Bill Barr: Jack Smith will probably 'pull the trigger' and indict Trump for Jan. 6, too

Former President Donald Trump's one-time attorney general, William Barr, suggested that special counsel Jack Smith is now likely to indict him in the January 6 investigation, reported the New York Sun.

This comes after the special counsel already indicted the former president on 37 charges related to stashing boxes of highly classified national defense information at his Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida, along with his longtime valet and body man Walt Nauta, who allegedly helped him move around and conceal the boxes from federal investigators.

During his interview over the weekend with CBS News' Robert Costa, "America’s former top law enforcement official mused that charges for January 6 'will be a hard case to make' but that he nevertheless 'expects' Mr. Smith will 'pull the trigger' on an indictment this summer," reported A.R. Hoffman. "Those comments came in an interview where Mr. Barr called his old boss a 'fundamentally flawed person who engages in reckless conduct that leads to situations, calamitous situations, like this, which are very disruptive and hurt any political cause he’s associated with.' He also called Mr. Trump’s behavior 'indefensible' and compared him to a 'nine-year-old kid.'"

During that same interview, Barr openly questioned Trump's mental health, saying America "can't be a therapy session" for a single "troubled man."

"General Barr’s prediction of an indictment related to January 6 — Mr. Smith’s second purview is to investigate 'whether any person or entity unlawfully interfered with' the 'transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election or the certification of the Electoral College vote' — suggests that Palm Beach could be the beginning, but not the end, of Mr. Trump’s federal legal travails," said the report. "The prediction of charges from General Barr carries added weight due his comments to the Associated Press in the days after the 2020 election that 'to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.' Mr. Barr would later tell NBC News that 'I told him that all this stuff was bulls*** about election fraud.' Mr. Trump fired him before January 6."

During his tenure under Trump, Barr, who also led the Department of Justice under former President George H. W. Bush, developed a reputation for interfering in investigations that embarrassed Republicans, particularly trying to spin the Mueller Report and appointing a special counsel to run an ill-fated investigation into the legitimacy of having conducted that probe in the first place. He was a chief proponent of so-called Unitary Executive Theory, which argues for vastly fewer checks and balances against the power of the president. But Barr gradually fell out with Trump over his increasingly wild conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.