AG Barr likely feared revealing how much Trump interferes in DOJ matters: MSNBC security analyst

When Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) grilled Attorney General William Barr about his support for President Donald Trump's conspiracy theory about the Justice Department "spying" on the Trump campaign, Barr became cagey about giving an exact answer.

On Thursday's edition of MSNBC's "The Beat," national security analyst Natasha Bertrand offered her take on why Barr wasn't more forthcoming.

"I would also add the big New York Times piece from this morning outlining how Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal attorney, has been really pushing the Justice Department to go hard on hunter Biden's ties to Ukraine," said Bertrand. "A report that said that Giuliani was actually talking to the president about pressuring the Justice Department to look into these ties."

"So the idea that the president, who has in the past pressured people in the Justice Department — his attorney general, the deputy attorney general — to go down investigative avenues, whether it's Clinton or Comey or the investigators in 2016 and beyond who investigated the Russian interference," Bertrand continued. "It just seems virtually implausible and impossible that he wouldn't have had these conversations with Bill Barr, and I think that is why Barr hesitated at the hearing yesterday. He knows that he could not say 'no, I have never had a conversation with anyone in the White House about certain avenues of inquiry that they want me to go down,' because that would have been a lie."

"So there are many, many things that the president would like to see investigated," Bertrand continued, "So there's a ton out there that I think he would have to say to the attorney general."

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