2 years ago
Former Attorney General William Barr on Sunday said progressives are “dangerous” to the country and indicated that he could support Donald Trump should he win the Republican nomination in 2024.
Barr said on NBC's "Meet The Press" that he’d favor a generic Republican nominee over the former president if he decides to run again. But when host Chuck Todd asked whether he would support Trump over Joe Biden in a potential presidential rematch, the former attorney general said: “Well, I think there are a lot of American people right now that might prefer having him back in office than Biden.”
The former head of the Justice Department resigned in 2020 as the then-president spun lies and conspiracies in his failed bid to stay in office.
Pressed further on whether he could support Trump after presenting the former president as unfit for office in his recent book, Barr described elections as a “binary choice” that can be about the “lesser of two evils” and claimed that “the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is dangerous for the United States.”
The former attorney general also responded to criticism of comments he made in 2020, months before the election, that liberals were “projecting” when they claimed Trump would try to seize power to stay in office. He said he stood by those comments, adding that he had no basis before the election for thinking Trump would attempt to overturn it.
“I saw no sign of a plan before the election to stay in office regardless of the outcome,” Barr said.
He went on to say that he thought Trump’s “obnoxious” behavior in the run-up to the election alienated voters, and that he thought Trump would lose the 2020 election before the votes were tallied. “I was actually surprised it was as close as it was,” he added.
In Barr’s critiques of the former president, detailing how he surrounded himself with yes men and claiming that accomplishing things with him could be like “wrestling an alligator,” he still said he’d be surprised to see Trump indicted by a grand jury over his post-election actions.
Todd asked Barr about an often-cited incident in which Trump called a Georgia official and urged him to find the exact number of ballots he needed to win the state. Barr said he “listened to the whole call” and simply felt the former president was indicating that he thought there must be 11,780 votes among all the fraud he said there was.
Asked about whether Trump intimidated the Georgia secretary of state during the same call, Barr said, “I thought that was very heavy-handed,” but said to “let the process in Georgia work.”
“They're going to get all the facts,” he said, adding that “I disapproved of his behavior after the election and made it clear from the very beginning that I did.”
English (US)