Bill Barr, who served as attorney general Donald Trumpand has repeatedly disputed his former boss’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, said Wednesday he will vote for “the Republican ticket” in November, adding that a second term for the president Joe Biden would be ‘national suicide’.
In an interview with Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom,” Barr, who has also previously questioned Trump’s fitness to serve, still thinks Biden and his policies pose a greater threat to the US.
“Well, I’ve said all along, you know, given two bad choices, I think it’s my duty to choose the person who I think will do the least harm to the country, and in my mind that’s – I will vote Republican,” Barr said. “I will support the Republican ticket.”
Barr suggested that Biden is pursuing a progressive agenda, which he described as “the real danger to the country, the real danger to democracy.”
“Trump may be playing Russian roulette, but a continuation of the Biden administration is, in my opinion, national suicide,” he added.
Barr, who backed Trump for most of his time at the Justice Department, resigned from the government in December 2020 after giving an interview to The Associated Press in which he said the DOJ had found no evidence to prove supporting Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud. in that year’s presidential contest.
In a June 2021 interview with The Atlantic, Barr doubled down, saying Trump’s claim that the election was stolen from him was “all nonsense.” He also testified before the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection, describing Trump as “detached from reality” due to his embrace of voting conspiracy theories.
In his own book, published in 2022, Barr wrote that the time he spent with the president showed him that “Trump only cared about one thing: himself.”
“Country and principle took second place,” he added.
But while Barr declined to endorse Trump in the 2024 Republican primaries, he had not explicitly ruled out ultimately supporting Trump’s candidacy if he were to win the Republican nomination.
During the Fox News interview, Barr also criticized the hush money case against Trump in New York, where the former president was accused of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in the lead-up to the 2016 election. election.
Barr said the case is an “abomination” and that the charges against the former president were politically motivated.
“To me, this shows that the real threat to freedom, the real threat to our system, is the excesses of the progressive left,” Barr said. “They are distorting the justice system and that is where the danger lies: the corruption and undermining of our institutions by the left.”
The trial will resume in New York on Friday with alternative jury selection after a panel of 12 jurors was selected this week.
