Bill Barr, who served as attorney general in Donald Trump’s administration and has repeatedly disputed his former boss’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, on Wednesday said he will vote for “the Republican ticket” in November, adding that a second term in office for President Joe Biden would be “national suicide.”
In an interview with Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom,” Barr, who has previously also called into question Trump’s fitness to serve, still thinks Biden and his policies represent a greater threat to the U.S.
“Well, I’ve said all along, you know, given two bad choices, I think it’s my duty to pick the person I think would do the least harm to the country and in my mind that’s — I will vote the Republican ticket,” Barr said. “I will support the Republican ticket.”
Barr suggested Biden is pursuing a progressive agenda, which he described as “the real danger to the country, the real danger to democracy.”
“Trump may be playing Russian roulette but a continuation of the Biden administration is national suicide in my opinion,” he added.
Barr, who stood by Trump for most of the time he served in the Department of Justice, resigned from the administration in December 2020 after he gave an interview to The Associated Press saying the DOJ had found no evidence to support Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud in that year’s presidential contest.
In an interview with The Atlantic in June 2021, Barr doubled down, saying Trump’s claim that the election was stolen from him was “all bullshit.” He also testified before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, describing Trump as “detached from reality” over his espousal of voting conspiracy theories.
In his own book published in 2022, Barr wrote the time he spent working alongside the president showed him “Trump cared only about one thing: himself.”
“Country and principle took second place,” he added.
Still, while Barr refused to endorse Trump in the 2024 Republican primary, he had not explicitly ruled out eventually supporting Trump’s candidacy if he secured the GOP nomination.
During the Fox News interview, Barr also criticized the hush money case against Trump in New York, where the former president has been charged with falsifying business records to hide a hush money payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
Barr said the case is an “abomination” and that the charges leveled against the former president were politically motivated.
“To me this shows that the real threat to liberty, the real threat to our system are the excesses of the progressive left,” Barr said. “They’re perverting the system of justice and that’s where the danger lies, the corruption and subversion of our institutions by the left.”
The trial is set to resume Friday in New York with alternate juror selection after a panel of 12 jurors was selected this week.
