Chris Wallace: AG Barr ‘clearly is protecting’ Trump

Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said he believes Attorney General Bill Barr “clearly is protecting” President Trump and “advocating his point of view” on issues during an interview on “America’s Newsroom” on Friday.

Wallace was reacting to fellow anchor Bill Hemmer’s interview with Barr during the attorney general’s trip to El Salvador. It was Barr’s first interview following the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on his investigation into Russia’s election meddling in April.

“What really comes across to me [about the Barr interview] most of all is that for two years Donald Trump sat there and said ‘I don’t have an attorney general. I don’t have somebody out there looking for and protecting my interests,’ ” said Wallace. “He clearly has that now with Bill Barr.”{mosads}

“Not saying that Barr isn’t right in everything he says. But he clearly is protecting this president and advocating his point of view on a lot of these issues,” the “Fox News Sunday” anchor continued. “And I suspect that as President Trump, who probably has watched some of this interview himself, is saying finally, ‘No Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr instead.’ ”

Wallace made similar comments about Barr in April after the attorney general held a press conference in which he offered a staunch defense of the president before the release of the Mueller report.

“The attorney general seemed almost to be acting as the counselor for the defense, the counselor for the president, rather than the attorney general, talking about his motives, his emotions,” Wallace told Hemmer and Sandra Smith on “America’s Newsroom” at the time. 

Barr, who replaced Jeff Sessions as attorney general after being confirmed in February, traveled to El Salvador on Wednesday to talk about the Department of Justice strategy on illegal narcotics, the MS-13 gang, illegal immigration and human trafficking, the department said.