Former Attorney General William Barr said the Department of Justice appears to be aggressively looking into former President Donald Trump and people near him over their roles within the Jan. 6 attack.
Barr, who served as attorney general from February 2019 through December 2020, weighed in on the DOJ investigation into the deadly Capitol rebellion during an interview with CBS News’ Catherine Herridge on Friday.
Barr said that based on a federal grand jury’s recent subpoenas of top Trump administration officials, it looks like prosecutors are “taking a tough look” at Trump and people around him regarding their actions related to the Jan. 6 attack.
“It definitely is a major event. It changes my view of what’s been happening,” Barr said. “This implies to me that they’re taking a tough have a look at the group at the highest, including the president and the people immediately around him who were involved on this.”
He also predicted to Herridge that prosecutors are “going to attempt to get a ruling on the problem of executive privilege” after former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone was reportedly subpoenaed by the Justice Department last week.
He described reports of Cipollone’s subpoena as “essentially the most significant.”
“He has the strongest claim to executive privilege because the counsel to the office of the president,” Barr said. “That’s type of the largest mountain for them to climb, and the incontrovertible fact that they lead off with that, to me, suggests that they desire a definitive resolution — not only on Cipollone — but you understand, this might affect [former White House chief of staff Mark] Meadows and among the other people, too.”
The previous attorney general, who helped sow unwarranted doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election results, previously told the House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 that Trump’s election fraud claims were “bullshit” and “detached from reality.”
Chatting with Herridge last week, Barr stopped in need of saying there’d be a technique to prove “beyond an inexpensive doubt” that Trump engaged in criminal behavior.
“After the last set of hearings I said, personally, if that is what there may be, as attorney general I still don’t see that as a sufficient basis to prove beyond an inexpensive doubt that against the law was committed by the president,” Barr said.
You may watch Barr’s interview with CBS News below.
