“I've said all along that given two bad choices, I think it's my duty to choose the person who I think would do the least harm to the country, and in my mind that's – I'll stand for the Republican party votes,” Barr said. , who remains a Republican. “I will support the Republican ticket.”
His comments marked a shift from his previous refusal to support Trump during the Republican Party's presidential primaries, when he was one of several former Trump aides who said they would prefer not to see Trump on the November ballot. 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 Advisor John Bolton, have flatly stated that they would vote for neither Trump nor President Biden.
A lifelong Republican, Barr previously served as U.S. attorney general from 1991 to 1993 under former President George HW Bush, and again as attorney general under Trump from 2019 to 2020. He resigned from Trump's Cabinet on December 14, 2020, after publicly disputing the former president's claims that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Trump would later claim that he had demanded Barr's resignation.
Barr also later worked with the House committee investigating the January 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 attorney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani — advanced absurd claims of massive voter fraud.
“His legal team had a difficult case to argue, and they did it as poorly and unprofessionally as I could have imagined,” Barr wrote. “It was all a grotesque shame.”
Trump, in turn, has castigated Barr and called his former attorney general a “cowardand promised that if re-elected, he would not reappoint Barr as attorney general. The Washington Post previously reported that Trump has also told advisers and friends that he wants the Justice Department to investigate Barr, among other former officials and allies who have criticized his time in office.
During the Republican presidential primaries, Barr likened voting for Trump to “playing Russian roulette with the country.”
“I have made it clear that I strongly oppose Trump for the nomination and that I will not support Trump,” Barr told NBC News in a story. published in July. When asked then how he would vote if the general election were a rematch between Trump and Biden, Barr said he would “jump off that bridge when I get around to it.”
Barr claimed on Wednesday that voting for Trump would still be “Russian roulette” but asserted that a “continuation of the Biden administration is, in my opinion, national suicide.”
Mariana Alfaro, Devlin Barrett, and Isaac Arnsdorf contributed to this report.
