This new Washington Post article reports that "Former attorney general William P. Barr is President Trump’s leading candidate to be nominated to lead the Justice Department." Here is more:
Barr, 68, a well-respected Republican lawyer who served as attorney general from 1991 to 1993 under President George H.W. Bush, has emerged as a favorite candidate of a number of Trump administration officials, including senior lawyers in the White House Counsel’s Office, these people said. Two people familiar with the discussions said the president has told advisers in recent days that he plans to nominate Barr.
One person familiar with the discussions cautioned that while Barr is the leading candidate, the decision is not final and the president could decide to pick someone else. Another person familiar with the discussions said Barr is “a really serious contender and possibly the front-runner” for the job but stressed it was impossible to predict Trump’s pick definitively until it was announced publicly.
That person said those advising the president viewed Barr as someone who knows the department well and is a good manager. Barr, this person said, also had a bluntness that is likely to resonate with the president. “He’s a serious guy,” the person said. “The president is very, very focused on [a candidate] looking the part and having credentials consistent with the part.”
Barr declined to comment. Those familiar with the discussions said Barr, having already been attorney general, doesn’t feel a particular ambition for the position, but does feel a sense of duty to take it if offered....
Even if Barr were announced as the president’s choice this week, it could take months for a confirmation vote, given the congressional schedule. In the meantime, acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker would still serve as head of the Justice Department...
Administration officials expect Barr’s nomination would be received positively by Republicans who respect his experience and Democrats who would likely view him as an old-school GOP lawyer with no particular personal loyalty to the president....
After leaving the Justice Department, Barr served in a variety of high-level corporate positions, including as general counsel and executive vice president of Verizon Communications. He is currently a lawyer at Kirkland & Ellis and does work advising corporations on government enforcement and regulatory actions.
Any confirmation hearing for a new attorney general will likely be dominated by questions about how the nominee would handle political pressure from the White House, and oversee the ongoing Russia probe into whether any Trump associates conspired with Russian officials to interfere in the last presidential election.
Barr shares at least one of the president’s views on the probe being conducted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. In 2017, when asked by The Washington Post about political donations made by lawyers on the special counsel’s team, Barr said “prosecutors who make political contributions are identifying fairly strongly with a political party” and added: “I would have liked to see [Mueller] have more balance on this group.”
Barr also wrote last year that the administration’s decision to fire James B. Comey as FBI director was “quite understandable” because, in his view, Comey had usurped the power of the attorney general when he publicly announced his recommendation not to charge former secretary of state Hillary Clinton during the investigation of her private email server.
Barr’s daughter, Mary Daly, is a senior Justice Department official overseeing the agency’s efforts against opioid abuse and addiction.
Of course, I would be even more interested to hear about Barr's views on the FIRST STEP Act than about his views on the Special Counsel. A number of folks I follow on Twitter have been quick to note this notable document coming from the Justice Department in 1992 titled "The Case for More Incarceration." Then-AG Barr said this in a brief note at the start of that document:
[T]here is no better way to reduce crime than to identify, target, and incapacitate those hardened criminals who commit staggering numbers of violent crimes whenever they are on the streets. Of course, we cannot incapacitate these criminals unless we build sufficient prison and jail space to house them.Revolving-door justice resulting from inadequate prison and jail space breeds disrespect for the law and places our citizens at risk, unnecessarily, of becoming victims of violent crime.
Notably, as this BJS document highlights, at the end of 1992, the federal prison population was "only" just over 80,000 and the national prison population was just over 883,000. This subsequent BJS document two dozen years later details that by year end 2016, the the federal prison population clocked in at over 196,000 and the national prison population was over 1,526,000. I am not at all keen to see more early 1990s era thinking about imprisonment at the Justice Department, but I certainly would like to see a return to early 1990s incarceration levels.
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