WASHINGTON. Former Attorney General William P. Barr writes in a new memoir that former President Donald J. Trump’s “self-indulgence and lack of self-control” cost him the 2020 election and says that “he got absurdly far in his ‘stolen election’.” This statement led to riots on Capitol Hill.”
In the book, “One Damn Thing After Another: The Attorney General’s MemoirsMr. Barr is also urging his fellow Republicans to choose someone else as the party’s nominee in the 2024 election, calling the prospect of Mr. Trump’s new presidency “worrisome.”
“Donald Trump has shown that he has neither the temperament nor the power of persuasion to provide the necessary positive leadership,” writes Mr. Barr.
The memoir – an account of Mr. Barr’s time as Attorney General under President George W. Bush and then again under Mr. Trump – defends his own actions in the Trump administration that led to heavy criticism of the Justice Department. giving up their independence succumb to pressure from the White House.
Mr. Barr has long been seen as a close ally of Mr. Trump. But the two fell out near the end of the Trump administration, when Mr. Barr refused to accept Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election had been stolen.
In a statement last June, Mr. Trump denounced his former attorney general, calling him a “swamp creature” and a “RINO” — meaning a Republican in name only — who “was scared, weak and outspoken, now that I see what he really is”. saying sorry.
For his part, Mr. Barr portrays Mr. Trump as a president who – despite sometimes displaying the “menacing manner” of a strong ruler as a “chip” to create an image of power – acted within the fences set by his advisers and achieved many goals of conservative policy. But Mr. Trump “lost his grip” after the election, he writes.
“He stopped listening to his advisers, became manic and unintelligent, and lost his way,” writes Mr. Barr. “He surrounded himself with sycophants, including a host of fools from outside the government who fed him a constant diet of comforting but unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.”
Throughout the book, Mr. Barr despises the media, accusing them of “corruption” and “active support for progressive ideology.” He writes that the political left became radicalized during Barack Obama’s second term. He compares his support for social justice issues to “the same revolutionary and totalitarian ideas that propelled the French Revolution, the communists of the Russian Revolution, and the fascists of Europe in the 20th century.”
He also denounces the investigation by the FBI and later by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III into ties between Russia and Trump campaign aides in 2016. Let’s get started, and why did the FBI management handle this issue so inexplicably and clumsily?
Mr. Barr dismisses as “nonsense” criticism that his summary of the special counsel’s report, which he released before the report went public, was distorted in the way that favored Mr. Trump. Mr Barr insists his description, including his claim that Mr Trump did not obstruct justice, was “entirely accurate.”
In defense of this conclusion, Mr. Barr writes that it was “the simple fact that the President never did anything to interfere with the Special Counsel’s investigation.”
But his book does not address any of the specific incidents that Mr. Muller’s report outlines as capacity-building. obstruction of justice issuesfor example, the fact that Mr. Trump hung out but forgive from his former campaign chairman, Paul J. Manaforturging Mr. Manafort not to cooperate with the investigation.
In a chapter titled “For justice even for the bad guys,” Mr. Barr defends his handling of two other cases related to the Mueller investigation. Mr Barr writes that it was “reasonable” for him abolish line prosecutors as well as seek a lighter sentence for Mr Trump ally Roger J. Stone Jr..
And appeal his decision to drop the charge Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn for lying to the FBI – although Mr. Flynn has already pleaded guilty – he writes that there was not enough evidence to handle the FBI case was “malpractice.” authority,” and Mr. Muller’s accusations against him were not “fair.”
As he did during his tenure, Mr. Barr laments that Mr. Trump’s public comments about the Justice Department have undermined his ability to do his job.
“Despite the fact that I based my decisions on what I believed to be correct in terms of law and facts, if my decisions turned out to be the same as the opinion expressed by the president, this made it easier to attack my actions as politically motivated,” he writes.
Mr. Barr also describes how, on some occasions, he resisted Mr. Trump’s proposals. He declined to file charges against former FBI Director James B. Comey, Jr. for allegedly leaking classified information; insisted that the administration did not have enough time to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census; and rejected Mr. Trump’s “bad” idea that he could use an executive order to remove birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants.
White House and Justice Department lawyers should have talked Trump out of these ideas, which could be “bruising” and tantamount to “eating grenades,” he writes.
On the scandal that led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, in which Mr. Trump withdrew aid to Ukraine as leverage to try to get the President of Ukraine to announce an investigation into Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Barr spoke out harshly.
Mr. Barr calls it “another mess – this time by itself and the result of extreme stupidity”, “a reckless gambit” and “incredible idiocy”. But while he describes Mr. Trump’s conversation with the Ukrainian president on the subject as “unseemly and unreasonable,” he maintains that it did not rise to the level of a “criminal offence.”
Similarly, Mr. Barr writes that he did not consider Mr. Trump’s actions prior to the January 6 Capitol attack, which he denounced in a statement the next day, as “organizing a mob to pressure Congress” and “betraying him office and its supporters” – met the legal standard for the crime of incitement, even though it was “wrong”.
The book begins with a December 1, 2020 meeting with Mr. Trump, hours after Mr. Barr. gave an interview contrary to the president’s allegations of a stolen election, stating that the Justice Department “did not see fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome of the election.”
Mr. Trump was furious, he writes, accusing Mr. Barr of “knocking the rug out from under me” and saying he should “hate Trump.” After Mr. Barr said he explained why the allegations of various scams were unfounded, he offered to resign, with Mr. Trump slamming the table and yelling “Accepted!” Mr. Trump changed his mind when Mr. Barr left the White House, but Mr. Barr resigned before the end of the month.
His book expands on this theme by looking at the specific “substantiated allegations of fraud” that Trump made and explaining why the Justice Department found them to be unsubstantiated. He lists several reasons, such as why claims of allegedly hacked Dominion voting machines were “absolute rubbish” and “nonsensical chatter”.
“The election was not ‘stolen’,” writes Mr. Barr. “Trump lost.”