“People say it’s unprecedented,” Barr said Friday, “but for a president to take all this classified information and put it in a country club is unprecedented, right?”
Barr also rejected the explanation put forward by Trump and his allies, saying the former president has declassified entire volumes of documents.
“If he’s actually standing over a bunch of boxes and not knowing what’s in there and saying, ‘I hereby classify everything here,’ that’s a show of abuse and recklessness that’s worse than taking that. Documents,” Barr said.
“What people are missing,” Barr told Fox News, is that regardless of whether the documents are classified, “they still belong to the government and go to the archives.” Barr said other seized documents, such as news clippings, were “seizable under a warrant because they show the conditions under which classified information was held.”
Barr also said the government had gone to extraordinary lengths to cooperate with Trump’s team before entering his Florida home.
“They’ve been jaw-dropping for a year. They’ve been duped by the voluntary actions that were taken,” he said, referring to false claims by Trump’s lawyers that all the necessary materials had been handed over. Then the government “went in and got a subpoena. They were duped into that, they feel, the records, the facts that they’re being surrounded by.” are starting to show.
“So,” Barr asked rhetorically, “how long have they been waiting?”
Although Barr said that “what happened was clearly stupid and inexplicable,” he said, among other things, that it was unclear whether the actions warranted criminal prosecution given that the documents were eventually recovered.
The latest court filing was Friday showed Trump mixed classified and unclassified items in boxes at his Florida home, and there were dozens of empty folders marked “classified,” according to an inventory that detailed what FBI agents recovered when they last searched Mar-a-Lago. month.
Barr’s comments on Fox News — one of the outlets Trump is known to watch closely — indicate Barr condemned his former employer’s behavior. Barr faced backlash after telling Trump there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election. It created a deep rift between the nation’s top law enforcement official and the president, and ultimately led to the bar. Exit suddenly Administration. Since then, Trump and his allies have attacked Barr for not doing more to change the election results.
Later, the Jan. 6, 2021, Barr gave damning testimony to a House committee investigating the attack on the US capital. Barr testified that Trump “Detached from reality” and obsessed with fantastic ideas about voter fraud.
“Total coffee junkie. Tv ninja. Unapologetic problem solver. Beer expert.”