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Bill Barr said he didn’t think Donald Trump would win the presidency in 2022 because the former president is petty and divisive, and that he wouldn’t support Donald Trump as commander-in-chief.
Barr, 71, was interviewed by CNN’s Jake Tapper on Friday, and during the interview, he criticized Trump’s temperament and said he knew Trump would lose if he ran for president in 2020.
“He’s not my idea of a president,” Barr said. “I felt he was going to lose the election because he was not controlling himself.”
“He was allowing this pettiness to come through, and I feel it’s one of his great failings.”
According to him, while Republicans may be able to succeed in winning the presidency in 2024, but it will be possible only without the assistance of Trump.
“I think the Republicans can win a decisive majority, but I don’t think we can do it with Trump,” he added. “He’s just too divisive a candidate.”
“He’s not my idea of a president and I felt he was going to lose the election because he was not controlling himself.”
Former Attorney General Bill Barr joins @jaketapper to discuss his memoir highlighting his role in helping confront former President Trump. pic.twitter.com/6vPrRRNCai
— CNN (@CNN) March 11, 2022
This comment from Barr comes after he released his memoir, “One Damn Thing After Another,” earlier this week, in which he characterized Trump’s behavior as “erratic and manic.”.
Although many people saw Trump as a strong candidate, the former attorney general noted that his actions have become something to tolerate rather than celebrate, rather than something to celebrate.
“I think a lot of people agree with his policies. They like his strength and his directness,” Barr said, “But to the extent they support them, it’s despite these – this kind of obnoxious behavior, it’s not because of it.”
Though Barr has said he will support Republicans who run against Trump, if Trump takes the GOP nomination, he will most likely back his former boss.
Additionally, he maintained unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 elections would be vulnerable to fraud due to the advent of mail voting, while also condemning Donald Trump’s claims that the election will be stolen by rampant voter fraud.
He then described an incident in the White House when the president yelled at his staff that they were all losers as he was fed up with protests and violence in the United States following George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
The White House spokeswoman Liz Harrington responded to CNN’s report following the interview by saying, “it’s not surprising Barr would try to work against the will of the people, that’s what he did in 2020.”
It is not the first time Barr and Trump have had differences after the attorney general said he held Trump ‘morally responsible’ for the January 6 riot but would not charge him if he were still in office.
On Sunday night, Lester Holt of NBC News conducted a wide-ranging interview William Barr, in which he discussed his last days as president and the debunked claim that the 2016 presidential election was rigged.
“I do think he was responsible in the broad sense of that word, in that it appears that part of the plan was to send this group up to the Hill,” Barr told Holt in an interview promoting the former AG’s new memoir he’s been pushing for the last week or two. “I think the whole idea was to intimidate Congress. And I think that that was wrong.”
Although Barr did not prosecute Trump when he was the head of U.S. law enforcement, he would be prosecuted now if he were still in that role.
“I haven’t seen anything to say he was legally responsible for it in terms of incitement,”‘ he told NBC News.
As recently as May, the National Archives and Records Administration discovered that Trump took home 15 boxes of classified records, but Barr declined to prosecute him when asked.
“To tell you the truth, I probably wouldn’t,” Barr said. “The whole classification system is done under executive order. It’s the president. The president decides everything.”
In an excerpt from the memoir, Barr recalled a dramatic moment when former President Trump placed his hand on his desk and ordered him to leave without delay since he had refused to acknowledge the allegations of election fraud.
In the tense meeting with President Trump at the White House, Barr reportedly said the following: “Our mission is to investigate and prosecute actual fraud. The fact is, we have looked at the major claims your people are making, and they are bullsh***.”
The Associated Press was told by Attorney General William Barr that the Justice Department investigated the claims, but did not uncover widespread issues that would cause the outcome to be overturned.
“But you did not have to say that”‘ Trump shouted, according to Barr. “You could have just said, ‘No comment.’ This is killing me – killing me. This is pulling the rug out from under me.”
Speaking in the third person, the president said, “You must hate Trump. You would only do this if you hate Trump.”
In early 2020, Barr resigned from his post – just weeks before the end of Trump’s term – in a move that has since been revealed to be a sign of turmoil within the White House over Trump’s efforts to press his fraud claims despite the fact that they had been thrown out by various courts.
“And, you know, it was wrong to be shoveling it out the way his team was. And he started asking me about different theories. And I had the answers. I was able to tell him, ‘This is wrong because of this,’”Barr said.
Source: The Republic Brief