Barr: Trump Engaged in Outrageous Acts of ‘Obstruction and Deception’

Former Attorney General Bill Barr said Wednesday on FNC’s “Special Report” that former President Donald Trump engaged in outrageous acts of “obstruction and deception” with classified information that led to federal charges.

On Fox News, Mark Levin said, “It’s called the Presidential Records Act because he is the executive branch. He’s the executive branch. So he doesn’t have to rely on some subordinate. Here are the regulations. This is the way you do it, Mr. President. His power comes from the Constitution. He is a third branch of government. Him. He alone. Everything else flows from him.”

Anchor Bret Baier said, “You listen to Mark there, and he is saying that these Presidential Records Act covers what they’re seeing here. How do you see that?”

Barr said, “I think positions being taken that this is just a documents dispute over custody of documents and the president has good arguments as to why he should have kept them, I think the arguments are farcical and will be shown as such. I also think they are a sideline and distracting from the real issue. The president is being prosecuted here because it’s an obstruction case. And he is in trouble for what he did after he got the subpoena. If he thought he had arguments that these were his documents there are many things he could have done. He could have moved to quash the subpoena. He could have given the documents to the government and sued to bring them back and made his legal arguments as to why they’re really his, but he didn’t do that.”

He added, “What did he do? He engaged in outrageous acts of obstruction and deception that obstructed that subpoena. And that is wrong. That’s a law. I mean, that’s a violation of law. That’s a serious problem for him. What he did was, according to the indictment, he took a lot of the boxes away, hid them from his lawyer, told his lawyer to go and search what remained, and then caused that lawyer to file a statement to the court saying that there had been a complete search. And if anyone did that, that would be obstruction. So that is why I think the Justice Department pulled the trigger, and that’s the central part of this case—so talking about whether he had the right to have the documents or not. Well, it’s ridiculous. It’s a sideshow. You cannot defend what he did with that subpoena using.

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