Former Attorney General Bill Barr said Wednesday that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is “getting very close” to having enough evidence to indict former President Donald Trump.
The former attorney general said on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom that authorities may have the evidence necessary to indict the former president and his associates for reportedly storing over 300 classified documents in his private residence.
“As I’ve said all along, there are two questions: Will the government be able to make out a technical case, will they have evidence by which they could indict somebody on, including him. That’s the first question, and I think they’re getting very close to that point, frankly.”
Barr then raised a second question of whether the DOJ should indict a former president, in which he expressed hope that the administration will not indict Trump based on the consequences it could have on the country. (RELATED: Government Anonymously Leaks Accusations Of Sensitive Nuclear Documents To Justify Trump Raid)
“At the end of the day, there’s another question which is, ‘Do you indict a former president? What will that do to the country, what kind of precedent will that set? Will the people really understand that this is not failing to return a library book, that this was serious?’ And so, you have to worry about those things,” Barr continued. “I hope that those kinds of factors will incline the administration not to indict him because I don’t want to see him indicted as a former president.”
“But I also think they’ll be under a lot of pressure to indict him because if anyone else had gotten indicted, why not indict him?” he added.
The former attorney general criticized U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon during a Fox News appearance Tuesday for granting Trump’s request to have a special master to review the documents the FBI seized during the Aug. 8 raid.
“The dispute isn’t over whether this document is potentially executive privilege and this one isn’t. That’s not the dispute,” he said. “The dispute is whether the president, even if it is executive privilege, can the president bar DOJ from reviewing the documents? And the answer to that, I think, is clearly no … Totally wrong, totally wrong.”
A receipt of property released to the public on Aug. 12 disclosed that the FBI obtained 11 sets of classified documents, around 300 in total. These sets consisted of four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret and three more sets of confidential material. The DOJ later released a highly redacted affidavit revealing that 14 boxes from Mar-a-Lago had classification markings and contained 184 documents – 25 of the documents had “top secret” markings, 92 were labeled “secret” and 67 had a “confidential” warning.