Donald Trump's former justice minister, William Barr, said Friday, September 2 that the FBI's spectacular search of the former US president's home seemed justified, and that the authorities appeared to have
"good"
evidence on a attempted obstruction on his part.
Bill Barr's remarks, who went from supporting the former president to detractor, come in the wake of an Aug. 8 police operation at the Florida home of Mar-a-Lago, which sparked a political storm and in which confidential documents were seized.
“For them to get to where we are today, they probably have good evidence
,” the former minister said on Fox News.
People say it's unprecedented.
Well it's also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put it in a country club.
»
William Barr
“If they clearly have the president moving things around, hiding things in his office and telling people to hide things from the government, they may be inclined to take this case”
to court, he added.
"I think the driving force behind all of this from the start was the pile of classified information that was at Mar-a-Lago
," he said.
"People say it's unprecedented
," he said of the search.
"Well it's also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put it in a country club
," he added, scathingly.
But while he called
Donald Trump's behavior regarding the documents
"insane"
and
"inexplicable" , Bill Barr said he hoped the department would not charge him,
"given that it is a former president and in view of the state of the nation”
.
Donald Trump replied, in a message on his social network Truth Social.
"Former Attorney General Bill Barr was fired long before I left the White House
," the former Republican president wrote.
11,000 state-related documents
On Friday, a Justice Department court document revealed that some of the top-secret documents seized by the FBI from Donald Trump's Florida home were discovered in his office, potentially bolstering suspicions that he obstructed Justice.
The detailed list of what was seized during the search also shows that Donald Trump had kept more than 11,000 secret and state-related unclassified documents.
Tells him he has the right to keep them, but they legally go to the National Archives.
Among the texts seized during the police operation are 18 documents classified as "top secret", 53 "secret" and 31 "confidential".
Among them, papers that were recovered from Donald Trump's personal office.
Officers also found several dozen empty folders marked
"classified"
in the office, which may suggest sensitive documents may have been lost or destroyed.
