking point that Trump’s prosecution shows a “double standard.” Essentially this talking point holds that Hillary Clinton was not prosecuted for storing classified information on a private server while secretary of state; so it’s unfair to prosecute Trump for leaving the White House with documents.

Setting aside for a moment the many differences in the two cases, Barr addressed the “double standard” claim on its own terms. He said it was not “frivolous” to believe that Clinton should have been prosecuted. But even if that was the case, “it’s hard for me to fault the decision” to prosecute Trump, because “the solution to a double standard is to apply the right standard.”

He said the standard in Trump’s case was clear because his conduct was so “egregious.” He didn’t merely mishandle classified documents; he refused for more than a year to return them when asked.

The former attorney general said that failing to prosecute Trump would be “unjust,” and would create a “double standard” of an entirely different kind. “How, then, do you control and protect classified information going forward? You just prosecute the little guys, but you let the big guys get off when they flip the bird at the government?”

Barr told us he expected Trump to face more indictments—one from a Georgia grand jury that is investigating his effort to overturn the 2020 election, and another from the federal investigation into the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Barr is not “cheerleading” for further indictments “because they seem to help him.” That’s the political reality of the moment—a reality that Barr hopes to change, eventually.

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