Former Attorney General Bill Barr has emerged as a staunch defender of the corrupt FBI and DOJ and the crooked, impaired President who ordered that outrageous and unlawful raid on Mar-A-Lago. At the same time, Barr has become a persistent, frequent, and impassioned assailant of President Trump, so much so that large questions are arising.
00:00:14.120We have now incredibly entered the seventh year of the deep state and Marxist Dems political persecution of President Donald Trump.
00:00:24.000Think of that. More than six years of persecution, assaults on President Trump.
00:00:29.800Ongoing harassment, hounding, prosecution, lawsuits, and to what end, and when will it end?
00:00:36.980The Dems and deep state have from the beginning meant to destroy President Trump if they can, any way they can.
00:00:44.760And to this point, the only crimes that have been revealed are their own, and there have been many.
00:00:50.140In carrying out a search and seizure raid on President Trump's Mar-a-Lago offices,
00:00:55.240the politically corrupt FBI and DOJ have again broken laws and only added to their increasingly sordid legacy.
00:01:04.240The strangest of many strange elements in the FBI-DOJ Mar-a-Lago scandal has been the sudden, it seems, emergence of former Attorney General Bill Barr.
00:01:14.900His emergence as the staunch, vocal defender of the corrupt FBI and DOJ and the crooked, impaired, puppet president who ordered that outrageous and unlawful raid on Mar-a-Lago.
00:01:28.520At the same time, Barr has become a persistent, frequent, and impassioned assailant of President Trump, so much so that large questions are arising.
00:01:40.940Among them, first, why would the former top law enforcement officer in America choose to defend a president he knows for certain fact to be a liar and thoroughly corrupt?
00:01:53.160Second, why would Barr attack former President Donald Trump, who Barr knows for a certain fact has been the innocent target of the Marxist Dems and Deep State for more than six long years?
00:02:08.100And third, has Barr forgotten that his oath of office was to protect and defend the Constitution, not the institution he once headed?
00:02:19.740There's a lot to consider in all this. There's little that's simple here.
00:02:24.600And to take up all of this and more, our guest today is the remarkable, highly respected journalist, John Solomon.
00:02:31.120John is the founder and editor-in-chief of JustTheNews.com.
00:02:36.900John, thanks so much for being with us here.
00:02:39.340I want to turn to the issue of the sudden public parade of William Barr and his judgments on applicable law to the search and seizure of Mar-a-Lago documents from President Trump.
00:02:55.920First, I'd like to play this sound of Barr addressing why it was necessary for the Department of Justice and FBI to suddenly carry out a raid against Mar-a-Lago.
00:03:15.920People say this was unprecedented. Well, it's also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put him in a country club.
00:03:24.820OK, and how long is the government going to try to get that back?
00:03:29.480You know, they jawbone for a year. They were deceived on the voluntary actions taken.
00:03:35.260They then went and got a subpoena. They were deceived on that, they feel.
00:03:42.580And the facts are starting to show that they were being jerked around.
00:03:47.440John, I didn't hear a single reference to law, to regulation, convention.
00:03:55.040I just heard about feelings and a conclusion, certainly not in law.
00:04:01.520What is this felony called being jerked around?
00:04:05.880Yeah, listen, it's certainly not a term that shows up in any of the statutes that I've been able to find.
00:04:12.140It's very interesting. I think you get to see in this recent wave of interviews that Bill Barr has done, two things about him.
00:04:19.460One, he is an institutionalist. He actually believes the Justice Department and the FBI are good organizations fundamentally,
00:04:25.060and they can be trusted on most things, and that the president should have bent to the will of the Justice Department and the FBI.
00:04:32.500Now, to make that argument, the logical arguments he's making in those interviews,
00:04:39.880he has to eat all the words he said about the FBI and Justice Department in its unlawful, illegal pursuit of the very same president under Russia collusion.
00:04:48.260He assigns a level of trust to the FBI and Justice Department on this issue that his own investigation about the FBI and Justice Department just a few years ago said there wasn't trust to be warranted.
00:05:02.040There were egregious behavior, and I think you see two different Bill Barrs here,
00:05:07.720basically almost forgetting that this was the same Justice Department pursuing the president unlawfully five years ago.
00:05:14.340And I think at the end of the day, he's making an emotional argument not rooted in the law.
00:05:19.020And when we get to the issue of trust, let's just take a look at what we learned four or five days ago from Judge Eileen Cannon in the state of Florida.
00:05:28.980She names a special master. That's what everyone remembers from her ruling.
00:05:33.060But when you dig into the ruling, Judge Cannon debunks the Justice Department's you-can-trust-us argument.
00:05:40.100Remember, the Justice Department said two things going into this hearing.
00:05:43.400There was only a small number of privileged documents that we found and took and seized.
00:05:49.840And two, we have this great system called the filter-slash-taint team system, and we took care of this.
00:05:56.200We got it right. You have nothing to worry about.
00:05:58.240Well, here's what the judge revealed about that.
00:06:00.680That small number of privileged documents was more than 500 pages of attorney-client-privileged documents.
00:06:07.200I talked to the former FBI's assistant director for intelligence, a guy who did these sort of cases,
00:06:11.660these classified national security cases, he said no agent in their right mind with all of their training that they get at Quantico
00:06:18.180would ever take 500 pages of attorney-client-privileged documents.
00:06:21.920But the second thing that Judge Eileen Cannon pointed out is, hey, that filter system, it failed.
00:06:27.500There are at least two sets of documents that were clearly marked privileged that the filter team allowed to get to the front-line investigators.
00:06:35.980In other words, fruits of the poison tree got all the way to the front-line of the investigation.
00:06:40.860The filter system, the we trust us, the honor system failed.
00:06:45.520So the judge who looks at this from a legal and evidentiary standpoint, which Bill Barr doesn't seem to have done,
00:13:53.340Attorney General Barr is a very accomplished lawyer.
00:13:56.060He's had a very real successful career.
00:13:59.740I think he was instrumental in calling out and trying to stop some of the abuses of the Russia collusion case.
00:14:05.660The bill bar I saw on TV the other day felt like a pundit and not the accomplished lawyer that I came to cover in 20 or 30 years of my career.
00:14:14.320He seemed to be loose on the facts, imprecise on the law.
00:14:17.940And what he's arguing is, hey, it's okay to punish a president for exercising an authority that the Constitution gave him.
00:14:26.060That's what he basically is saying in that sound clip.
00:14:28.800The president's the ultimate declassifying authority.
00:14:30.840He's not like Hillary Clinton, who didn't have the declassification authority, who had a very specific process that she would have had to follow to declassify any of those things that she had put on her email server.
00:14:43.120The executive orders that are in place, because Bill Barr is a law guy, right?
00:14:59.360It explicitly states that the president does not have to follow any of the declassification procedures that every other government official does.
00:15:07.320They are an ultimate classified authority.
00:15:08.760They can decide on a whim with a wave of a hand, a tweak of their eye, or a wrinkle of their nose that a document's declassified.
00:15:15.940But President Trump, through his lawyers, has put a more specific piece of information out there.
00:15:21.640He described why he knew the documents that were in the residence and then taken to Mar-a-Lago or declassified.
00:15:27.980According to him, and again, it's going to come down to the evidence, well, can he back it up?
00:15:33.140What the president has said is that I knew these documents were not classified because I created a standing order that allowed me to take documents from the Oval Office,
00:15:41.980where they were still in a SCIF, a protected environment, and take them to my residence, which isn't technically a SCIF.
00:15:48.020And that the standing order said, if I took home classified documents with me, if I told the intelligence officials who brought the documents in and were waiting to get them back, go home, I'm taking these with me, it was a standing order to declassify them.
00:16:01.580And that's how declassified documents got up to the residents, why the national security officers who normally would have stayed with the documents and taken them back when the president was done, left ship, abandoned post, left the documents there.
00:16:13.560The president says he had a standing order, and that's how the documents got declassified, and he did so to facilitate his job as president in taking homework home with him.
00:16:23.220And that's something Bill Barr doesn't even acknowledge or put into the equation of what's going on, and he doesn't address the fact.
00:16:30.480He sort of suggests, well, every president has to follow a procedure.
00:16:34.220The executive order actually is explicit that the president and vice president don't have to follow the procedures that everybody else has.
00:16:40.300So, again, I don't see in these recent interviews the same Bill Barr that I saw as a very accomplished, smart lawyer and, you know, had a pretty good record in the Justice Department in both of his tenures as attorney general.
00:16:52.480He seems loose and more TV pundit, less careful lawyer than I'm used to seeing.
00:16:58.920Less careful and also more inventive, as is the Justice Department and the FBI.
00:17:05.480There is no question whatsoever in law that these documents in the possession of a former president are his.
00:17:15.600Now, there is nothing that sets a time limit on that or sets a specific period in which there has to be a completed negotiation with an archivist.
00:17:25.660We are basically talking about a librarian, an assistant librarian at that, talking about an overdue book and turning it into a nuclear confrontation legally with a former president.
00:17:41.180And, by the way, with the authorization, she says, of the president of the United States.
00:18:08.440The archives, in some ways, gets a little bit of a bum rap here because the archives were still in a negotiation mode until President Joe Biden, according to the archives' own records, said,
00:18:18.500you know what, take those boxes you got that President Trump voluntarily returned to the archives, send them to the FBI.
00:18:24.100By sending them to the FBI, they made a criminal referral.
00:18:26.360Within a couple of days of Joe Biden giving that instruction, and that's the word the court uses, it's also the word that the letter uses that we made public, the FBI opened up a grand jury investigation.
00:18:37.600Joe Biden, the sitting president, initiated a criminal investigation of his chief rival from 2020 and his likely rival in 2024.
00:18:46.560He initiated the powers of the FBI to be unleashed on the man who was the opposition party leader in his government.
00:18:53.660That is something that can't be glossed over.
00:18:56.060It is something that Bill Barr didn't address at all.
00:18:59.280Maybe he missed the important reference that the judge made, or maybe he missed my story from two weeks ago.
00:19:04.000But Joe Biden is at the initiation point of this criminal investigation.
00:19:08.040And according to many of the great people I've interviewed, including FBI agents who, on most days, defend the FBI's conduct, people like Kevin Brock,
00:19:16.560they said they never saw a president order up a criminal investigation of a political rival in all their years and decades in government service,
00:19:28.300Bill Barr was upset that Barack Obama got a briefing about Hillary Clinton's plan to dirty up Donald Trump.
00:19:34.120Well, this goes way farther than Barack Obama's briefing that, hey, Hillary Clinton might be dirtying up Donald Trump with some fake Russia allegations.
00:21:34.800Will the people really understand that this is not, you know, failing to return a library book, that this was serious?
00:21:40.380And so you have to worry about those things.
00:21:42.320And I hope that those kinds of factors will incline the administration not to indict him,
00:21:46.980because I don't want to see him indicted as a former president.
00:21:49.340But I also think they'll be under a lot of pressure to indict him, because, you know, one question is, look, if anyone else would have gotten indicted, why not indict him?
00:21:59.600Well, I guess he answered his own question, didn't he?
00:22:02.000He's a former president of the United States, who has the authority of classification and declassification.
00:22:10.920Your reaction to this Bill Barr, who argues both sides of the question about indictment, and I think leaves us hanging as to what he truly wants the DOJ to do?
00:22:22.860Well, listen, even more troubling than that, there is a political component that he makes into what is supposed to be a criminal analysis.
00:22:30.740He actually breaks his own rule of not allowing politics to affect.
00:22:34.940He just said, just because the president is a former president, I don't want to see him indicted.
00:22:39.960That isn't the standard that we use in America.
00:22:42.400But it is the standard that seems to have seeped into the mentality of the Justice Department in the permanent bureaucracy, which is politics can infect a decision.
00:22:52.900And when our founding fathers created this country, they said that politics should be, that justice should be blind.
00:22:59.720Political considerations should not apply.
00:23:01.460Now, most of the time when we talk about this context, we talk about it in the context of you shouldn't pursue a prosecution just because you want to get your political enemy, which was the story of the Russia collusion case.
00:23:12.880But it's just as damning for a person like Bill Barr to say, Donald Trump shouldn't be president or shouldn't be prosecuted simply because he's a former president.
00:23:21.860That's a political consideration that treats Donald Trump differently under law.
00:23:25.880By the way, Donald Trump doesn't want to be treated differently under law.
00:23:28.860He wants to be treated like everybody else.
00:23:30.460This this this sentiment that Bill Barr expresses here is behoving to me.
00:23:35.760It's so different from the scholarly, constitutionally accurate Bill Barr I've seen.
00:23:40.820And it's just a sloppier version of him.
00:23:44.780Listen, if the president committed a murder tomorrow, God, not that I say he would.
00:23:48.720But are we going to just say, oh, we don't want to see him prosecuted because he's the former president.
00:23:53.400It's a silly rationale that Bill Barr is spewing here.
00:23:56.380And it gets into, I think, what has been an erosion of the bright line in the Justice Department.
00:24:02.540Politics shouldn't matter at any moment.
00:24:04.800And that includes in the Hunter Biden investigation.
00:24:07.040I have a bone to pick with Bill Barr's Justice Department, because in the summer of 2020, on multiple occasions, I had been told that there was a criminal investigation of Hunter Biden.
00:24:17.480And they waved me off it. And when I mean waved me off it, they said, it's not true.
00:24:21.220Don't go with that. You'll be embarrassed.
00:24:42.900He basically says, well, we have a rule in the Justice Department in the 90 days before elections.
00:24:47.500You don't take actions that can impact the election.
00:24:50.180OK. But Bill Barr didn't actually abide by that rule.
00:24:54.600In the fall of 2020, he released a whole bunch of documents about Mike Flynn that implicated the Obama-Bide administration and wrongdoing that showed that Flynn was wrongly prosecuted,
00:25:04.220that quoted an FBI agent saying that the FBI had politicized and pursued an investigation without evidence.
00:25:10.800That clearly had an impact on the election.
00:25:13.040It clearly shined a light on Joe Biden.
00:25:14.880And oh, by the way, one of the documents Bill Barr released in the 2020 election implicated Joe Biden in sitting on a meeting and Joe Biden suggesting one of the crimes that maybe they could pursue against Mike Flynn,
00:25:28.260which was this crazy idea of the Logan Act.
00:25:30.200Bill Barr had no problem putting that out in an election year and some of that out in the 60-day window.
00:25:35.820But he did have a problem just confirming a factual thing that Hunter Biden was under criminal investigation.
00:25:41.620Again, inconsistency in his argument that I think really undercuts the seriousness by which we should treat these interviews.
00:25:48.700And let's take all of this, put it together with what we know, and I can come to only one reasonable conclusion right now.
00:26:00.560And that is that Bill Barr has been part of a cover-up for the Department of Justice and the FBI.
00:26:08.360Because as you said, talking about your experience with him in September of 2020, he also famously said that he knew that Joe Biden, the former vice president, in the second and final debate,
00:26:24.680it was actually the third debate, became the second because they got rid of the second debate.
00:26:32.840He knew he was lying about the Hunter Biden laptop, knew he was lying about Russian disinformation, knew that the 51 veterans who had signed that famous letter,
00:26:42.120including five former CIA directors, was all a lie.
00:26:47.240And he dispatched his FBI agents to big media, big tech, big social media to make certain that the October, I believe it was October 14th story by the New York Post was shut down on the Biden laptop and dismissed as Russian disinformation.
00:27:09.420He sent those FBI agents out while he's saying he didn't want to intervene and tell the American people that he knew Biden to be the liar that he is.
00:27:19.040Listen, and John Ratcliffe, less than 20 days from the election, went out and made a statement as the intelligence chief that the Hunter Biden laptop is not Russian disinformation.
00:28:26.320All right, if he wants to say I didn't want to do it in September, why not in the spring and summer of 2020 when I first asked his people?
00:28:32.100And I want to be clear, I never talked to Bill Barr about this, but I did talk about to his deputies and the people authorized to talk to the press, and they waved me off a true story well before the 60-day window.
00:28:42.920So, again, all I know is the Bill Barr I'm hearing in these recent interviews doesn't feel like the precise, careful, lawyerly, and very accomplished Justice Department official I saw for most of his career.
00:28:54.200There's a disconnect, and I think he's doing a disservice with all of this disassembling excuses.
00:29:05.700And this is Bill Barr concerned about the unprecedented nature of what Trump had done, which is absolutely specious nonsense or dissembling, or maybe just go to what it is.
00:29:21.640It is not okay to leak the FBI, the DOJ, leaking from those documents that they seized illegally, and my judgment, I will speak only for myself, that they seized illegally from Donald Trump.
00:29:48.300They are seizing documents that are absolutely incriminating, including it may well be documents pertaining to crossfire hurricane that they want to bury.
00:30:01.300They may also want to know the legal strategy of Donald Trump as he pursues the RICO case against these very same characters from crossfire hurricane.
00:30:12.640It's astonishing the possibilities here.
00:30:16.860Yeah, listen, and as a journalist, I'm not going to speculate what motivates him.
00:30:20.000All I can say is that the precision that Bill Barr used for most of his career as a very successful, accomplished lawyer and Justice Department official and twice the Attorney General, I don't see that same carefulness in this recent television appearance.
00:30:33.260As there are, with the book and some of these interviews, he has contradictions and conflicts in both his behavior and in his answers that don't add up.
00:30:43.300And I think Americans will make up their own mind.
00:30:45.640I don't know what's in his heart, what his motive is.
00:30:48.460But there was nothing preventing Bill Barr from letting the American people know in the summer and spring of 2020 that there was an investigation.
00:30:59.400Investigations are confirmed all the time.
00:31:01.040By the way, almost every aspect of an investigation of Donald Trump was always public.
00:31:05.320So why did Joe Biden get that protection?
00:31:07.420I think history will look back and say there was an unequal system, a thumb on the scale during the 2020 election.
00:31:16.100And either through silence and omission or through commission, large numbers of Justice Department and FBI officials put the weight of that thumb on the scale.
00:31:42.760It could have been a notification to Congress.
00:31:44.580A lot of different ways he could have done it.
00:31:46.260It's done almost every day in the Justice Department, including the way we learned about President Trump being under investigation.
00:31:52.280And we also have the knowledge that Bill Barr, at least in one meeting, told the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia not to pursue a significant election fraud irregularity.
00:32:09.260He thought it would take too much time.
00:32:28.640And I agree with you about speculation.
00:32:32.180But when you have a former attorney general, the current attorney general, the president of the United States lying to the American people with frequency, regularity, and substantively, I don't think there's anything speculative about the plight of this country when it comes to the character of its leadership, at least as expressed in this Marxist-Dim administration.
00:32:58.340And, unfortunately, with Bill Barr as well.
00:33:05.300You know, just real quickly, there was an interview that Bill Barr did in December with 2020, just before he quit with Politico, and he made these comments.
00:33:13.220There is fraud, unfortunately, in most elections.
00:33:15.280I think we're too tolerant of this, and I'm sure there was fraud in this election.
00:33:19.840That's pretty accepting of the idea that we should just let fraud go on.
00:33:22.840And let's keep in mind, when he uttered those words in December of 2020, the FBI and the attorney general and the Justice Department were aware that a foreign power, Iran, had breached a state voter database, stole 150,000 identities of American voters, and were using it to try to influence the election for and against Republicans.
00:33:42.800That is known now because eight or nine months after Bill Barr resigned, the Justice Department brought that indictment, but they acknowledged in the indictment they knew about in the summer of 2020.
00:33:54.220So even when you look back at Bill Barr's comments on elections, first off, there's a tolerance.
00:34:03.000Secondly, at the time he downplayed and poo-pooed those ideas, he was aware, the FBI was aware, of a major foreign power breach, Iran.
00:34:12.000And John Ratcliffe was trying to send us signals that, hey, there's something about Iran, but the attorney general didn't give us that visibility before the election was certified on January 6th.
00:34:22.480In fact, it took eight, nine months after that for us to learn that the FBI knew that Iran and these hackers had carried out this hideous plan.
00:34:29.560And so history will look back, and there's a lot of facts that when added up against Bill Barr's words, there are contradictions and conflicts.
00:34:36.220And I think Americans will make a good, informed judgment about Bill Barr's legacy when they have the full picture.
00:34:42.780And important to having that full picture is Just the News and a great reporter who also happens to be founder and editor-in-chief of Just the News, John Solomon.