'He brought it entirely on himself': Bill Barr says 'anybody' who did what Trump did would go to prison
As former President Donald Trump continues to insist he is the victim of a witch hunt in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, one of the former president's one-time strongest legal allies is continuing to sound the alarm that he needs to be prosecuted: former Attorney General William Barr.
In an interview with Steve Inskeep on NPR's "Morning Edition," Barr reiterated this stance — and demolished all of the claims from the MAGA world that Trump is being treated unfairly.
"There have been cases in the past where, I think, his enemies in the left have gone after him obsessively and unfairly and told lies about him, and that he was, in that sense, a victim," said Barr. "But in this case, I think, he was not. This he provoked himself. He brought it entirely on himself. And in a pattern that is also typical of Trump, which is going to excess and doing reckless things with the idea that he can get away with it."
Barr, who led the Justice Department under both Trump and former President George H. W. Bush, is a hardcore conservative who pioneered so-called "unitary executive theory," the idea that checks and balances do not apply to the designated functions of the president — and he went to bat to sweep legal controversies for Trump, like the Mueller Report, under the rug. But he has made very clear that when Trump stole boxes of top secret national defense information, and moved them around his South Florida country club to conceal them from investigators and his own attorneys, he broke the law.
"The government got videos and other information that he was cheating, that he was deceiving the government and still not giving everything back," Barr continued. "So I don't think the government had much of a choice at that point but to execute a search to retrieve the documents. And everyone presented that as some outrage, like, why didn't you ask him? Well, it turns out they had asked him for a year and a half. Why didn't you get a subpoena? Turns out they did get a subpoena."
"The fact is that anybody, a general or a former diplomat or anyone who did this would be prosecuted and go to prison, okay?" Barr concluded.
Listen to the full interview below or at this link.
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