Donald Trump’s former justice minister, Bill Barr, said on Friday that the FBI’s spectacular search of the former US president’s home seemed justified, and that the authorities appeared to have “good” evidence of an attempted attack. hindrance on his part.
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Mr. Barr’s remarks, which went from supporting the former president to detractor, come following this police operation on August 8 at Mr. Trump’s home in Florida, which caused a political storm and during which documents confidential were seized.
“For them to get to where we are today, they probably have good evidence,” Barr said on Fox News.
“If they clearly have the president moving things around, hiding things in his office and telling people to hide things from the government, they may be inclined to take this case” to court, he added.
“I think the driving force behind all of this from the start was the pile of classified information that was at Mar-a-Lago,” he said.
“People say it was unprecedented,” he said of the search. “Well it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put it in a country club,” he added, scathingly.
But while he called Mr. Trump’s behavior regarding the documents “insane” and “inexplicable”, Mr. Barr said he hoped the department would not charge him, “given that he is a former president and in view of the state of the nation”.
Donald Trump replied, in a message on his social network Truth Social. “Former Attorney General Bill Barr was fired long before I left the White House,” the former Republican president wrote.
On Friday, a Justice Department court document revealed that some of the top-secret documents seized by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Florida home were discovered in his office, potentially bolstering suspicions that he obstructed Justice.
The detailed list of what was seized in the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago also shows that Mr. Trump had kept more than 11,000 secret, state-related unclassified documents. Tells him he has the right to keep them, but they legally go to the National Archives.
Among the texts seized during the police operation are 18 documents classified as “top secret”, 53 “secret” and 31 “confidential”.
Among them are papers that were recovered from Mr. Trump’s personal office.
Officers also found several dozen empty folders marked “classified” in the office, which may suggest sensitive documents may have been lost or destroyed.