Former Attorney General Bill Barr would not put Donald Trump in the case of the riots on January 6 on the street. Capitolhe said, although he believes the former president was “in charge” and part of a plan to thwart certification elections 2020.
He also said that he would probably have allowed the former commander-in-chief to take the secret documents home to Mar-a-Lago if he was still the attorney general.
In a wide-ranging interview with NBC News anchor Lester Holt, broadcast in full on Sunday night, Barr spoke about his last days in office and denied accusations that the presidential election was rigged.
“I do think he was responsible in the broadest sense of the word, because it seems like part of the plan was to send this group to the Hill,” Barr told Holt in an interview promoting the former attorney general’s new memoir. “I think the whole idea was to intimidate Congress. And I think it was wrong.
But Barr wouldn’t go after Trump if he was still the top US law enforcement official.
“I didn’t see anything that said he was legally responsible for this in terms of incitement,” he said. NBC News.
The National Archives and Records Administration recently discovered that Trump took home 15 boxes of classified documents, but Barr shrugged when asked if the former Attorney General would prosecute him for it.
“To be honest, I probably wouldn’t,” Barr said. “The whole classification system was created by decree. This is the president. The president decides everything.
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Former Attorney General Bill Bahr (left) tells NBC News’ Lester Holt that he believes former President Trump was “responsible” for the January 6 Capitol attack, but he wouldn’t blame him.
Former AG Bill Bahr said he probably wouldn’t file a case against Trump for taking 15 boxes of classified documents out of the White House.
Barr (left) told Holt that he holds Trump “responsible” for the January 6 attack, but he cannot legally hold him accountable.
Barr said ex-President Trump should not be tried for seizing classified documents because the president’s job is to decide what is secret.
Holt asked if Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report was misleading.
Barr wouldn’t have known about election fraud if it was staring him in the face, former President Trump said in response to the ex-AG book.
Recently, Barr has received significant media coverage as part of the promotion of his book One Damn Thing After Another: A Memoir of an Attorney General.
In it, he also discusses a proposal for the president to drop the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen.
In an excerpt from a book published by the Wall Street Journal, Barr recalls the dramatic moment when former President Trump slammed his palm on the table and ordered him to go home without delay after he contested allegations of electoral fraud.
During a tense meeting with Trump at the White House, Barr told him, “Our mission is to investigate and prosecute the actual fraud. The thing is, we’ve looked at the main claims your people are making, and they’re bullshit.”
In his March 8 book, Barr explains why he doesn’t think Trump should be allowed to run for president again in 2024.
Barr told The Associated Press that the Justice Department was investigating the claims but found no widespread issues that could invalidate the result.
But you shouldn’t have said that! According to Barr, Trump barked. “You could just say, ‘No comment.’ It’s killing me – it’s killing me. It knocks the carpet out from under me.”
The president then said, speaking in the third person, “You must hate Trump.” You would only do this if you hate Trump.”
Barr had resigned shortly before. Christmas in 2020, just weeks before the end of Trump’s presidency – in an event that has since turned out to be a sign of an internal White House riots due to Trump’s attempts to push his fraud claims through even after they were thrown out of succession courts.
“And, you know, it was wrong to dig him up the way his team did. And he started asking me about different theories. And I had answers. I was able to tell him, “It’s wrong because of this,” Barr said.
The president got angrier and angrier as he spoke.
I said, “Okay, okay, listen, I understand that you are upset with me. And I am perfectly happy to resign,” Barr recalled, referring to the ex-president.
“Boom!” Former Attorney General Bill Barr says former President Donald Trump slammed his palm on the table when he accepted his resignation offer after Barr refused to accept his allegations of election fraud, which were thrown out by a succession of courts.
He made the comments to NBC’s Lester Holt in an interview that aired Sunday at 9pm.
This angered Trump, Barr told Holt.
And then – boom! He slapped the table and said, “Accepted!” Accepted!”‘
And then – boom! He hit her again,” Barr said, hitting his arm for emphasis. ‘Accepted! Go home. Don’t go back to your office. Go home. Done,” he says, Trump told him.
The former president told NBC News that he fired Barr for not doing AG’s job properly and called him “lazy” and a “coward.”
“Former Attorney General Bill Barr would not have known about election fraud if it looked him straight in the face — and it was,” Trump said in a statement Friday night.
“The fact is that he was weak, ineffective and completely afraid of impeachment, which was constantly threatened by the Democrats. They “broke” him.
Barr spent most of the interview with Holt defending his track record as Attorney General.
Many said that he defended the ex-president from his political enemies; in particular, Barr’s statement about the investigation into a collusion with an attempted Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
17 US intelligence agencies concluded that Russia was trying to sway the election in favor of Trump.
Barr chose to release a four-page summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on election interference, which two federal judges called misleading.
“This was not a summary of the report,” Barr said. “It was a description of his final findings. I settled on the bottom line. You say guilty or innocent.