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Barr pushes back on Trump: This is not a ‘witch hunt’

by Sarah Fortinsky - 06/06/23 2:47 PM ET

Former Attorney General Bill Barr pushed back on former President Trump’s claims that a special counsel’s ongoing documents probe is politically motivated and said he thinks the public eventually will come to realize the former president’s culpability.

“Over time, people will see that this is not a case of the Department of Justice conducting a witch hunt,” Barr said in an interview on CBS on Tuesday. “In fact, they approached this very delicately and with deference to the president, and this would have gone nowhere had the president just returned the documents. But he jerked them around for a year and a half.”

Special counsel Jack Smith is leading an investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents, some of which were discovered in an FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago home after Trump repeatedly refused to turn the documents over to federal officials once he left the White House.

Trump has repeatedly called investigations into his behavior “witch hunts,” and released a torrent of angry social media posts against federal investigators Tuesday — one day after Trump’s lawyers reportedly met with Smith and other Justice Department (DOJ) officials. Smith is also probing Trump’s efforts to remain in power following the 2020 election.

“The Marxists and Fascists in the DOJ & FBI are going after me at a level and speed never seen before in our Country, and I did nothing wrong,” Trump wrote in one of several posts Tuesday.

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In the CBS interview, Barr said he suspects the Monday meeting was “probably held to complain about some aspects of the special counsel’s work,” and that he thinks an indictment is probably on the horizon.

“I would bet that it’s near,” he said of a federal indictment.

Barr served under Trump for nearly two years as attorney general, leaving after the president lost the 2020 election.

He became the target of Trump’s wrath when he publicly affirmed the legitimacy of President Biden’s victory.