AG Bill Barr Ignored the Elephant in the Room

In the Netflix series Ozark, drug lord Camino Del Rio tells Marty Byrd the story of his father catching a trusted employee stealing from his shop’s cash register. When confronted, the woman cries, apologizes, and promises it will never happen again. Then Camino asks Marty what his father should have done – should he have been magnanimous and forgiven her? Marty tells Camino that his father should have fired her, because it wasn’t the first time she had stolen from him – it was only the first time she had been caught. The screenwriters of Ozark understood that when a criminal enterprise is underway, the exposed crime is merely the tip of the iceberg – a tiny subset of the likely crimes committed. That’s why Attorney General Bill Barr was foolish when he chose to not prosecute Andrew McCabe.

In 2018 Inspector General Michael Horowitz investigated illegal leaks to the press, coming from within the FBI. He discovered that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was the likely source of the leaks (a felony), and that McCabe probably lied to investigators about it – which he called “lack of candor” (also a felony). Horowitz referred the matter to the Department of Justice with a recommendation for criminal prosecution.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions immediately fired McCabe – just days before his scheduled retirement – and assigned a US attorney to investigate the matter. In September of 2019, prosecutors recommended that an indictment be brought against Andrew McCabe.

Shortly after that recommendation, William Barr became the new Attorney General, and in February of 2020 Barr decided to be the magnanimous shopkeeper, and opted to forego criminal prosecution. Apparently, he ignored McCabe’s obvious character flaws, assumed he had committed no other crimes, and decided that termination and loss of retirement benefits was sufficient punishment for his alleged violation of the law, and breaking of his oath to the American people.

Following Barr’s act of mercy, the 2020 election – which many people still question – gave the American people a President and an Attorney General with highly questionable ethical standards. McCabe rewarded AG Barr’s grace with a lawsuit against the Department of Justice for wrongful termination. The new Attorney General – Merrick Garland – reached an out of court settlement with McCabe which

• Restored his full retirement benefits,
• Cleared his name, and
• awarded him $539,348.15 for his trouble.

It seems the Democrat party crime family protects its own, so long as they remain useful – and McCabe had been quite useful as the family (criminal, not legal) spokesperson on the cable news networks.

In 2024, Americans decided that a change of national direction was called for. We now have a President with different objectives than his predecessor, an Attorney General with different ethical standards than her predecessor, and an FBI Director with a different commitment to the truth than his predecessor.

Director Patel has discovered a cache of hidden evidence, and is working tenaciously with his colleagues in the intelligence community to declassify and make it public. He is revealing what those in the Biden administration had concealed – that the iceberg of misconduct beneath the surface of McCabe’s “lack of candor” was gigantic.

The enormity of McCabe’s alleged misbehavior (as well as that of others) is staggering. The man Merrick Garland rewarded is credibly accused of

• Obstruction of justice – interfering with the Clinton email investigation,
• Violation of civil rights – surveilling private citizens with fabricated predicates,
• Entrapment – setting a perjury trap for Michael Flynn,
• Defamation – aiding in the perpetration of a hoax about an American citizen, and
• Treason – using the power of the FBI to overthrow a duly elected President.

When dealing with organized crime – which the “Russian collusion” hoax seems to be – prosecutors often need to settle or what they can get, not what they want. The federal government wanted to convict Al Capone for violent crimes, but it had to settle for tax evasion. Luckily, that was enough to keep Capone in prison long enough to break his leadership of the Chicago Outfit.

Even though many suspected that Andrew McCabe had committed high crimes against the republic, evidence of the extent of his misbehavior was hidden from us in 2020, and AG Barr decided to give him a pass for what was known at the time.

Now it’s 2025 and the scope of what was done by McCabe and his cohorts to undermine the will of the people is becoming apparent. Unfortunately, unless the conspiratorial nature of possible crimes extends the statute of limitations, Andrew McCabe will escape justice for everything – retiring with full benefits, and a half-a-million-dollar bonus, courtesy of the American taxpayers.

Thank you, Bill Barr, for ignoring the elephant in the room – something that even a fictional television program understood. Premeditated criminal acts are rarely isolated. By failing to pursue what you had evidence for, you may have denied the American people any justice in the matter of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

Author Bio: John Green is a retired engineer and political refugee from Minnesota, now residing in Idaho. He spent his career designing complex defense systems, developing high performance organizations, and doing corporate strategic planning. He is a contributor to American Thinker, The American Spectator, and the American Free News Network. He can be reached at greenjeg@gmail.com.

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