Former Attorney General Bill Barr is “adamantly against” the notion of his former boss, President Donald Trump, returning to the Oval Office.
While promoting his new book “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General” at a May 5 event hosted by The City Club of Cleveland, Barr said it would be a “tragedy” if Trump won the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, though he added that he did not think that would be the case.
“We have other serious candidates who have most of the same policies and don’t have all the baggage,” he noted.
Barr, who served as attorney general under both the George H.W. Bush and Trump presidencies, had a falling out with the latter in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump believes he rightfully won.
“He went off half-cocked and there was no getting him back on the rails,” Barr recounted. “And the stuff about it being stolen, to me, once I started looking at it, understanding what had happened, it was clearly wrong. And I wasn’t going to be a part of it.”
As a result, Barr resigned in December 2020 and has been an outspoken critic of the former president in the years since.
Working for Trump
When asked Friday by Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera, who attended the Cleveland event, as to whether he believed Trump was fit to hold office, Barr responded that Trump would be “the last person” who could execute and achieve the policies he promotes.
“He does not have the discipline; he does not have the ability for strategic thinking or setting priorities, or how to get things done in the system,” he asserted. “It is a horror show when he’s left to his own devices. So, you may want his policies, but Trump will not deliver Trump policies.”
Despite that criticism, Barr said that, up until the 2020 election, he felt that the Trump administration had been largely successful in accomplishing its goals.
“I was satisfied with the performance,” he noted, adding that he thought Trump had been treated unfairly by the press and federal law enforcement in relation to the Department of Justice’s Russia probe.
