PC: Business Insider

On Friday, William Barr made an appearance to defend the Department of Justice’s choice to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and take thousands of documents. William Barr served as the former president Donald Trump’s attorney general up until the last few months of his administration.

Barr stated in a Fox News interview that “I think the driver on this from the beginning was tonnes of secret information sitting in Mar-A-Lago.”

People have stated that this was unprecedented; nevertheless, it is also rare for a president to take all of this sensitive material and place it in a country club, okay? stated Barr.

How long will the government keep trying to recover that? Barr continued. They “jawboned for a year, they were misled about the voluntary steps taken, they went and received a subpoena, they felt, and they were misled on that.”

How long do they wait now that the evidence is beginning to mount that they were being played fast and loose? Barr threw in.

The former DOJ leader made his comments as further details regarding the agency’s criminal probe into the delivery of sensitive government records to Mar-a-Lago after Trump departed the White House were made public in court documents.

During their raid on Trump’s club last month, FBI agents discovered four dozen empty document folders marked “CLASSIFIED,” according to information from an earlier Friday newly disclosed court document. According to the court document, 43 of these files were taken from Trump’s office.

After the National Archives removed 15 boxes of records from Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, vacation property in January, the raid on August 8 took place a few months later. In June, FBI agents travelled to Mar-a-Lago to gather all further documents with classification marks.

However, the FBI eventually “uncovered various sources of evidence” suggesting that more secret documents were still present at Mar-a-Lago, prompting them to get a search warrant for the property, according to a DOJ court brief.

The search warrant, according to Barr, “indicates that they presumably have pretty good evidence to have brought things to the current point, but that’s guesswork,” he said on Friday.

Additionally, Barr deemed it “extremely doubtful” that Trump declassified the records that were acquired at Mar-a-Lago.

However, Barr claimed that if Trump really did “stand over scores of boxes, not really knowing what was in them, and say, I hereby declassify everything in here, that would be such an abuse and that shows such recklessness that it’s almost worse than taking the documents.”

In February 2019, Barr took the oath of office as Trump’s attorney general. He handled the contentious public release of former special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and potential collusion with the Trump campaign. When he published a four-page summary of the Mueller report weeks before the complete report was made public, critics charged him with misrepresenting the probe’s findings.

Barr recently broke with his boss by refuting his assertions that the 2020 election was rigged through widespread fraud less than a month after Trump lost to President Joe Biden. Even after he left office on January 20, 2021, Trump continued to insist that the election had been fixed to favour him.

Trump has recently requested that either he be recognised as the “rightful winner” or that a new election be held “quickly.”

Barr stated to The Associated Press that the DOJ has “not observed fraud on a magnitude that might have influenced a different outcome in the election” in an interview that was published on December 1, 2020.

Two weeks later, Trump made the departure of Barr public.