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Trump-era Attorney General Bill Barr said he believes former President Donald Trump would be “very exposed” legally if he played “any game” with documents marked as classified stashed in his Mar-a- Lago estate
In an interview with CBS News senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge on Thursday, Barr also said he thinks special counsel Jack Smith may come to charging decisions in the Trump investigations soon. this summer. Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Trump’s retention of documents, and his role in any alleged unlawful interference with the transition of power after the 2020 election or the certification of the Electoral College on Jan. 6, 2021.
Mar-a-Lago documents
Barr believes the special counsel’s investigations into Trump’s handling of classified documents, in particular, should be a cause for concern for the former president.
“It doesn’t quite go into intent or anything like that. It’s very clear that he had no business having those documents,” Barr told Herridge. “He’s been given a long time to get them back. And they’ve been subpoenaed. And I’ve told everybody that he’s not going to get in trouble, probably, just for getting them, like Biden I don’t think is going to get in trouble or Pence won’t be in trouble.”
“The problem is,” he continued, “what did he do after the government asked them to come back and subpoena them? And if there were any games being played there, he was going to be very exposed.”
Barr also thinks Trump’s claim in a recent CNN town hall that he is declassifying records as they leave the White House won’t resonate with the special counsel. Trump said at the town hall that he “took what I took, and declassified it.”
“I don’t think that argument will fly,” Barr responded. “I don’t think the idea that you know, he automatically — that they were somehow automatically declassified when they were put in the boxes. I don’t think that will fly.”
In a recent letter to Congress, Trump’s lawyers said the Justice Department should “stand up” to the investigation. They also suggested the former president’s departure from the White House after the election was quickly conducted and that the staff “simply sweep all the documents from the president’s desk and other places into boxes” that then moved to Florida.
Jan. 6
The Jan. 6 investigation will be “harder to establish a case,” because it could run up against First Amendment issues and also, much of the case relies on proving intent, Barr said. The former attorney general estimated that charging decisions in Smith’s investigation related to Trump, his actions on January 6 and the Mar-a-Lago documents could come as soon as this summer.
“My guess is that, and that’s all, I’m thinking, but I would think they want to do it before the end of the year. Maybe later in the summer or in the fall at the earliest. I’m looking forward to it,” Barr said. .
Trump has denied all wrongdoing in both investigations.
The Durham report
Barr, who appointed special counsel John Durham to look into the origins of the Russia investigation, said a successful investigation is not necessarily measured by how many people are prosecuted. One person pleaded guilty and two others were acquitted during the four-year investigation. Durham’s report, released Monday, found that the Justice Department and FBI “failed to uphold their essential mission of strict fidelity to the law” regarding events during the 2016 campaign.
“I have told everyone that it is dangerous to enter the business of saying that the standard is how many people you prosecute, because the goal here is to find out what happened and tell the story, to get to the bottom of it,” Barr said.
“I think accountability is like if people pay attention to the truth,” Barr added. “I mean, there’s been a lot of attention that the media has paid to all the little details that they think Trump is involved in colluding with Russia, which is all nonsense. And yet, we’ve had a two-year steady diet of this nonsense from the media. Now they have to pay attention to the actual facts in the report. And that’s what accountability looks like.”
Trump is predicted to lose the 2024 GOP primary race
Barr continues to believe that Trump will not win the Republican nomination next year. But he wasn’t sure who to do.
Nor is he convinced that stricter abortion laws in the states are a winning issue for Republicans.
Barr, who says he has always been a “pro-life Republican” and continues his work to support this position, is glad that Roe v. Wade.
“But there’s a difference between what people like me and other pro-lifers believe is, you know, the moral principle and what we actually represent in our particular secular laws,” he told Herridge. He added, “I think we have to be judicious in what we propose as a law because I think laws have to have a lot of support among the people, have to show some kind of consensus, and it has to be a solid solution.”
“We’re talking about rules and restrictions placed on other people,” Barr said. “And I think we have to be careful about that. It’s not about us showing our purity. It’s about finding something that allows us to live together in a stable way.”
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Kathryn Watson
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