Jun 20, 2019 2 min read

Attorney General William Barr has taken toadying to a bizarre new low with his plan to have the Justice Department investigate how U.S. intelligence agencies investigated Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Barr outlined the investigation a day before two former FBI counterintelligence testified before a House committee that there is no doubt that Russia plans to again interfere in U.S. elections in 2020.

And that was a day before President Donald Trump, even after the Russian meddling and the investigation that proved it, said he would accept negative information about a political opponent if it is offered by a foreign intelligence agency.

Though the Mueller investigation into the Russian conduct did not find any direct collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, it demonstrated conclusively that the Russians had indeed engaged in a campaign to sow discord and that they favored Trump.

Trump’s comment is an invitation to Russia to again interfere in U.S. elections, all the more so because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has vowed to block pending election security legislation that otherwise has broad bipartisan support in the House and Senate.

The investigation of the intelligence agencies is particularly bizarre because the Justice Department itself used information produced by those agencies to obtain indictments against 26 Russian nationals, including known spies and oligarchs tied to the Putin regime. That data also led to the indictments of three Russian companies, including the infamous St. Petersburg troll farm that was the epicenter of the electoral meddling campaign.

If on nothing else, the parties should be unified in an effort to protect elections from foreign interference. Barr’s effort to undermine the intelligence agencies for ferreting out such interference imperils the democracy.