by Mary O’Neill, Executive Director America’s Future, a young professionals’ organization dedicated to preserving American values and ideals. Larry Gillheeney form the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity is the organization’s Northeast Regional Director.

There is only one truth. When Americans invest their faith in leaders who fail in their mission to hold the corrupt to account, the search for the truth is in the hands of We The People. These are the circumstances of our time in history. And, sometimes, questions of intentions arise even among those least expected.

William Barr, a Washington, D.C. luminary who was once seen as a lawman in a white hat, coming in to clean up a Beltway that had become rotten at the core, is one such example because, in reality, that’s not how it played out. He failed his mission, and some now wonder if he ever intended to accomplish it.

The fact is, he left the Justice Department in even worse shape than when he started. Republican voters have less faith in the DOJ and FBI now than they did before Barr’s two-year tenure. And worse, since resigning from the Donald Trump administration in its final days to protest the President’s allegations of election fraud, the former attorney general has become a spokesman for the anti-democratic forces he was hired to bring to heel.

After the FBI’s August 2022 raid on Trump’s Florida mansion, Barr demanded Trump step away from his presidential run. When Merrick Garland’s corrupt Justice Department brought phony classified documents charges against the former president, Barr said the prosecutors had good evidence. When DOJ brought its second round of indictments against Trump, for election interference, Barr said it was a “legitimate case.

The fact is that in taking sides with the federal law enforcement authorities who have weaponized the justice system, Barr is turning not only on his former boss but also one-half of the U.S. electorate, who have been subjected to the DOJ and FBI’s campaign of terror targeting pro-Trump demonstrators, school parents, pro-life activists, journalists and other opponents of the ruling party.

It’s strange to think it was less than five years ago that Barr’s appointment to his second term as attorney general gave Americans hope that he would restore the integrity of federal law enforcement.

At first he appeared to be doing all the right things. He ended the special counsel investigation and named John Durham to investigate the origins of the FBI’s anti-Trump plot. The president and his supporters expected justice, and Barr counseled patience. Investigations take time, he said. But if no one was brought to justice for interfering in the 2016 election, there would be nothing to stop the same people from doing the same in 2020.

In fact, the FBI had set up a special unit, the so-called foreign interference task force, tasked to reboot the Bureau’s 2016 election interference campaign for 2020 and, again, hide evidence of the Democratic candidate’s corruption. Even while Trump was being impeached for asking questions about the Biden family’s financial entanglements in Ukraine, the Bureau came in possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop, loaded with evidence confirming Trump’s concerns.

Even with the agencies under Barr’s control holding information that would have cleared the president, the attorney general did nothing. When informants provided more leads pointing to the Bidens’ corruption, Barr buried the evidence by sending it to a prosecutor in Biden’s home state.

In the spring of 2020, Barr said that neither Biden nor Obama were among Durham’s investigative targets. But why not? Government records contained evidence that both Obama and Biden had participated in Russiagate.

At the time, Barr also said he expected developments in Durham’s cases by late summer. But when Labor Day passed without indictments, it was clear that nothing would happen before the November vote — and the same agencies and the same figures would be incentivized to again interfere in the election.

Sure enough, when news of Hunter Biden’s laptop broke, the FBI’s special task force coerced social media platforms to censor it as “Russian disinformation.” Barr later said he was shocked to hear Biden repeat the FBI’s lie about the laptop in his first televised debate with Trump. But that’s just evidence Barr knew the laptop was authentic, even as the agents under his authority were rigging an election and creating First Amendment violations.

Barr’s current public position against Trump, while destructive and deceitful, also provides evidence of a bad conscience. Perhaps he thinks that having gone this far to cover up and facilitate crimes against the American public, the only way forward is to continue along the path of corruption.

In the end, the story of William Barr is a sad one, but also a reminder that the only institution that can be fully trusted to preserve our republic is We the People. And as we link arms readying ourselves for the fight for our God-given rights, look to your left and to your right, where you see family, friends, neighbors, and other patriots who look to you to stand strong and hold the line.