A war of words has erupted between former President Donald Trump and former Attorney General Bill Barr, as Barr took to media outlets to back the recent classified documents indictments against his former boss.
Barr wrote an op-ed that ran in The Free Press on Monday, challenging Trump’s alleged defenses to the charges he will face.
Initially, Barr rang a sympathetic note for the “witch hunts” Trump has endured.
“On those occasions — most prominently Russiagate, and more recently the civil and criminal actions against him in New York — I have never shied away from defending him. As his attorney general, I witnessed firsthand the unfair and venomous treatment he, and those in his administration, often received,” Barr wrote.
But the op-ed’s tenor changes quickly to make the case, both personally and legally, against Trump.
“For the sake of the country, our party, and a basic respect for the truth, it is time that Republicans come to grips with the hard truths about President Trump’s conduct and its implications. Chief among them: Trump’s indictment is not the result of unfair government persecution. This is a situation entirely of his own making. The effort to present Trump as a victim in the Mar-a-Lago document affair is cynical political propaganda,” Barr continued.
Barr accused Trump of risking “the safety of the American people by hanging on to these documents in the face of the government’s lawful demands for their return … merely to gratify his own ego.”
He also claimed that there was a double standard regarding the Department of Justice’s pursuit of Republicans versus its treatment of similar alleged wrongdoings by Democrats. However, he dismissed the invoking of the selective prosecution defense, stating, “It is not clear to me that giving Trump a pass would be the best way of restoring the rule of law and putting the double standard behind us.”
Barr then switched tracks from the legal argument against Trump to the political one, urging the Republican Party to turn away from its leading presidential candidate.
“It is one thing to argue that Trump should not face criminal liability. Fine. But the next obvious question is whether, given his conduct, the GOP should continue to promote him for the highest office in the land. Many Republicans are avoiding this question and thus implicitly endorsing Trump for the presidency despite his egregious conduct. This posture is untenable,” Barr argued.
Trump has had plenty to say about his former attorney general as well. The former president had previously called Barr “a coward who didn’t do his job,” referring to the former attorney general’s conclusion that election irregularities did not impact the outcome of the presidential race. Trump’s comment came after Barr made the news show rounds to lend credence to the federal indictment against Trump.
“This thing is a disgrace and virtually everybody other than a low life like Bill Barr — who I, as you know, I terminated because he was gutless, he wouldn’t do what you’re supposed to do — but everybody says this is a disgraceful indictment. It shouldn’t happen,” Trump told Roger Stone on Stone’s WABC radio show on June 11.