Former Attorney General William Barr blasted his one-time boss Donald Trump in a column for The Free Press on Tuesday — even as he proclaimed the state decisions in Colorado and Maine to remove the former president from the ballot are "unconstitutional."
"I am firmly opposed to Trump’s candidacy," wrote Barr. "While I think it is critical the Biden administration be beaten at the polls, Trump is not the answer. He is not capable of winning the decisive victory Republicans need to advance conservative principles. And his truculent, petty, and toxic persona — unconstrained by any need to face the voters again — will damage the country."
However, he continued, he also believes attempts to disqualify him from the ballot will be "destructive of our political order" — and urges the Supreme Court to nullify the decisions quickly.
"As a legal matter, states do not have the power to enforce the disqualification provision of the Fourteenth Amendment by using their own ad hoc procedures to find that an individual has engaged in an insurrection," said Barr. "If the Justice Department, in pursuing its criminal case, had found that Trump had engaged in insurrection, it would be another story. But it has not."
The exact mechanism for the Insurrection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and whether state officials have power to execute it, has never been settled in court. However, Barr's interpretation that a criminal conviction is necessary to rule a candidate disqualified is itself controversial and disputed by many other legal authorities, including conservative jurist Michael Luttig.
Other legal scholars have noted that none of the Confederate defectors disqualified from holding office when the amendment was originally passed in the 1860s were criminally convicted for their roles in the Civil War.
Barr, who previously served as attorney general under George H.W. Bush before reprising the role in the Trump administration, was an early proponent of "unitary executive theory," or the idea that the president's powers aren't subject to checks by the other branches. He was frequently accused of weaponizing the Justice Department for Trump's political ends, including distorting the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 election; however, he broke sharply with Trump over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, after which the former president turned on him.
