Former attorney general William P. Barr effectively endorsed former president Donald Trump on Wednesday, despite having previously criticized Trump’s conduct while in office and once comparing him to a “defiant, 9-year-old kid.”
“I’ve said all along, 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,” said Barr, who remains a Republican. “I’ll support the Republican ticket.”
His remarks were a shift from his previous refusal to endorse Trump during the GOP presidential primary, when he was one of many former Trump aides who said they would prefer not to see Trump on the ballot in November. Many of those people, including former vice president Mike Pence, have demurred when asked whether they would vote for Trump if he is the Republican nominee. Others, like former national security adviser John Bolton, have outright stated that they would vote for neither Trump nor President Biden.
Barr, a lifelong Republican, previously served as U.S. attorney general from 1991 to 1993 under former president George H.W. Bush, and again as attorney general under Trump from 2019 to 2020. He resigned from Trump’s Cabinet on Dec. 14, 2020, after publicly disputing the former president’s claims that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Trump would later claim he had demanded Barr’s resignation.
Barr also later cooperated with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, and defended special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump as a “legitimate case.”
In his 2022 memoir, “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General,” Barr wrote about how his relationship with Trump had soured, citing how Trump and his legal team — including Barr’s nemesis, Trump lawyer and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani — pushed absurd claims of mass voter fraud.
“His legal team had a difficult case to make, and they made it as badly and unprofessionally as I could have imagined,” Barr wrote. “It was all a grotesque embarrassment.”
Trump in turn has castigated Barr, calling his former attorney general a “coward” and vowing that, if reelected, he would not make Barr attorney general again. The Washington Post previously reported that Trump has also told advisers and friends that he wants the Justice Department to investigate Barr, among other onetime officials and allies who have voiced criticism of his time in office.
During the Republican presidential primary, Barr compared voting for Trump to “playing Russian roulette with the country.”
“I have made clear that I strongly oppose Trump for the nomination and will not endorse Trump,” Barr told NBC News in a story published in July. Asked then how he would vote if the general election was a Trump-Biden rematch, Barr said he’d “jump off that bridge when I get to it.”
On Wednesday, Barr maintained that voting for Trump would still be “Russian roulette” but claimed that a “continuation of the Biden administration is national suicide, in my opinion.”
Mariana Alfaro, Devlin Barrett and Isaac Arnsdorf contributed to this report.
