Ex-Attorney General William Barr Urges GOP to Move On From Trump
Book recounts confrontational meeting in Oval Office and says Republicans need to focus on new leaders
Donald Trump and William Barr, who was then U.S. attorney general, at the White House in 2019.
By Sadie Gurman
Updated Feb. 27, 2022 8:43 am ET
Former Attorney General William Barr writes in a new book that former President Donald Trump has “shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed,” and that it is time for Republicans to focus on rising new leaders in the party.
The release of the former attorney general’s 600-page book, “One Damn Thing After Another,” is coming as Mr. Trump, who remains the GOP’s dominant figure, contemplates another presidential run. Mr. Barr writes that he was convinced that Mr. Trump could have won re-election in 2020 if he had “just exercised a modicum of self-restraint, moderating even a little of his pettiness.”
“The election was not ‘stolen,’” Mr. Barr writes. “Trump lost it.” Mr. Barr urges conservatives to look to “an impressive array of younger candidates” who share Mr. Trump’s agenda but not his “erratic personal behavior.” He didn’t mention any of those candidates by name.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr. Barr’s book. Last summer the former president called his former attorney general “a disappointment in every sense of the word.”
Mr. Barr’s memoir adds to a growing list of books by senior Trump administration officials and journalists about the former president. It is scheduled for release March 8 by the William Morrow imprint of HarperCollins. Both HarperCollins and The Wall Street Journal are owned by News Corp.
The recollections and conclusions by Mr. Barr are notable because he was one of Mr. Trump’s most powerful cabinet secretaries and was once such a close ally that Democrats accused him of acting more like the president’s defense attorney than an apolitical law-enforcement official.
Mr. Barr, a respected figure in Washington conservative circles, returned to head the Justice Department in February 2019 after Mr. Trump ousted his first attorney general, former Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican. Mr. Barr served in the same post at the end of the George H.W. Bush administration and was a corporate lawyer in between.
During much of his time in the Trump administration, some said Mr. Barr protected the president at the expense of the Justice Department’s independence, especially over his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Mr. Barr issued his own summary of Mr. Mueller’s investigative report depicting the results in a way that Mr. Mueller and others described as misleading or overly favorable to Mr. Trump. He also worked in the ensuing months to undermine some of the prosecutions spawned by the Mueller investigation. An example is his decision to drop the criminal case against Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser.
Mr. Barr has said that he intervened to correct what he saw as overreach by the prosecutors and flaws in the department’s approach to those cases, a stance he maintains in his book.
‘The election was not ‘stolen,’’ former Attorney General William Barr writes in his new book. ‘Trump lost it.’
Photo: Olivier Douliery/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
“Predictably our motion to dismiss the charges led to an election-year media onslaught, flogging the old theme that I was doing this as a favor to Trump,” Mr. Barr writes. “But I concluded the handling of the Flynn matter by the FBI had been an abuse of power that no responsible AG could let stand.”
Mr. Barr also describes times when he was privately frustrated by Mr. Trump’s aggressive style and constant comments on the Justice Department’s work.
He provides the details of a contentious meeting on Dec. 1 in the Oval Office hours after Mr. Barr said publicly that there wasn’t evidence of widespread voter fraud in the presidential election that could reverse Joe Biden’s victory, contradicting Mr. Trump’s claims.
“This is killing me—killing me. This is pulling the rug right out from under me,” Mr. Trump shouted at Mr. Barr, according to the book. “He stopped for a moment and then said, ‘You must hate Trump. You would only do this if you hate Trump.’”
Mr. Barr writes that he reminded Mr. Trump that he had “sacrificed a lot personally to come in to help you when I thought you were being wronged,” but that the Justice Department had not been able to verify any of his legal team’s assertions about mass voter fraud.
Mr. Trump then launched into a list of other grievances he had with his attorney general: that the federal prosecutor Mr. Barr ordered to review the origins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Russia probe that preceded the Mueller report hadn’t released his findings before the 2020 election, and that Mr. Barr declined to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey after a department watchdog rebuked him for sharing memos that contained sensitive information about his interactions with Mr. Trump, a complaint brought up repeatedly by the president.
Mr. Barr countered by offering to submit his resignation, according to the book. “Accepted!” Mr. Trump yelled, banging his palm on the table. “‘Leave and don’t go back to your office. You are done right now. Go home!’” White House lawyers persuaded Mr. Trump not to follow through with Mr. Barr’s ouster.
Mr. Barr resigned a few weeks later, bringing a tumultuous end to his time in office.
After the election, Mr. Barr said that Mr. Trump “lost his grip” and that his false claims of voter fraud led to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters trying to thwart the certification of Mr. Biden’s November 2020 victory.
“The absurd lengths to which he took his ‘stolen election’ claim led to the rioting on Capitol Hill,” Mr. Barr writes.
Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com
wsj.com
 |
