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Today it is my great and giddy pleasure to present my final column of the Trump Occupation. Garbage pickup is slated for noon tomorrow, and one oversized Hefty bag will be needed just to schlep the shredded reputation of William Barr.

Barr bailed on the regime back in mid-December, resigning as Attorney General in a last-ditch bid to purge himself of the serial sins he committed while functioning as the Don’s Tom Hagen. But there’s no way this rat can flee the sinking ship. There is not enough Tide detergent on this planet to launder him clean.

He’s still giving it the old college try, singing the blues. Yesterday, in a TV interview, he said that the violent insurrection on Capitol Hill was “unacceptable” and “despicable,” and made sure to note that “I was not Attorney General, I had already left office when that occurred.” Also yesterday, another press report depicted Barr as a hero who’d tried in vain to tell Trump the truth about the election – namely, that the stolen-election trope was “bullshit” and that Trump’s legal team was “clownish.” Either Barr himself spoke to the reporter on background, or someone in his orbit did the honors.

But those were merely the last gasps of Project Rehab. The laundering began in late autumn when Barr said he would not name a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden; when he fingered Russia as the likeliest culprit behind the unprecedented hacking of federal agencies; when he broke with Trump and told the Associated Press that he had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.”

He apparently thinks these eleventh-hour actions will cleanse the stink. Not a chance. Nothing can absolve him of everything he did to trash the rule of law, to nurture and amplify the serial lies that ultimately inspired the MAGA rabble to storm the citadel of democracy. In the crimes committed against this country, he belongs in the docket with his Don.

Barr misled the public about the Mueller probe of the Trump-Russia scandal, whitewashing the findings that, in truth, detailed how the ’16 Trump campaign welcomed Russia’s assistance. He big-footed career prosecutors in order to shield guilty Trump flunkies like Roger Stone and Michael Flynn. He ordered the tear-gassing of peaceful Lafayette Square protestors so that Trump could hold a bible in front of a church. He denounced pandemic restrictions as “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties” since slavery. He declared long in advance of the election – and without a shred of evidence – that mail balloting in 2020 was grist for massive fraud. All told, his authoritarian arrogance was so flagrant that last May more than 1,900 former Justice Department employees, Republicans and Democrats alike, demanded his resignation.

Barr can’t whitewash his infamous past with token charity work after the fact, any more than a serial killer can make amends by ladling gruel at a soup kitchen. He blessed the lies that fed the deadly MAGA fury on Capitol Hill; by dint of his high office, he gave those lies a veil of legitimacy.

Arguably more than anyone else in Trump’s malevolent circle, Barr is responsible for driving us into the ditch. At noon tomorrow, a new administration will be tasked with pulling us out. That will be a long arduous process, thanks to lying opportunists like Barr. Perhaps the opening words of the brilliant HBO miniseries Chernobyl are a fitting coda to the MAGA era – as well as a warning:

What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth – and content ourselves instead with “stories”?