What is responsible for the left's Barr phobia?

Rich Lowry:

Can the republic survive William Barr?

The question has seized the media and center-left, which have worked themselves into a full-blown panic over an attorney general who is, inarguably, a serious legal figure and one of the adults in the room late in President Trump’s first term.

Some 2,000 former Justice ­Department employees have signed a letter calling on Barr to resign. An anti-Barr piece in The Atlantic opined that “it is not too strong to say that Bill Barr is un-American” and warned that his America is “a banana republic where all are subject to the whims of a dictatorial president and his henchmen.”

This is impressive heavy-breathing over an AG whose ­alleged offense doesn’t hold a candle to the greatest hits of his predecessors:

Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer carried out raids to arrest suspected leftists in the wake of World War I.

Bobby Kennedy, serving as his brother’s attorney general, authorized the wiretapping of Martin Luther King.

William Barr changed the sentencing recommendation of Roger Stone from its original, excessive call for a sentence of seven to nine years. It isn’t clear why the country would collapse into dictatorship if Stone is sentenced to fewer than seven years in prison, especially given that the judge has complete discretion to impose whatever sentence she sees fit.

The suspicion is that Barr was doing Trump’s bidding, but the ­attorney general maintains — and he hasn’t been contradicted — that he was surprised by the initial, maximalist sentencing recommendation and he intended to amend it prior to Trump’s fulminations about the matter.

If Barr were truly Trump’s henchman, he would have squashed the Stone case rather than merely recommending a little less jail time at the end. ­Indeed, Barr said in an ABC News interview last week that he considered the Stone case a “righteous” prosecution.

Barr allowed the Mueller probe to reach its conclusion unmolested. The extent of his alleged interference was, prior to the ­release of the report, summarizing its findings in a way that wasn’t harsh or detailed enough for Trump’s critics.

Finally, he declined to prosecute former Department of Justice official and frequent Trump target ­Andrew McCabe for lying to investigators. If Barr were really Trump’s Roy Cohn, his personal enforcer masquerading as a top law-enforcement official, nailing McCabe would have been his Job One.
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There is more.

I think William Barr has done a good job especially considering he is supervising a bunch of leftist Democrat donors who hate the President.  It is unfortunate that the country cannot replace the more virulent of this hate mob with lawyers who do a better job of calling balls and strikes without prejudice or favor. Barr needs to stick around for Trump's second term so that he can have a better shot at uprading the department.