Bill Barr predicts ‘good chance’ Trump will be indicted over Mar-a-Lago documents
Ryan King
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Legal peril from Manhattan could be the least of former President Donald Trump‘s worries, his former Attorney General Bill Barr suggested Sunday.
Barr contended that if he was Trump’s lawyer, he would be most concerned about special counsel Jack Smith‘s inquiry of classified documents discovered at his Mar-a-Lago estate and predicted there’s a “very good chance” his onetime boss will be indicted over it.
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“I’d be most concerned about the document case in Mar-a-Lago,” Barr told ABC’s This Week. “He had no claim to those documents, especially the classified documents. They belong to the government. And so I think he was jerking the government around, and they subpoenaed it, and they tried to jawbone them into delivering the documents.”
“The government is investigating the extent to which games were played, and there was obstruction and keeping the documents from them. And I think that’s a serious potential case. I think they probably have some very good evidence there,” he added.
Smith has been spearheading both the Justice Department’s investigation into the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago and the department’s inquiry into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Earlier this month, reports emerged that Secret Service agents were set to testify before the inquiry. Last month, a federal appeals court also tossed out Trump’s bid to block Smith’s review from gaining access to material from one of his lawyers.
“By reputation, he’s a very dogged, aggressive prosecutor who will get to the bottom of what happened,” Barr said of Smith.
Barr had a falling out with Trump toward the end of his tenure atop the DOJ. In the time since, he has implored the Republican Party to move on for Trump while occasionally swooping to Trump’s defense. Barr recently knocked the Manhattan indictment against Trump as an “unjust case.”
Trump has denied wrongdoing in all of the investigations pending against him. In the Mar-a-Lago case, he argued that presidents maintain the right to declassify material just by thinking about it. President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence were also found to possess classified documents from their vice presidencies.
A key question before Smith is whether Trump intentionally sought to undermine the DOJ inquiry and obstruct justice throughout the process.
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Should an indictment from Smith come forward, Barr believes that Trump will not be convicted or sentenced before the GOP nomination in 2024.
“I don’t think anything’s gonna happen before a nomination is made and even perhaps until the 2024 election. This stuff is going to drag out through 24,” he said, noting that charges could boost Trump in the GOP primary. “As the general election is concerned, it will greatly weaken Trump. He’s already, I think, a weak candidate that would lose, but I think this sort of assures that.”