Former President Donald Trump slammed former Attorney General William Barr after Barr criticized him during a Fox News interview late this week, claiming that Barr had “no guts.”
Barr’s Friday afternoon remarks on Fox News came after the FBI raided the former president’s Florida home at Mar-a-Lago last month and recovered numerous classified documents and U.S. government records that belonged to the National Archives, according to the Department of Justice.
“Bill Barr had ‘no guts,’ and got ‘no glory,’” Trump wrote on social media. “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 started off OK as A.G., but faded fast – Didn’t have courage or stamina.”
“Former A.G. Bill Barr was fired long before I left the White House on January 20th,” Trump later added. “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, years later – A waste of time & money. The Laptop information should have been released BEFORE the Rigged Election, not after it, for the VOTERS TO SEE. He was petrified of the lunatic Dems & of being Impeached!”
Trump’s remarks about the former attorney general came after Barr dismissed the push from Trump’s legal team to appoint a “special master” to review the items that were seized during the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. Barr called it “a bit of a red herring.”
“The only documents that have been taken, it seems to me, that there’s a legitimate concern about keeping away from the government and insulating the government from would be documents relating to his private lawyer communications, him as an individual and his outside lawyers,” Barr said. “If there’s stuff like that, fine, identify it. There doesn’t appear to be much of it. I’m not sure you need a special master to identify it.”
“But what people are missing is that all the other documents taken, even if they claim to be executive privilege, either belong to the government because they’re government records — even if they’re classified, even if they’re subject to executive privilege, they still belong to the government and go to the Archives,” he continued. “And any other documents that were seized, like news clippings and other things that were in the boxes containing the classified information, those were seizable under the warrant because they show the conditions under which the classified information was being held. So, I think it’s a red herring … at this stage, since they have already gone through the documents, I think it’s a waste of time.”
Fox News host John Roberts asked Barr if there was “any legitimate reason” for Trump to be in possession of the documents that were recovered during the raid, including “top secret/SCI materials.”
“No. I can’t think of a legitimate reason why they should have been — could be taken out of the government, away from the government, if they’re classified,” Barr said. “I, frankly, am skeptical of this claim that ‘I declassified everything,’ because, frankly, I think it’s highly improbable. And, second, 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 — and show such recklessness, that it’s almost worse than taking the documents.”