OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Former Attorney General William Barr, who has been critical of his one-time boss in recent days and in a new book, revealed in an interview Monday whether he would cast a ballot for former President Donald Trump if he were to run again in 2024, as he has strongly hinted he would do.
Barr “has been called ‘lazy’ and ‘cowardly'” by Trump, NBC’s “Today” reported, while he has described Trump as “off the rails” and called his push to discredit the 2020 election “a farce.”
But that said, and despite the ongoing war of words, the former AG told the Today show that if Trump were to win the 2024 GOP nomination, he would still vote for him.
“Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party, it’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee,” Barr told host Savannah Guthrie.
“It’s hard to project what the facts are going to turn out to be three years hence, but as of now, it’s hard for me to conceive that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee,” Barr noted further.
Nevertheless, Barr went on to say that he does not believe Trump ought to be the nominee for the GOP moving forward.
“Well, I certainly have made it clear. I don’t think he should be our nominee and I’m going to support somebody else for the nominee,” he said.
Today noted further:
Barr details his turbulent 22-month tenure under Trump in a new book, “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General,” that comes out on Tuesday.
In a response to NBC News’ questions about the memoir, Trump sent a three-page letter that called Bar “slow and lethargic, so lazy and cowardly,” and said Barr “didn’t want to stand up to the radical left Democrats because he thought the repercussions to him personally in the form of impeachment would be too severe. In other words, Bill Barr was the coward.”
Barr called Trump’s letter “par for the course.”
“The president is a man who when he is told something he doesn’t want to hear, he immediately throws a tantrum and attacks a person personally,” Barr said. “I thought the letter was childish.”
In an interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt that aired Sunday evening, the former attorney general also pushed back on accusations that he politicized the Justice Department during his Trump tenure and that he acted more as the former president’s personal lawyer.
“The narrative was I was a ‘toady’ to Trump and I would do Trump’s bidding. And the media constantly went out with that story,” Barr told Holt. “Well, I think no, because I tried to take every issue that came to me and decide it what I thought was the right thing.”
During his interview with Holt, Barr also discussed an “awkward” moment with the then-president, which was also documented in his book.
Barr first saw then-President Trump after The Associated Press reported on an interview in which Barr said the Justice Department found no evidence of widespread fraud that determined the outcome of the 2020 election.
Barr told the AP’s Michael Balsamo that the DOJ explored some of these claims, but “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
The former AG said Trump became “enraged” over this and “slammed his fists” on the Resolute Desk.
“And I told him that all this stuff was bulls**t and — about election fraud. And, you know, I was wrong to be shoveling it out the way his team was, and he started asking me about different theories, and I had the answers. I was able to tell him, this is wrong because of this,” Barr noted.
