Trump secret papers crisis is his own fault for ‘jerking around’ DOJ says his former attorney general

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Former Attorney General Bill Barr has weighed in on Donald Trump’s legal problems relating to the trove of classified documents found at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.

Mr Barr told CBS Mornings that the former president’s problems are of his own making and the case against him and any probe of his retention of secret papers would have gone nowhere if he had just returned them.

“This is not a case of the Department of Justice conducting a witch hunt,” he began, noting how delicately they had approached the case.

“This would have gone nowhere had the president just returned the documents, but he jerked them around for a year and a half. The question is ‘Did he deceive them’ and if there is evidence of that then that says more about Trump than the Department of Justice, that is that he is so egotistical that he has this penchant for conducting risky reckless acts to show that he can sort of get away with it, it’s part of asserting his ego.

“He’s done this repeatedly at the expense of all of the people who depend on him to conduct the public’s business in an honourable way — we saw that with both impeachments — and there is no excuse for what he did here.”

Mr Barr is the latest former ally of Mr Trump to give his assessment of the swirl of legal woes surrounding the one-term president.

His former lawyer Ty Cobb told CNN in May that he believed Mr Trump would go to jail if he is indicted in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation.

Then last week, Mr Cobb reiterated his confidence in the potential indictment to CNN’s OutFront, after it was reported there is an alleged recording of Mr Trump discussing classified material he kept after leaving the White House in 2021.

Mr Cobb said if the recording is real: “It further enhances the obstruction case because it eviscerates the two defences that Trump has put forward. The first being that merely by taking documents he declassifies them or that he has the authority, if he is playing with the ducks in the hot tub, to declassify them in his own mind.”

The former president lashed out at Mr Cobb on Truth Social, calling him a “disgruntled former lawyer” who “knows absolutely nothing about the Boxes Hoax” and accused the Department of Justice of “interfering with the upcoming 2024 Presidential Election” which Mr Trump claimed he was leading.

“His words are angry, nasty, and libelous, only because I did not continue using him (and paying him), and for good reason. He will be held legally responsible for his false statements!”

Mr Cobb served as a lawyer for Mr Trump while he was in the White House from July 2017 until May 2018. He provided assistance during the Mueller special counsel investigation.

Mr Barr served as Attorney General in the Trump administration from February 2019 to December 2020 taking over after Jeff Sessions departed and resigning after it became clear to him that Mr Trump lost the 2020 election.

He also served as attorney general under President George HW Bush in the early 1990s.