Comment In his sharpest criticism of his former boss, former Attorney General William P. Barr said there was no reason for classified documents to be in Donald Trump’s Florida home after he was no longer president. “No, I can’t think of a legitimate reason why they could be removed from the government, away from the government, if they’re classified,” Barr said in an interview with Fox News that aired Friday. Barr’s comment comes after federal officials entered Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and home last month with a warrant to retrieve classified documents, a move the former president said was improper and politically motivated. “People are saying this was unprecedented,” Barr said Friday, “but it’s also unprecedented for a President to take all this classified information and put it in a country club, OK?” Barr also rejected the explanation by Trump and his allies that the former president had declassified entire batches of documents. “If he actually stood over a bunch of boxes, not really knowing what was in there, and said, ‘I’m declassifying everything in here,’ that would be such abuse and so reckless that it’s almost worse than getting the paperwork,” he said. the bar. “What people are missing,” Barr told Fox News, is that the documents, regardless of whether they were classified, “still belong to the government and go on record.” The other documents seized, such as news clippings, were “seizable under the warrant because they show the conditions under which the classified information was held,” Barr said. Barr also said the administration had gone to extraordinary lengths to work with Trump’s team before entering his Florida home. “They jawed for a year. They were deceived by the voluntary actions that were taken,” he said, referring to false claims by Trump’s lawyers that all the necessary material had been turned over. Then the government “went and got a subpoena. They were cheated about it, they feel, and the record, the facts are beginning to show that they were shaken.” “So,” Barr asked rhetorically, “how long have they been waiting?” Although Barr also said that “it’s clearly stupid what happened and inexplicable,” he added that it was unclear whether the actions should be prosecuted, considering, among other things, that the documents were eventually recovered. The latest court filing on Friday showed Trump shuffled classified and unclassified material into boxes at his Florida residence and had dozens of empty folders marked “classified,” according to an inventory list that detailed what FBI agents found. when they searched. Mar-a-Lago last month. Barr’s comments on Fox News — one of the outlets Trump is known to follow closely — represent an escalation in Barr’s condemnation of his former boss’s behavior. Barr faced a backlash from Trump after he told him there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election. This created a deep rift between the nation’s top law enforcement officer and the president and ultimately led to Barr’s abrupt exit from the administration. Trump and his allies have since attacked Barr for not doing more to overturn the election results. Barr later gave damning testimony to the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters who tried to stop the certification of the presidential election. Barr testified that Trump was “out of touch with reality” and obsessed with fanciful notions of voter fraud.
