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In his strongest criticism of his former boss, former Attorney General William P. Barr said there is no reason why classified documents should have been at Donald Trump’s personal residence in Florida after he already wasn’t president
“No, I can’t think of a legitimate reason why they can be taken out of government, away from government, if they’re classified,” Barr said in an interview with Fox News that aired Friday. Barr’s comments come after federal officials entered Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and home last month with a warrant issued to retrieve classified documents, a move the former president said was inappropriate and politically motivated. .
“People say 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 dismissed the explanation advanced by Trump and his allies that the former president had declassified entire batches of the documents.
“If, in fact, he stood over dozens of boxes, not really knowing what was in them, and said, ‘I hereby declassify everything here,’ that would be an abuse and show such recklessness that it is almost worse than taking the documents Barr said.
“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 in the archives.” Other documents that were seized, such as news clippings, were “seizable under the warrant because they show the conditions under which classified information was kept,” Barr said.
Barr also said the government had made an extraordinary effort to work cooperatively with Trump’s team before entering his Florida home.
“They were jaw-dropped for a year. They were misled by the voluntary actions 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 tricked into it, they feel that, and the record, the facts are starting to show that they were being played around.”
“So,” Barr asked rhetorically, “how long are they waiting?”
While Barr also said that “it’s clearly nonsense what happened and inexplicable,” he added that it was unclear whether the actions should be prosecuted, given, among other things, that the documents were finally recover
The latest court filings on Friday showed Trump mixed classified and unclassified materials in boxes at his Florida residence and had dozens of empty folders marked “classified,” according to an inventory list he described with more detail what FBI agents recovered when they searched. Mar-a-Lago last month.
Barr’s comments on Fox News, one of the outlets Trump watches closely, represent an escalation in Barr’s condemnation of his former boss’ behavior. Barr faced backlash from Trump after he told him there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election. That created a deep rift between the nation’s top law enforcement official and the president and , ultimately, led Barr to abruptly leave 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 declared that Trump was “out of touch with reality” and obsessed with fanciful notions of voter fraud.