Former Attorney General William Barr has been on a tear lately. He’s calling out his ex-boss for potential criminality and obstruction amid the evidence that Donald Trump absconded from the White House with boxfuls of government documents, including the most highly classified kind.
Barr’s truth-telling is welcome, especially since much of it is happening on Fox News, whose audience typically doesn’t get much of that about Trump. Yet the straight-talk would have been more welcome when Barr was in power, when it would have mattered more.
At times, the Fox hosts seem barely able to conceal their shock, as Barr puts the lie to every Trump complaint against the Justice Department in the wake of the FBI’s court-approved search of Mar-a-Lago. “People say this was unprecedented. Well, it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club, OK?,” Barr told Fox viewers last Friday.
Then and since, he’s said Trump repeatedly “deceived” and “jerked around” the government as it tried for more than a year to retrieve its property. He can’t think of a “legitimate reason why” Trump took the documents. He mocks Trump’s claim to have declassified everything, conjuring a wizard waving a wand over the boxed secrets.
As for whether a special master should review the material before the feds proceed with their investigation — as Trump got a Trump-appointed judge to order — Barr told the New York Times, “It’s a crock of s–.” He said the Justice Department should appeal — as it did Thursday — and predicted it would win.