Former President Donald Trump was quick to respond to his onetime attorney general William Barr on Friday after the latter said there was likely no legitimate reason for his former boss to have documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago.
In an interview with Fox News, Barr said that regardless of whether Trump declassified the documents, they still belonged to the government, meaning he should not have had them after he left office.
“I can’t think of a legitimate reason why they could be taken out of the government … if they’re classified,” Barr said. “If, in fact, [Trump] sort of stood over scores of boxes, not really knowing what was in them, and said, ‘I hereby declassify everything in here,’ that would be such an abuse. … It’s almost worse than taking the documents.”
‘I CAN’T THINK OF A LEGITIMATE REASON’ FOR TRUMP TO HOARD CLASSIFIED MATERIAL: BARR
The comments provoked a stinging rebuke from Trump via his Truth Social account.
“Former A.G. Bill Barr was fired long before I left the White House on January 20th,” he wrote. “He acted very slowly on the ‘No Collusion’ Mueller Report in that the FBI and ‘Justice’ had the ‘Laptop from Hell’ in their possession, which totally exonerated me long before Mueller’s decision came out, years later – A waste of time & money. The Laptop information should have been released BEFORE the Rigged Election, not after it, for the VOTERS TO SEE. He was petrified of the lunatic Dems & of being Impeached!”
Trump has denied any wrongdoing over the Aug. 8 search and seizure, while his representatives and allies have insisted he had a standing order to declassify the material brought to his lavish Palm Beach, Florida, resort. A trove of documents confiscated had material that ranged from “CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET information,” according to the Department of Justice.
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Barr and Trump have had a strained relationship since the former stepped down as attorney general, in part over the duo’s disagreement over whether the 2020 presidential election was rigged in President Joe Biden’s favor.
