Bill Barr strongly defended the Department of Justice’s handling of the top secret documents case against former President Donald Trump, saying that the feds were being “jerked around.”
The conservative former attorney general said on Friday that the evidence suggests that authorities took every reasonable step to recover the top secret documents before obtaining a search warrant.
“The facts are beginning to show that they were being jerked around,” Barr said on Fox News. “How long do they wait?”
Barr shrugged off the claim by MAGA apologists that the FBI should have avoided searching Mar-a-Lago because no former president’s home has ever been searched.
“People say this is unprecedented,” Trump’s onetime close ally said. “Well, it’s also unprecedented for a (former) president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club, OK?”
Barr's interview amounts to a powerful vote of confidence for the actions of current Attorney General Merrick Garland in the Mar-a-Lago case.
Even though Barr has already broken with Trump, his backing of Garland is a body blow to Republican efforts to paint the search as the work of out-of-control partisan Democratic prosecutors.
Barr even said he believes prosecutors have far more evidence that Trump was seeking to thwart the probe than the public knows.
“How raw is the evidence of deceit and obstruction?“ Barr said. “I personally think for them to have taken things to the current point, they probably have pretty strong evidence.”
Prosecutors say they launched the investigation after realizing Trump took hundreds of top secret government documents when he left the White House. He voluntarily handed back a few and gave some more back when the feds issued a subpoena.
When investigators discovered he had held on to many more documents in defiance of the subpoena, they obtained the warrant for the Aug. 8 search from a federal judge.
Barr mocked Trump’s absurd claim that he had issued a blanket declassification order for all the documents, no matter how secret or sensitive.
“That would be such an abuse,” Barr said, shaking his head in disbelief at his ex-boss. “It would show such recklessness. It might be worse than taking the documents.”
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