Ex-Attorney General William Barr Urges GOP to Move On From Trump
By: Sadie Gurman (WSJ)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Former Attorney General William Barr writes in a new book that former President Donald Trump has "shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed," and that it is time for Republicans to focus on rising new leaders in the party.
The release of the former attorney general's 600-page book, "One Damn Thing After Another," is coming as Mr. Trump, who remains the GOP's dominant figure, contemplates another presidential run. Mr. Barr writes that he was convinced that Mr. Trump could have won re-election in 2020 if he had "just exercised a modicum of self-restraint, moderating even a little of his pettiness."
“The election was not ‘stolen,’” Mr. Barr writes. “Trump lost it.” Mr. Barr urges conservatives to look to “an impressive array of younger candidates” who share Mr. Trump’s agenda but not his “erratic personal behavior.” He didn’t mention any of those candidates by name.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr. Barr’s book. Last summer the former president called his former attorney general “a disappointment in every sense of the word.”
Mr. Barr’s memoir adds to a growing list of books by senior Trump administration officials and journalists about the former president. The recollections and conclusions by Mr. Barr are notable because he was one of Mr. Trump’s most powerful cabinet secretaries and was once such a close ally that Democrats accused him of acting more like the president’s defense attorney than an apolitical law-enforcement official.
Mr. Barr, a respected figure in Washington conservative circles, returned to head the Justice Department in February 2019 after Mr. Trump ousted his first attorney general, former Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican. Mr. Barr served in the same post at the end of the George H.W. Bush administration and was a corporate lawyer in between.
During much of his time in the Trump administration, some said Mr. Barr protected the president at the expense of the Justice Department’s independence, especially over his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Mr. Barr issued his own summary of Mr. Mueller’s investigative report depicting the results in a way that Mr. Mueller and others described as misleading or overly favorable to Mr. Trump. He also worked in the ensuing months to undermine some of the prosecutions spawned by the Mueller investigation. An example is his decision to drop the criminal case against Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser.
Mr. Barr has said that he intervened to correct what he saw as overreach by the prosecutors and flaws in the department’s approach to those cases, a stance he maintains in his book.
“Predictably our motion to dismiss the charges led to an election-year media onslaught, flogging the old theme that I was doing this as a favor to Trump,” Mr. Barr writes. “But I concluded the handling of the Flynn matter by the FBI had been an abuse of power that no responsible AG could let stand.”
Mr. Barr also describes times when he was privately frustrated by Mr. Trump’s aggressive style and constant comments on the Justice Department’s work.
He provides the details of a contentious meeting on Dec. 1 in the Oval Office hours after Mr. Barr said publicly that there wasn’t evidence of widespread voter fraud in the presidential election that could reverse Joe Biden ’s victory, contradicting Mr. Trump’s claims.
“This is killing me—killing me. This is pulling the rug right out from under me,” Mr. Trump shouted at Mr. Barr, according to the book. “He stopped for a moment and then said, ‘You must hate Trump. You would only do this if you hate Trump.’”
Mr. Barr writes that he reminded Mr. Trump that he had “sacrificed a lot personally to come in to help you when I thought you were being wronged,” but that the Justice Department had not been able to verify any of his legal team’s assertions about mass voter fraud.
Mr. Trump then launched into a list of other grievances he had with his attorney general: that the federal prosecutor Mr. Barr ordered to review the origins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Russia probe that preceded the Mueller report hadn’t released his findings before the 2020 election, and that Mr. Barr declined to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey after a department watchdog rebuked him for sharing memos that contained sensitive information about his interactions with Mr. Trump, a complaint brought up repeatedly by the president.
Mr. Barr countered by offering to submit his resignation, according to the book. “Accepted!” Mr. Trump yelled, banging his palm on the table. “‘Leave and don’t go back to your office. You are done right now. Go home!’” White House lawyers persuaded Mr. Trump not to follow through with Mr. Barr’s ouster.
Mr. Barr resigned a few weeks later, bringing a tumultuous end to his time in office.
“The absurd lengths to which he took his ‘stolen election’ claim led to the rioting on Capitol Hill,” Mr. Barr writes.
Tags
Who is online
444 visitors
The 608 page memoir is titled: One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General
To be released in March
Trump was the first President since Herbert Hoover to lose the House, Senate and Presidency in 2 years!
He lost the Presidency in 2 years? Think again.
I'd be more concerned with this:
It's a shame when partisan politics can prevent a simple google search.
Perhaps he meant in the 2020 election when the Democrats held the House but the Republicans held the Senate and the White House, but all three went to the Democrats after the 2020 elections.
But he would be wrong in saying the first president since Hoover.
The 2008 election put Obama in the White House and put Democrats in charge of both the House and the Senate.
The 2010 election put the Republicans in charge in the House leaving the Democrats in charge of the Seaate and the White House.
The 2012 elections kept this same status.
The 2014 elections kept the Republicans in charge of the House and moved the Senate to Republican Control.
The 2016 elections had the Republicans in charge of the House, Senate and the White House.
Going back to the 2008 elections, the Democrats held the House and the Senate and President Obama was elected to the White House.
So using the same logic, there have been plenty of times where this happened since Hoover. But hey, gotta keep on hating the Orange Man... geeze
You get the A today. Well done!
Yes, two years. The House in 2018 and the Senate and Presidency in 2020. In the space on two years Trump lost all three branches...
Look at it this way, Trump may have sung his "Swan song" as Arthur Godfrey once famously said.
You don't want him to get the nomination and neither do I.
Except that was also over the course of two elections. Now who else lost both the House and the Senate and the White House over the course of two elections? You don't have to go far back in history to see.
And to keep things straight, it was only two branches. The third branch is the Judicial Branch which doesn't change based on elections.