Former Attorney General Bill Barr called arguments being made by Republicans attempting to compare former President Trump’s handling of classified documents to previous presidents “big lies.”
Barr was asked by “Fox News Sunday” host Shannon Bream to respond to comparisons of Trump leaving the White House with classified documents to former Presidents Clinton and Obama, and President Biden when he was vice president.
Barr said that the difference is that other presidents worked with the National Archives to store those documents, unlike Trump who faces obstruction of justice charges over trying to keep from handing the records back over to the federal government.
“So, there are two big lies, I think, that are out there right now,” Barr said. “One is all these other presidents took all these documents. Those were situations where they arranged with the archives to set up special space under the management, control, and security provided by the archivists to temporarily put documents until the libraries were ready. These were not people just putting them in their basement, OK.”
The second lie, according to Barr, is the notion that a president has “complete authority” to declare any document “personal.”
“It’s facially ridiculous. That opinion had to do with the distinction between official records, which are records prepared by government agencies for the purpose of government action, and personal documents, as opposed to official documents, which are things prepared by the President, such as a diary or notes, which are not used in the government’s deliberations,” Barr said.
He acknowledged that while the president does have some discretion, some of the documents in Trump’s possession, including what could be included in the president’s daily summary of high-level information, clearly could not be marked as personal. The summary includes some of the nation’s most sensitive information.
“The president has some discretion, but these are official documents. It’s inarguable the President’s daily brief provided by the intelligence community is not Donald J. Trump’s personal document, period,” Barr said.
The Justice Department charged Trump in a 37-count indictment last week over his handling of classified materials after leaving office, and the charges hold several decades of prison time.
The Justice Department released evidence that showed that Trump possessed documents that contained nuclear and military secrets, stored them improperly and shared the information with staffers who did not have security clearance.
Barr served as attorney general during the Trump administration until December 2020 when he stated publicly that the FBI and Justice Department found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the midst of Trump contesting his election loss to Biden that year. Barr has since been a critic of Trump, particularly after Jan. 6.