Attorney General William Barr has a Herculean task in running the Justice Department in these contentious times, but he will succeed in his task of cleaning out the Augean stable. A true insider at the Justice Department, he knows what a clean stable looks like.
In his book A Time to Build, Yuval Levin sets forth the premise that institutions have the important task of forming the people within them into having good work habits. “Insiders,” Levin posits, who have absorbed the ethic and ideals of the institution, are those who have been properly formed. The institution shapes behavior, building integrity. In this positive twist on the word, insiders are those hardworking individuals formed in character by their institutional experience.
Today’s elites, on the other hand, claim to be part of a meritocracy, which substitutes intellect for character. Often, they are the graduates of the elite schools who go on to use our institutions as platforms for their own celebrity. Levin, in his analysis, contrasts these elites with those who work their way up inside the institution, absorbing its values.
In the current contretemps caused by the confluence of the revision of Roger Stone’s sentencing recommendation, the declination of Andrew McCabe’s prosecution, and the reexamination of the Michael Flynn matter, we can see the contrast between the outsider and the “worker bee” insiders.
President Trump is the ultimate outsider. He was not formed by any institutional experience. All our previous presidents were either government officials or military officers, often both. Trump is behaving as an outsider when he pours gasoline on the bonfire with tweets complaining about the actions taken by his attorney general and the DOJ.
Barr has held numerous other posts inside the DOJ, including one other tenure as attorney general. He called on another “insider” to examine the Flynn matter. Barr, who took four years to finish law school at George Washington University at night while working full time, tasked Jeffrey Jensen, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, with the Flynn matter.
Jensen spent 10 years as an FBI agent. Those who knew and worked with him in the bureau all use the word “character” when describing him. While working full time as an agent, he attended St. Louis University Law School at night for five years. After getting his law degree, he worked as an assistant U.S. attorney for 10 years. Appointed as the U.S. attorney in St. Louis by Trump in 2017, Jensen is the quintessence of the insider worker bee.
Earlier, Barr had designated another insider, whose character was formed while absorbing the ethos of the institution, to investigate the origins of the presidential probe started by the elitists. John Durham, now the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, spent some 35 years as an assistant U.S. attorney. He is a graduate of the University of Connecticut Law School, no ivory tower.
Insiders, in the sense of Levin’s very positive spin on that word, will help to save our important institutions from the damage done by the arrogant elites. Barr, Durham, and Jensen, men of character and not the ivory tower, are just what is needed now.
In the hopefully prescient conclusion to A Time to Build, Levin writes, “Abuses of power … are beginning to compel some real moments of reckoning.” This is what we should expect from the work of Barr’s team.
Tom Baker spent 33 years in the FBI and is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
