NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas - Bill Barr: In the Eye of the Storm

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

Lester Holt sits down with former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr in an exclusive primetime TV interview, Barr’s first since resigning as attorney general under the Trump administration.

You're controversial. Yeah, that's okay. He was a lightning rod insider at an unprecedented time in America. Can we talk about the big lie? Which one is that? Bill Barr, former President Trump's Attorney General, is speaking out about Trump.

You said some of those press conferences were rambling, cringe-inducing, and he put himself at the center. A lot of people have said he's narcissistic, and from what I observe, that's true. The election. I said he wheeled out a clown show of lawyers. Who are you referring to? Rudy Giuliani? His Cracker Jack legal team, among others. The insurrection.

Do you think that President Trump was responsible? I do think he was responsible in the broad sense of that word. Race. Do you believe there's such a thing as systemic racism? I actually think the whole idea is a cop-out. And the next election. Is there anything he could do to win back your support? Good evening from Washington. I'm Lester Holt. He is one of the first and most powerful administration insiders to crack open the closed doors of the Trump White House. Tonight, my exclusive interview with former Attorney General Bill Barr. For two years, he was at the center of the storm.

We begin where for Barr, it all ended. Take me back to that day, December 1st. You're in the suv you've got meetings at the white house did you know you were going to end up in the oval office before the day was up i assumed i was as i expected the president heard i was in the building and told me to come downstairs attorney general bill barr knew he had infuriated the president. Since election night, Trump had been insisting he'd won. This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. Barr disagreed and said publicly that Trump's claims of election fraud were wrong. We hadn't seen any evidence of broad fraud that would have affected the outcome of the

election. And I knew that that was not the party line. Now, Barr was being summoned to the president's private dining room, where he was going to say the same thing in person. And I told him that all this stuff was bulls**t about election fraud. And, you know, it was wrong to be shoveling it out the way his team was. And he started asking me about different theories, and I had the answers. I was able to tell him this is wrong because of this. You're trying to set him straight. Yes. And, you know, he listened. He was obviously getting very angry about this. I said, OK, well, look, I understand you're upset with me and I'm perfectly happy to tender my resignation. And then, boom. He slaps the desk. He slapped the desk and he said, accept it. Accept it. And then, boom, he slapped it again. Accept it. Go home. Don't go back to your office.

Go home. You're done. Tonight, for the first time, Barr is telling his story of how he and Trump arrived at that table-pounding moment. In his memoir, One Damn Thing After Another, Barr reveals not just how his time with Trump ended, but how it all began. You're controversial. Yeah, that's okay. Though it ended in a blow-up, for most of his tenure as Trump's attorney general, Barr faced criticism that he was too close to the president, putting Trump's interests before the country's.

Justice Department officials are accusing Barr and the president of interfering, quote, in the fair administration of justice. He has hired a hatchet man as his attorney general to rig the system. A lot of blowback coming Bill Barr's way. The narrative, and we live in the age of narrative, not facts. The narrative was I was a toady to Trump and I would do Trump's bidding. And the media constantly went out with that story. Were you?

Well, I think no, because I tried to take every issue that came to me and decide it, what I thought was the right thing. And I didn't really care what people thought about me. The criticism that framed Barr's time in the Trump administration actually started before he even took the job. We now have a special counsel to head the Russia investigation. Barr was a private citizen when the Trump presidency began and had deep concerns about the investigation into the Trump campaign's alleged ties to Russia. I was skeptical of the Russiagate thing, and I thought it was quite possibly being used as a political weapon.

And the more I heard about it, the more it started looking that way. The man heading that investigation, Robert Mueller, had been a colleague of Barr's decades earlier at the Department of Justice. You had a good relationship with Mueller? Yes, we were friends. And our wives were friends. Our friends. Are you still friends? I don't know. Mueller's investigation expanded,

targeting the president for possible obstruction of justice. Barr thought Mueller's legal theory was flawed and that the power of the presidency was in jeopardy. He wrote a lengthy, unsolicited memo about why the president should not be investigated. He emailed it to the Department of Justice. Many people look at that memo as an audition for the job of attorney general. Look at this. This is how I lean. Well, first, I wasn't interested in being attorney general. And second, you know, if I wanted to be attorney general,

there are much more direct ways of auditioning for it. Your mind sounds like it was clearly made up before we even got to this point on the Russia investigation, that it was a phony investigation. No, it wasn't made up. I was, as I say in my book, I was suspicious of it. It didn't ring true to me. Months after Barr wrote that memo, the president fired his first attorney general,

Jeff Sessions, who had refused to intervene in the Mueller investigation. The president offered the job to Barr. Do you affirm that the testimony you're about to give will be... At his confirmation hearing... I do....Senators grilled Barr about his objectivity. ...on whether you should recuse yourself from the Mueller investigation.

Would you seek to stop that portion of the Mueller investigation? He swore he would not interfere in the investigation, and even said this about his old friend, Bob Mueller. I have the utmost respect for Bob and his distinguished record of public service. I thought I was doing okay, and then my chief of staff came up and said, there's a problem. We heard from the White House the president is apoplectic. He thinks you were too nice to Mueller. He was thinking about pulling the nomination.

Was it a little bit of an introduction to what it might be like working for Donald Trump? Yeah, sure. But, you know, I went in with my eyes open. I didn't go in to be best buddies with President Trump. Five weeks into the job, the Mueller report was in Barr's hands. This is an NBC News special report. This is all we know. Bob Mueller has submitted his report to the Attorney General. Period. Mueller had wrapped up his investigation, but Barr did not immediately release the full

report. Classified and grand jury information needed to be redacted. Instead, he wrote a four-page letter for Congress on Mueller's findings. In a perfect world, you wanted the entire report out. Yes. I would be happy to put the whole report out the day I got it. But you didn't. Right. And ended up writing this four-page summary. Well, the reason I didn't was because there's material in there that under law cannot go out and be made public. So I said that I would put out the principal conclusions of the report. And the conclusions were there was no collusion and that he didn't make a decision on obstruction, but he lays out all the facts in the report. And I say that he does not exonerate Trump.

But critics say Barr essentially did exonerate the president. He said Mueller's evidence did not establish that Trump committed a crime. What Barr left out of his four-page letter? Mueller's description of multiple acts by the president that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations. Mueller cited the president's effort to have the special counsel removed, his attempts to limit the scope of the probe, as well as his public attacks on the investigation. Mueller's full report would not be released for nearly a month.

Trump's voice filled the vacuum. So it's complete exoneration, no collusion, no obstruction. Thank you very much. Thank you. This four-page letter, this summary, was immediately met with wide criticism that it didn't really accurately reflect what Mueller was saying. That's not true. What it was, it was a tantrum by the people who were hoping that Mueller would be able to bring down Trump. Wait a minute. Mueller himself wrote you a letter complaining. He said the summary didn't capture the substance of his report and that there was now public confusion. No, he didn't say the substance of his report.

Actually, he did. Mueller wrote Barr's letter did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office's work and conclusions. It wasn't just Mueller. Later, the four-page letter came up in court cases seeking the unredacted Mueller report. One judge said Barr distorted the findings and questioned whether Barr was trying to create a one-sided narrative. A second judge says it was disingenuous, there was a lack of candor. So the complaints are piling up that this four-page summary didn't really capture the essence or the heart of what was in the report.

Do you reject those? I totally reject it. This was not a summary of the report. It was a description of his bottom-line conclusions. You know, if people are waiting outside of the courthouse and want to know what the verdict is, you don't go out and give them a 16-page summary of the trial. You say, guilty or not guilty. That's what I did.

Bill Barr's job as Attorney General was just getting started, working for a president without precedent. And he chuckled and said, you know what the secret is to a really good tweet? I said, what? A lot of people think that... Like the former president, Bill Barr is from New York City. Barr grew up Catholic and conservative in Upper Manhattan. So you grew up in these streets, Upper West Side.

Right. Kind of a liberal bastion. Yes. Is this, though, where you were grounded in your conservative beliefs? It's where they started developing. My father was the Republican district leader, and we sort of imbibed that initially. As a college student in the 60s, Barr's conservative worldview was also shaped in opposition to the anti-war movement.

His ride in government began at the CIA in the Nixon administration, then as a lawyer at DOJ. So my first job in the Reagan administration was in that building, the Eisenhower, the old executive. In 1991, he became attorney general, one of the youngest in modern history. When you're working for the first President Bush, you had real concerns about the power of the presidency, a sense that it had been diminished. How so? Our view, my view, was that since Watergate in Vietnam, a lot of the president's power had been eroded. And so he wanted me to be the watchdog of presidential power. Twenty-five years later, Donald Trump had not been Bill Barr's first choice among Republicans running for president. Whoa!

You described some of your early reactions to him as grossly self-centered, contentious, crass, bombastic, petulant. I think some of those adjectives were used by my business friends in New York who knew him. I'd never met him. Could you have ever imagined yourself working for someone who fit that description? Yeah, it was not an attractive proposition for me, but there was no doubt in my mind that he was better for the country than Hillary Clinton.

There were many issues that I thought were critical, including the selection of judges. Now 71, Barr is one of only two Americans to serve as AG twice. Thank you, Mr. President. And once he joined Trump's administration, he quickly saw how different his second time around would be. I think I probably was in the Oval Office six times maybe when I was AG for Bush. How many times do you think under Trump? Scores, scores of times. And, you know, it wasn't nefarious. It was just that he was the kind of guy who liked to get people around and

talk things through. Familiar protocols were out the window. Access to the Oval Office is tightly controlled. I share with you the story of walking into the Oval Office and being stunned that there were 15, 20 or more people in there. Was that typical? That was not atypical. You know, Trump is not, in my opinion, he's not all, you know, it's not all black or white. He has some strong qualities, some good qualities. And like all of us, he has flaws.

Barr saw the way Trump sometimes used Twitter as one of those flaws, though he and the president once joked about it. And he knew, you know, the tweets got under my skin. And he said, well, I think I'm going to go and now start tweeting. And he chuckled and said, you know what the secret is to a really good tweet? I said, what? He said, just enough crazy. I thought it was funny. Barr was Trump's AG for 22 months. And during that time, the skepticism about his independence

from the White House only grew. A Department of Justice that is behaving as preposterously. Wear a red mark for the rest of his life. ...accused of creating a special justice system just for President Trump's friends. Friends like Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security advisor, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with Russia. Barr thought Flynn should never have been investigated in the first place. His department asked a judge to drop the charges. Trump was publicly pleased.

He was an innocent man. He is a great gentleman. Then there was U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Berman, who had prosecuted Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen, in the Stormy Daniels saga. He was investigating Trump's other associates, too, including the president's new lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Barr fired him. Big question this afternoon. Why was the U.S. attorney here in New York really fired? Ultimately, he's shown the door. Whose call was that? That was my call. You know, I hadn't really thought much of him.

I wanted to make the change. Not because he was a threat to the president? I didn't think there was any threat to the president. There's another instance that people have used to offer this idea that you were there to do the president's bidding, and it involves Roger Stone. Roger Stone, the president's longtime confidant who was convicted of lying and witness tampering in the Mueller probe. Barr's own prosecutors asked for a sentence of seven to nine years. The president tweeted that that was a miscarriage of justice. Hours later, you stepped in and overrode your own prosecutors.

The president congratulated you for doing so. He tweets, you move to get the sentence reduced. How do you respond to that? Well, that episode sort of crystallized the basic problem I had throughout my tenure. Barr says the president never spoke to him directly about Stone's case. He made up his own mind before the president never spoke to him directly about Stone's case. He made up his own mind before the president's tweet. The line prosecutors wanted to seek a penalty that was, I thought, grossly excessive.

And I wasn't going to let that happen. Feds prosecute something like 100,000 defendants a year. This is the one you choose to step in after the president tweets about it. Issues come, you know, when issues come to me, and there are a lot of cases in the department, but when a dispute is presented to me, I decide them. The prosecutors who tried Stone quit the case. One even resigned from the department in protest. And while the judge in Stone's case agreed with Barr about a lighter sentence, she called the attorney general's interference unprecedented. I guess this gets back to the optics question. You knew you had this rap against you that you're carrying the

president's water and you're his defender. And the timing of this, you knew it looked bad. I knew it would be made to look bad. At the end of the day, all you can do is what you think is right. And I wasn't going to be deterred from doing it simply because of the president's tweet. But that infuriated me. That kind of thing makes it impossible for me to do my job. In our interview and in his book, Barr blames the media for creating that perception that he was doing the president's bidding. But he also admits the president helped fuel it. I had a perfect phone call with the president of Ukraine. Like, I mean, perfect. Bill Barr was mentioned in that so-called perfect phone

call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is now center stage leading his country through crisis. In that call, which eventually led to Trump's impeachment, Trump urged Zelensky to gin up an investigation into his political rival, Joe Biden. This whole maneuver of trying to get the Ukrainians to investigate Biden, that was a harebrained scheme. It was ridiculous. Harebrained scheme, of course, not a legal term. In my view, he didn't break the law, but I just thought it was idiotic. Despite what the president said on that call, Barr says he had nothing to do with the scheme.

The president lumped you in with Rudy Giuliani as being the points of contact to make this happen. I was, I was livid. The fact that the president used your name along with Giuliani, did it represent a fundamental misunderstanding on his part of what your job was, what your duties were? I'd have to say yes. He never really had a good idea of the role of the Department of Justice and to some extent, you know, the president's role. Contrary to what critics say, Barr says he was often at odds with the president. Case in point, James Comey, who was in charge of the FBI when it began investigating Trump's

campaign, Barr says that while the president never specifically told him to investigate his political rivals and perceived enemies. He used Twitter and the media to make clear what he wanted done. He was very, very upset that I didn't bring a case against Comey. And why didn't you? Because the evidence wasn't there. The evidence of intent was not there. Barr also says the president wanted him to rush out results from an investigation into the origins of the Russia probe. You also talk about as the election got closer, the president was looking for scalps. How did you handle that pressure? I told him that, you know, these cases have their own timetable, but we can't run things according to a political calendar. The 2020 election year was underway.

A global pandemic, a racial reckoning, and a president pandering to his base. Was Lafayette Square cleared for the benefit of the president staging a photo op? Spring 2020. COVID-19 swept across the globe. It was the worst sort of crisis a president could face. Let's shut down the entire world. And when we shut it down, that would be wonderful. And let's keep it shut for a president could face. Let's shut down the entire world. And when we shut it down, that would be wonderful. And let's keep it shut for a couple of years. You know, we can't do that.

No, I don't take responsibility at all. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. You watch the press conferences along with the rest of us. In the book, you said some of those press conferences were rambling, cringe-inducing, and he put himself at the center. You know, a lot of people have said he's narcissistic, and from what I observe, that's true. It's not a flaw that's uncommon in Washington. But in Barr's opinion, it wasn't serving him well, not with an election approaching.

So, you know, I went in in April, and I said, you know, I think you're going to lose this election. You're saying things that are, you know, beneath the presidency. And 2020 wasn't halfway over. In late May, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, Americans took to the streets and demanded an end to racial injustice. What do you want? Change! What do you want? No! Pain and anger were on full display, some of it directed at the president. Can we talk about the big lie? Which one is that? Well, you write about the big lie being Black Lives Matter.

Yeah. What did you mean by that? Black Lives Matter is based on the premise that the main threat to black welfare in the inner city are an out-of-control police force that gratuitously kill African Americans. And that's simply not borne out by the facts. As the nation's top law enforcement official, Bill Barr always had hardline views on crime and how to fight it. In 1992, when Barr was Attorney General the first time, he wrote a memo called The Case for More Incarceration, the kind of tough lock-em-up policy that's been cited as a leading cause of destabilizing black communities.

One in three black men will be incarcerated sometime in their lifetime. One in 17 for white men. Can you not see how that shapes the perception? It makes people want to rally around the idea of Black Lives Matter? Well, I understand the perception, and I think there's ambivalence. That's what I have found. On the one hand, there is a concern that when they encounter police, they're not given the benefit of the doubt, and they're treated as second-class citizens. And there's definitely that concern.

On the other hand, I think they also understand that the police are there to try to make their communities safer, that it's a very tough job, and they want more police. No justice! No peace! try to make their communities safer, that it's a very tough job, and they want more police. In society, do you believe there's such a thing as systemic racism? I actually think the whole idea is a cop-out. I think racism exists in people's, individuals' souls. By dismissing systematic racism, are you not dismissing the pain of African-American families that have to sit down with their children and have the talk because they're afraid a simple traffic stop could lead to their death?

No, I don't. I don't. I don't. What did you say? I don't ignore that. Dismiss was a term that you used. I don't dismiss that as a reality. I don't think the police are racist as a general matter. You don't see bias in police forces? No, and every study of the situation that I'm familiar with says there is no bias. The numbers are the product of the number of interactions police have. Yeah, and black men are the subject of three times as many traffic stops by police. Right. And that sometimes is a function of where the police are. Police go where the crime is.

We are the voice of the voiceless! After Floyd's murder, Barr says Trump began to see the growing protests as a political problem, especially when some turned violent near the White House. During protests on Friday, they ushered him to a bunker underneath the White House. I think he had been embarrassed and upset that he had been taken down to the bunker over the weekend because of the activity of the rioting in the immediate vicinity of the White House, and they breached the Treasury Department. And he was taken down to the bunker, and he didn't like that optic.

Barr says the president's anger came to a head on June 1st in the Oval Office. It was the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and me and the head of DHS and then some White House people. And he sat there and he was yelling, bellowing at us that we were blank losers, blank losers, all of you. You're just blank losers. Later that day, I am your president of law and order. As Trump spoke in the Rose Garden, police in riot gear fired tear gas and rubber pellets to disperse the group of largely peaceful protesters. Twenty minutes later, there was the president walking across the street to St. John's Church with his top officials, including Barr, in tow. Had you been made aware that you

would be a part of it? Not until I arrived in the White House. You were asked to specifically join him? Yes. They told us that he was going to walk 15 feet in front and we were going to trail behind. And then that unforgettable photo op. Was Lafayette Square cleared for the benefit of the president staging a photo op? No, it was being cleared for law enforcement purposes. The perception, of course, was that it was cleared to allow the photo op to take place. But that's not really what happened. No, it happened, but by that point, that became the headline. Sure.

A headline that did not look good for anyone involved. Were you embarrassed? Were the others embarrassed? Yes. You didn't want to be there. Right. By this time, Barr was convinced the president was headed for defeat. But the end of the campaign was just the beginning of Trump's next fight. Do you think he believes that he truly won the election? Bill Barr didn't think Donald Trump had been the perfect president. But heading into the 2020 election, he still supported him. There were so many situations you found yourself in. Your name brought up in the infamous Ukraine call, Lafayette Park, the president asking you to go after his enemies.

The tweets. The tweets. Why didn't you reach a point where you say, I quit? Well, you know, after he tweeted and I said he was making my job impossible, I gave it consideration. You did think about quitting? Yeah, I just didn't think it was fair for me to do in an election year, so I decided I would just stay through. Were you not worried about this guy becoming president again? In this case, in my mind, it was a question of who was the least objectionable candidate. And I felt that even with some of his faults, Trump policies were good for the country. On election night, Barr was at the White House watch party.

What was the mood there? I think people were generally optimistic because of the size of the crowds. At the end, there was a feeling that he had clothed strong. But in the early morning hours, the mood turned. Joe Biden had taken the lead, and the president went in front of the cameras to cry foul. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. You doubted that the president would ever admit he lost. You write, in his cosmos, a loser was the lowest form of life. You predicted the loss. Did you predict that he would not accept the loss? Yeah, I didn't feel he would ever accept it.

Instead, Barr says, the president latched on to all kinds of theories about a stolen election, stuffed ballot boxes, rigged voting machines. Barr authorized the Department of Justice to investigate the claims, once again raising questions about his motives, whether he was using the department to do the president's dirty work. Barr says, far from it, he just wanted answers. I quickly came to the conclusion that the initial stuff that was pointed to, like the Dominion machines and all these other conspiracy theories, were nonsense.

This idea of some inner-city boiler room where people are cranking out false ballots is a fantasy. You looked at all these? We looked at, yes. It's a fantasy. What's true, he says, is that there is no doubt Donald Trump lost the election. When you actually look at the vote, there's no mystery why he lost in Wisconsin. He ran 50,000 votes behind the Republican ticket. Republican Party had a good day in Wisconsin. He was the weak sister on the ballot.

But Trump and his lawyers went on the offensive, spreading claims of fraud. They conducted themselves in a way that suggests that there was fraud. President Trump won by a landslide. And rallying their base to believe the big lie. Let me tell you, this election was rigged. A month after the election, on the last Sunday of November, Donald Trump phoned in into Fox News and took aim at Bill Barr's Justice Department. You would think if you're in the FBI or Department of Justice,

this is the biggest thing you could be looking at. He went on Maria Bartiromo's show and he tried to say that the reason people can't come up with evidence of fraud is because the department isn't looking for it. Where are they? I've not seen anything. And I was basically tired of this game. Barr decided it was time to speak up. He publicly broke with the president, throwing cold water on Trump's election fraud story in an interview with the Associated Press. Today, President Trump's own attorney general spoke the long-known truth. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Within hours, Barr was

summoned to that fateful meeting with the president. That's the maddest I'd ever see him. This is a reaction to what you told the AP. Right. He asked me if I had said that, and I said I had. And he said, you must hate me. You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump. I said, I don't hate Trump. And I told him that all this stuff was bulls**t about election fraud. And it was wrong to be shoveling it out the way his team was. And he started asking me about different theories, and I had the answers. For example, he said, you know, boxes were appearing, you know, in Detroit at this building, even into the early hours of the morning.

I said, that's because Detroit has over 600 precincts, and they centrally count them. The president was unconvinced. In fact, Barr says he raised the possibility of seizing voting machines. He said, well, you know, I hear about these Dominion machines in Michigan. Some people think that they should be seized. And I said, there's no way the department is going to seize those machines. They're simply not probable cause. He also told Trump what he thought of his legal team.

Not a lot. I said, the reason you are where you are is because you wheeled out a clown show of lawyers. Clown show? Yeah. Clown car or something like that. I said, it's just a bunch of clowns. Who are you referring to? Rudy Giuliani?

His Cracker Jack legal team, among others. Barr says the president shot back, listing the ways he said Barr had failed him and returning to his old gripe about not indicting FBI director James Comey. That's when Barr says he offered up his resignation. He slapped the desk and he said, accept it, accept it, go home, you're done. Barr walked out of the White House to his waiting car. And my FBI detail was there, and they said, where to, boss? I said, the department. My last act of rebellion. Because he said, go home.

And we're starting to ease down, and it was a rainy, dark night, and all of a sudden, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, pounding on both sides of the armored Suburban, and everyone, including the FBI, sort of jumped. It was the White House counsel and another White House lawyer. And they said, the president told us to not let you leave the building, to come back in. He's not going to fire you. And I said, well, I'm not going back in tonight. Two weeks later, Barr resigned.

He hasn't spoken to Trump since. When we asked the former president about this meeting, he disputed Barr's account, saying he demanded Barr's resignation for failing to do his job, including not properly investigating Trump's claims of election fraud. Do you think he believes that he truly won the election? I think his attitude probably is, well, either way, it either was stolen, or if it wasn't stolen, I want people to believe it was stolen. It's useful.

I'm not sure he's, you know, really fixated on finding out what the truth is. Barr had stood up to the president, but was it too little too late? The lie that led to this only grew. Do you think that President Trump was responsible for what happened here ultimately? On January 6th, 2021, Bill Barr was in his library, a private citizen once again. His old boss, President Trump, was at a rally near the White House, giving a speech to a crowd of supporters. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. Shortly after 1 p.m., Congress began to count the electoral votes that would make Joe Biden president. Bill Barr got a call from his former aide. Turn on the TV.

Kill the people! Bill Barb got a call from his former aide. Turn on the TV. I was surprised by the number of people who seemed dead set on breaking their way into the Capitol. And the way, the fury in fighting the police, I was horrified by. Obviously, no way of knowing that that was coming. But looking back at the riot, do you feel like you could have been more vocal, more out there on dismissing these ideas of election fraud, of a stolen election. But once I left the department, I had no access to information anymore. But in terms of the environment, yeah, you were out of office, but you still had a voice. And if you and others had been more forceful about that, might that have short-circuited whatever led to January 6th? No, I don't think so. I think the you know, the story was, you know, the theme was already big. But you also have to remember, we were playing whack-a-mole. And, you know, one of the things is the president was surrounded by these people who would very convincingly

make their case for fraud. On the day of the riot, Barr issued a statement denouncing the violence. And the next day, another one. He accused President Trump of betraying his office and his supporters. Are you supportive of the January 6th committee? Yeah, you know, I think the best way, what I'm most comfortable with is the Department of Justice doing it through their process. But, you know, this was the Capitol. It was attacked, and I can understand why members of Congress would want to look into it. Do you think that President Trump was responsible for what happened here, ultimately? I do think he was responsible in the broad sense of that word,

in that it appears that part of the plan was to send this group, many of whom were obviously rowdy and seemed to be dressed for conflict, send them up to the Hill. I think the whole idea was to intimidate Congress, and I think that that was wrong. But that's as far as Bill Barr will go. This man, accused so many times of protecting the former president, says he is still just calling it like he sees it. And he sees no crime by the president here. I haven't seen anything to say he was legally

responsible for it in terms of incitement. Bard does write that the president lost his grip and went off the rails after the election. And in his book, he lays blame on the people who had Trump's ear at the end. You put a lot of the blame, in your words, on the whack job sycophants who fed him a steady diet of conspiracy theories. Picking out all the good phrases. And does that not let the president off the hook, though, this idea that he's relying on these folks? He's the president. No, I don't let him off the hook. I think one of his weaknesses is, you know, his id is in control.

He'll follow his wants and his desires. And where other people might be modulated by logic and reason, he will push, push, push, push, push. And after the election, I think there were no guardrails. He had nothing to lose and he was going to go as far as he could. Can you tell me, will you talk to the January 6th investigation committee? Well, if they felt there was some area that was within their purview that I could be helpful, then I would certainly try to cooperate. So you would cooperate?

Sure. We're passing the Capitol right now, and it makes me think that there are still people in there, lawmakers, who are buying into the election lie. Is that hard for you to reconcile? Well, I don't know how many of them actually believe it. I think a lot of them don't want to make enemies with Trump. It might be too late for Barr to worry about that.

In a three-page letter to NBC News, President Trump trashed Barr's book as fake and hurled insults at his former attorney general, calling him a coward, a big disappointment, lazy. Although President Trump is out of office, he is still very much in the news. If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6th fairly. President Trump has talked about if he becomes president again, he would consider pardoning some of those who have been prosecuted from the January 6th riots. What's your reaction to that?

I think as a blanket statement, that was irresponsible. The people who were shown to have been engaged in this breach, forcible breach, should be prosecuted. Although he denies any wrongdoing, Donald Trump has recently come under scrutiny for his handling of classified documents after the National Archives recovered boxes of government materials from his home, Mar-a-Lago. If you were AG right now, would you be investigating that? To tell you the truth, I probably wouldn't. You have to remember the whole classification system is done under executive order. It's the president. The president decides everything. After four years of Trump in office, Bill Barr's lifelong belief in presidential power remains intact. He just wants a different president. He does not want Donald Trump to run again.

In your eyes, is there anything he could do to win back your support? In terms of the primary process and who should be the standard holder for the Republican Party? No, he's not. In my opinion, he's not the right person.