Global Courant
By Sarah N. Lynch
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Former US Attorney General William Barr on Sunday defended Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 37-count indictment against Donald Trump, saying that if it is proven that allegations that the former president deliberately kept hundreds of highly classified documents, “he is toasted”. .”
“I was shocked at the level of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were…Fox News Sunday.”
“If even half of it is true, then he’s toast.”
The comments from Barr, who served as Trump’s attorney general from February 2019 to December 2020, are noteworthy and were made at a time when many other prominent Republicans were hesitant to criticize the former president and current Republican frontrunner in the 2024 White House race.
Trump will appear in a federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday to make his first appearance on charges including willful retention of highly sensitive national defense data under the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice, making false statements, conspiracy and concealment.
Trump told Politico on Saturday he would continue his presidential campaign even if convicted in the case, saying “I will never leave.”
Of the 37 charges against Trump, 31 involve classified and highly classified secret documents he kept after leaving the White House in early 2021.
The indictment alleges that Trump kept the documents haphazardly at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, refused to return them to the government and attempted to hide them from the FBI and even his own attorney after a grand jury served a subpoena demanding that he hand over all documents with secret markings.
His attorney Alina Habba, who is not representing him in the case, told Fox News Sunday that Trump is innocent of the charges and intends to vigorously defend himself in the case.
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In the past, Barr has been a fierce defender of Trump, going so far as to appoint his own special counsel to investigate whether the FBI improperly opened an investigation into Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign over possible ties to Russia based on weak evidence.
But towards the end of his term, Barr’s views on Trump soured after the former president tried to pressure the Justice Department to launch false voter fraud investigations in a failed attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
NOT ‘PERSONAL DOCUMENTS’
Trump has previously defended his retention of classified documents, claiming without evidence that he released them while in office — a defense his allies have also echoed.
“I’m going to take the president’s word that he said yes,” Jim Jordan, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, told CNN’s “State of the Union” program on Sunday when asked if he had any evidence to back up Trump’s claim.
However, in previous lawsuits related to the FBI’s search of his Florida home, Trump’s lawyers repeatedly refused to make that argument in their court documents, and the indictment also contains evidence that Trump knew he had retained records which were kept very secret.
“As president I could have declassified it,” the indictment quotes Trump as saying of a military document he allegedly showed at a rally at his New Jersey golf club in July 2021. “Now I can’t, you know, because this is still a secret.”
Trump and his allies have also separately attempted to argue that the documents at the center of the case are personal in nature and fall under the Presidential Records Act.
“He has every right to have classified documents that he releases under the Presidential Records Act,” Habba told Fox News on Sunday.
But Barr said the claim that the documents were Trump’s personal data is “preposterous on the face of it.”
The documents referred to in the indictment are “official documents” prepared by government intelligence agencies, he said, and therefore belong to the US government.
“Battle plans for an attack on another country or Defense Department documents about our capabilities are not Donald J. Trump’s personal documents in any universe,” he said.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Rami Ayyub in Washington; editing by Mary Milliken and Paul Simao)
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