Aaron Blake: “Two months ago, Attorney General William P. Barr launched a hasty, questionable and haphazard effort to get rid of U.S. Attorney Geoffrey P. Berman at the Southern District of New York and install a new acting head of his office. Critics suggested it was a thinly veiled effort to get rid of the man whose office investigated allies of President Trump, including Rudolph W. Giuliani — the latest in heavy-handed and seemingly political actions by Barr to protect Trump.”

“It turns out the office was about to indict another Trump ally: Stephen K. Bannon. And the person responsible for charging the former top Trump aide is the acting U.S. attorney whom Barr tried and failed to bypass. Acting U.S. attorney Audrey Strauss on Thursday indicted Bannon alongside three others for an alleged fundraising scheme involving Trump’s border wall. He becomes merely the latest former top Trump aide to run into legal trouble — a list which includes the campaign chief Bannon effectively replaced, Paul Manafort, Trump’s longtime political adviser Roger Stone, and Trump’s first national security adviser Michael Flynn. But apart from the increasingly ugly picture it paints about the people with whom Trump has surrounded himself, it reinforces unanswered questions about precisely what happened — and why — two months ago. Barr’s explanations for the effort to remove Berman don’t make sense, to this day.”