Former Attorney General Bill Barr said the U.S. has a “very strong” criminal case against Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents and said the former president has himself to blame.
“He had no right to those documents,” Barr, who served as U.S. attorney general under Trump, said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation. “The government tried for over a year, quietly and with respect, to get them back, which was essential that they do, and he jerked them around. And he had no legal basis for keeping them.”
Barr dismissed suggestions by Trump and his supporters that the Presidential Records Act gave him a right to take the documents to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after leaving the White House.
He also lit into Trump’s personality, calling him a “narcissist” who acts like a “defiant nine-year-old kid” and whose “reckless conduct” puts the Republican agenda at risk.
The former president’s “conduct is indefensible,” Barr said.
Trump, the first former U.S. president charged with committing federal crimes, pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to the 37 counts the Justice Department brought against him. The indictment alleges that he willfully retained top-secret government documents and conspired to stymie officials’ efforts to recover them.
He later told supporters he “had every right to have these documents,” saying the boxes at Mar-a-Lago contained various “personal belongings” and he hadn’t had a chance to go through all of them.
Trump, who holds a wide lead over a growing field of rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, alleges that the Justice Department’s case is an attempt to derail his reelection bid. Special Counsel Jack Smith, speaking on June 9 after the indictment was unsealed, said the charges reflect the fact that U.S. laws “apply to everyone.”
Barr has repeatedly criticized Trump for his actions around the Mar-a-Lago documents, while also telling CBS “he has been the victim of unfair witch hunts in the past.” But the latest case is “entirely of his own making,” he said.
Asked whether he believes Trump should serve a prison sentence if convicted, Barr said: “You know, I don’t like the idea of a former president serving time in prison.”
