Attorney General William Barr compared the leadership styles of President Trump and former President George H.W. Bush, two men he has served as the nation’s top law enforcement official.
“I love both,” Barr said during an interview with Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York. “H.W. was more low-key. He had a very strong interest in foreign policy, which he really focused his attention on.”
Trump, Barr said, has a more open mind when consulting with advisers.
“He’ll bring people in to explain things to him,” Barr said. “He’ll reach down and bring the experts in, and he listens.”
Barr, 69, served as attorney general for Bush from 1991 until 1993. Bush died last year at the age of 94.
Trump’s longest-serving attorney general during his first three years in office, Barr has been criticized by Democrats and members of the media for acting more like Trump’s lawyer than that of the American people.
After the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, Barr determined Trump did not obstruct justice as Democrats had claimed. Mueller accused Bar of failing to “fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of his report.
Democrats held an empty-chair hearing in the House Judiciary Committee after Barr refused to show up.
“History will judge us for how we face this challenge,” Chairman Jerrold Nadler said that day. “We will all be held accountable. If he does not provide this committee with information it demands and the respect that it deserves, Mr. Barr’s moment of accountability will come soon enough.”
Barr again sparked controversy late last year when he blasted top FBI and Department of Justice officials for spying on Trump’s 2016 campaign for what he said was “the thinnest of suspicions.”
Later in the interview with Dolan, Barr bemoaned what he called a “militant secular effort” to undermine religion in America.
“The problem today is not that religious people are trying to impose their views on nonreligious people,” he said. “It’s the opposite — it’s that militant secularists are trying to impose their values on religious people, and they’re not accommodating the freedom of religion of people of faith.”
