“I’ve said all along, given two bad choices, I think it’s my duty to pick the person I think would do the least harm to the country, and in my mind, that’s — I will vote the Republican ticket, " Barr said in a Fox News appearance last year.
Barr, a lifelong Republican, served as Trump's second attorney general from 2019 to 2020. The Post recalls that Barr then resigned over the former president's 2020 election interference claims.
He then became a vocal critic of Trump's, writing an autobiography in which he trashes the former president and in cooperating with the House select committee investigation of the Jan. 6 riots.
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In Dec. 2023, Barr told Fox viewers he expects a second possible Trump administration to see the ex-president's “abuse of government power.”
“Trump needs people around him who will push back and help keep him on the straight and narrow,” Barr said in a Fox interview Saturday.
"During his first term, the main way that could be done is by pointing out to him how this would hurt his prospects for a second term,” Bar continued. “Once he wins a second term, I don’t know you know what considerations can be used to push back against bad ideas."
He made it clear in a December interview that Trump would pursue an “abuse of government power" if elected president again.
However, the interview with Bill Hemmer, Barr said that a choice between President Joe Biden and Trump was the difference between “Russian roulette” versus “national suicide.”
It's a dramatic difference from the story he was spinning last year.
“I have made clear that I strongly oppose Trump for the nomination and will not endorse Trump,” Barr also told NBC News at the time.
Barr's rocky relationship with the former president is detailed in former U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman's 2022 book "Holding the Line."
"Barr seemed always eager to be of service to the president—to be, as I said, the most valuable player in his cabinet. So, he wants to manage this situation. He has no way of knowing where it might go—and really, nobody does—but it looks to him as if it has the potential to spiral," the book says.
At one point, Berman even goes so far as to assert that Trump was able to use the DOJ as his own personal law firm and score settler.
In Jan. 2020, Barr came up with the idea of an "intake process in the field," which no one at the FBI or SDNY had ever heard of in their careers. By Feb. 2020, Barr was announcing the "intake process in the field" to the media. It would be a kind of collecting information and intelligence from [Rudy] Giuliani's Ukraine probe into Joe Biden's family, Barr explained.
The SDNY then spent a lot of time and effort dealing with Giuliani's henchmen, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, only to be told that suddenly "Rich Donoghue, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, who sat in Brooklyn; and Scott Brady, the US Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh," would be taking over the additional pieces of the investigation.
Berman also wrote that Trump used the Justice Department as his own personal law firm and Barr allowed it to happen.
