Former Attorney General Bill Barr pushed back against a Fox News anchor during an interview after she questioned whether the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago could have been avoided, saying that he believed that the raid was likely “reasonable” from the perspective of federal investigators.
“People say this was unprecedented, but it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club,” Barr said on Friday. “How long is the government going to try to get that back?”
“They were deceived on the voluntary actions taken. They then went and got a subpoena, they were deceived on that,” he added. “The facts are starting to show that they were being jerked around and so how long do they wait?”
Conservatives have widely criticized the August 8 raid, accusing the DOJ of politicizing its investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of presidential records and lambasting federal authorities for taking the unprecedented action of conducting a search warrant at a former president’s home.
On Friday, Barr told Fox News that he thought Trump’s request for a special master to be appointed over the review of evidence seized from Mar-a-Lago was a “red herring,” speculating there wouldn’t be many documents that would be covered under attorney-client privilege.
“I’m not sure you need a special master to identify it,” Barr said. “At this stage, since they’ve already gone through the documents, I think it’s a waste of time.”
Barr noted that all the documents taken, even if they are subject to executive privilege, either belong to the government or are seizable under the FBI’s search warrant because “they show the conditions under which the classified information was being held.”
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Barr, who headed the DOJ under Trump, said that for investigators to have “taken things to the current point,” he believed that there must have been “pretty good evidence” that a crime was committed at Mar-a-Lago.
“The driver on this [raid], from the beginning, was, you know, loads of classified information sitting in Mar-a-Lago,” the former attorney general said.
On Friday, Barr said he was “skeptical” of Trump’s claims that he had declassified the documents before taking them from the White House to his home in Florida.
“I think it’s highly improbable,” he said about the materials being declassified. “And second, if in fact he sort of stood over scores of boxes, not really knowing what was in them and said, ‘I hereby declassify everything in here,’ that would be such an abuse and shows such recklessness that it’s almost worse than taking the documents.”
Barr, who was widely viewed as one of Trump’s most loyal officials, has previously speculated that the evidence against his former boss is “building.”
Last month, Barr said the recent grand jury subpoenas of high-ranking Trump administration officials were “significant” and suggested that federal prosecutors were “taking a hard look at the group at the top, including the president and the people immediately around him who were involved in this.”