Barr says DOJ ‘getting very close’ to having enough evidence to indict Trump

Former Attorney General William Barr said on Wednesday that he believes the Justice Department is “getting very close” to having enough evidence to indict former President Trump. 

He said on Fox News that government investigators need to consider if they will be able to make a “technical” case against Trump for his handling of sensitive documents the FBI found at his Mar-a-Lago home last month. 

“I think they’re getting very close to that point, frankly,” Barr said. 

He said the other question to consider is whether to indict a former president, what it would do to the country and what precedent it would set. 

“Will the people really understand that this is not failing to return a library book, that this is serious? And so you have to worry about those things,” he said. 

Barr said he hopes those factors will lead the Justice Department (DOJ) to not indict Trump, but added the department will be under pressure to do so.

A federal judge approved Trump’s request to appoint a special master to review the documents seized from his Florida estate last month. The special master will be tasked with determining if any documents taken are protected by attorney-client or executive privilege. 

Barr said documents protected by attorney-client privilege should be returned to Trump. He noted the FBI had a right to take those documents initially as they would not have looked through them page-by-page during the search. 

He said “there is no scenario” under the law in which the government documents, some of which are classified, should be returned to Trump. 

“If it deals with government stuff, it goes back to the government,” he said. 

Barr said investigators are also allowed to take and keep personal items of Trump’s if it is evidence of the way the government documents were stored. 

“If you find very sensitive documents in Trump’s desk along with his passports, that ties Trump to those documents,” he said. 

On Tuesday, Barr said a federal judge’s order to appoint a special master to review the documents was “deeply flawed.”

“The opinion was wrong, and I think the government should appeal it,” Barr said on Fox News. “It’s deeply flawed in a number of ways. I don’t think the appointment of a special master is going to hold up, but even if it does, I don’t see it fundamentally changing the trajectory” of the case.