Donald Trump called his former Attorney General Bill Barr as having “no guts” and a “pathetic RINO” after Mr Barr went on Fox News to tear apart Mr Trump’s defence of having secret papers at Mar-a-Lago.
On Friday evening, Mr Barr took to the favourite network of the one-term president to defend the FBI raid on Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. He emphasised that his former boss’s attempt to explain away classified materials at his private residence was “unprecedented” and he couldn’t “think of a legitimate reason” why those documents would be there in the first place.
“I think the driver on this from the beginning was loads of classified information sitting in Mar-A-Lago,” Mr Barr said on the right-wing news network. “People say this was unprecedented, well, it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club, okay?”
Shortly after the interview aired, Mr Trump took to his own social media platform – Truth Social – to begin eviscerating Mr Barr’s character.
“Former A.G. Bill Barr was fired long before I left the White House on January 20th. He acted very slowly on the ‘No Collusion’ Mueller Report in that the FBI and ‘Justice’ had the ‘Laptop from Hell’ in their possession, which totally exonerated me long before Mueller’s decision came out,” the ex-president began in his first post on Friday night, before pivoting to a point he would pick in later posts that Mr Barr was allegedly “petrified of the lunatic Dems & of being Impeached!” he wrote.
Before arriving in Trump’s White House, Mr Barr had previously served in several leadership roles at the Justice Department including under President George H W Bush.
Though this resume was highly commended during his nomination to the role of attorney general back in 2018 by the then-president, Mr Trump has, like so many of his allies, done a complete 180.
While Mr Trump previously described Barr as “one of the most respected jurists in the country” and called him “a terrific man, a terrific person, a brilliant man,” this week he continued his rant against Barr on Truth Social by saying: “Bill Barr had ‘no guts,’ and got ‘no glory.’ He was a weak and pathetic RINO, who was so afraid of being Impeached that he became a captive to the Radical Left Democrats.
“Barr never fought the way he should have for Election Integrity, and so much else,” he said. The ex-president seemed to be referring back to one of the pair’s now famous disputes, where Mr Barr pushed back against his boss’s claim that there had been widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election and declared that there was no evidence to support this Big Lie.
Before closing, the former president did concede that Mr Barr had “started off OK as A.G.” but turned on that slight gesture of goodwill by stating that he “faded fast” and “Didn’t have courage or stamina.”
“People like that will never Make America Great Again!” he closed in his infamous rallying cry.
Mr Barr’s comments on Fox News arrived just hours after a Florida court released a full indexed list of what was found at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate during the FBI search last month.
Included in the trove of materials uncovered at the former president’s winter estate were more than 100 classified documents, over 10,000 documents by law the property of the US government, and mysteriously 90 empty folders that once held extremely sensitive documents. These documents were also interspersed with what the indexed list only described as photos, press clippings, and magazines.
Mr Trump has both claimed at times that those boxes containing classified items were planted by FBI officials and, perhaps unintentionally, at other times admitted to having moved some of the items there himself.
His argument of declassifying those materials has been viewed as ineffective, namely by former allies like Mr Barr who said that line of reasoning was “reckless”.
“If in fact he sort of stood over scores of boxes, not really knowing what was in them, and said ‘I hereby declassify everything in here,’ that would be such an abuse, and ― that shows such recklessness that it’s almost worse than taking the documents,” Mr Barr said on Friday night.
Mr Barr was nominated to attorney general by the former president in 2018 but resigned from his position shortly after Mr Trump was beaten in the 2020 election by Mr Biden and he began to proffer up the Big Lie to his supporters.
