Former Attorney General Bill Barr told CNN on Thursday that the Justice Department investigation into classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago poses the biggest legal risk to former President Donald Trump.
Barr called out Republicans who complained that the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago instead of simply asking the former president to return the documents.
"It turns out… that they jawboned him for a year-and-a-half," Barr said on Thursday. "They did subpoena him. And I think the real question there is not whether he kept the documents and had them in Mar-a-Lago, so much as, once this was raised with him, and it was clear that he was being asked to return the documents as the government's property, that games were played for quite a long time."
Ultimately Trump had documents that "he shouldn't have had" and he was subpoenaed, Barr said.
"If he doesn't provide them and hides them from the government, there's both an underlying offense and there's the offense of obstruction," he said. "But the thing that I think actually brings this — that raises this and makes it a more significant threat is the obstruction aspect of it."
There is a "high risk" of an obstruction charge, Barr said. "I suspect that they have some evidence that they would consider to be strong evidence of obstruction. And that's why I feel that this is probably the most threatening case."
Pressed on why he believed it was a strong case, Barr noted that the judge overseeing the case already allowed the DOJ to pierce attorney-client privilege in Trump's attorneys' testimony, "which was to say there was evidence of a crime here."
He added that reports suggest the DOJ has "people who have cooperated with the government and may be able to establish that he well knew he had not delivered all the documents back to the government."
Barr said that the DOJ still has to decide whether to prosecute Trump if they have enough evidence but the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith suggests that "if the facts are there to sustain a case, that it's a supportable case that would ordinarily be indicted, that they have made the decision to indict it, and that they're not going to tank the case because of these discretionary considerations."
