“I’ve always said, when faced with two bad choices, I feel it is my duty to choose the person who I believe would do the least harm to the country, and in my mind, that is- that is, I will vote for the Republican ticket,” Barr said. , who remains Republican. “I will support the Republican ticket.”
Barr served as United States Attorney General under Trump from 2019 to 2020, resigning from Trump’s Cabinet on December 14, 2020, after publicly disputing the former president’s claims that there was widespread fraud in the Trump election. 2020. Trump would later claim he had demanded Barr’s resignation.
Barr also later cooperated with the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection and defended Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump as a “legitimate case.”
In his 2022 memoir, “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General,” Barr wrote about how his relationship with Trump had deteriorated, citing how Trump and his legal team — including the nemesis by Barr, Trump lawyer and former New York Mayor Rudy. Giuliani – pushed absurd claims of massive voter fraud.
“His legal team had a difficult case to make, and they presented it in as poor and unprofessional a manner as I could have imagined,” Barr wrote. “The whole thing was just a grotesque embarrassment.”
Trump in turn lambasted Barr, calling his former attorney general a “coward” and vowing that, if re-elected, he would no longer appoint Barr as attorney general.
Barr refused to support Trump in the Republican presidential primary, comparing voting for Trump to “playing Russian roulette with the country.”
“I have made it clear that I strongly oppose Trump’s nomination and will not support Trump,” Barr told NBC News in an article published in July. When then asked how he would vote if the general election were a Trump-Biden rematch, Barr responded that he would “jump off this bridge when I get to it.”
On Wednesday, Barr argued that voting for Trump would still be “Russian roulette” but asserted that “continuing the Biden administration is national suicide, in my opinion.”
Devlin Barrett and Mariana Alfaro contributed to this report.
washingtonpost
