Former attorney general Bill Barr on Friday said the facts surrounding the FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence are beginning to show that the Department of Justice was being “jerked around” by the former president as the Feds sought to obtain classified government records.
Barr spoke directly to Republican outcries about the nature of the “unprecedented” search of a former president, offering a counterpoint: “It’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club.”
“And how long is the government going to try to get that back? They jaw bone for a year. They were deceived on the voluntary actions taken. They then went and got a subpoena. They were deceived on that, they feel, and the facts are starting to show that they were being jerked around. And so how long, you know, how long do they wait?” Barr said in an interview on Fox News.
Barr’s bluntness in talking about the former president isn’t new. He’s been an open critic of Trump, and his testimony — dismissing the former president’s lies about the 2020 election — was featured heavily in the Jan. 6 select committee’s early hearings. But his scathing comments on Friday, bolstered by his expertise as the former attorney general, come as more details surface about the nature of the recovered records.
Bill Barr: The facts show the Feds were being ‘jerked around’ by Trump – POLITICO