Former Attorney General William Barr has been giving television interviews to promote his new memoir. On Sunday, he went on NBC’s Meet the Press with Chuck Todd.
Todd pressed him on the role of partisan politics in the office of the attorney general… and lost it when Barr pressed back.
Earlier this month, Barr said on NBC’s Today that he would likely vote for any Republican over any Democrat in 2024.
Barr remains open to voting for Donald Trump over President Joe Biden, despite his well-documented misgivings about the former president.
For this reason, Todd implicitly characterized Barr as too partisan to serve as attorney general.
“You sort of shocked a lot of people, because you spend a lot of time in your book painting this person as unfit for office — and making that he, himself has got temperamental issues, he’s got character issues,” Todd asked. “And you would risk that again over Joe Biden?”
“Right, well, I think elections are a binary choice, and unfortunately sometimes it’s choosing the lesser of two evils,” Bar responded. “I believe that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is dangerous for the United States.”
“You’ve said this quite a bit. It’s an uncomfortable thing to hear from somebody who was needing to provide equal justice under the law as attorney general, because you said it while you were attorney general,” Todd followed up. “You really think the left in this country is somehow more dangerous than some issues around the world?”
“No,” Barr said, tersely. “I just said in terms of the leadership of the country, I think they would be a dangerous choice for the United States.”
Then, Barr explained the role of partisan politics for an attorney general: an official nominated by a democratically elected president and confirmed by more than 50 democratically elected senators.
“Our system, the person who’s in charge of the administration of the criminal law, is a politically accountable official, and an official has to be politically accountable,” Barr said, according to NewsBusters. “But at the same time dedicated to providing equal justice based on law and facts with no favoritism or partisanship, which I did.”
Take a look —
.@chucktodd scolds Bill Barr for calling the left "dangerous"…moments after the NBC @MTP host compared Trump to Putin pic.twitter.com/Z4b8hGBpsE
— Kyle Drennen (@kjdrennen) March 14, 2022
Todd faced criticism for his hypocrisy in describing Barr as too partisan but gushing over Eric Holder, the attorney general under former President Barack Obama.
“Eric Holder took a lot of the slings and arrows at him from Republicans in Congress that were essentially intended for the president,” Todd said on MSNBC in 2014, according to NewsBusters.
“He has been an enormous important ally to the President in a way that I think people don’t understand… To the outside world, he’d get criticized, say from Republicans on Capitol Hill, because they thought, ‘Oh, he’s being too much – too political.’ The guy wasn’t political at all and in many ways just ended up being the point person to attract a lot of attacks.”
Take a look —
In Todd’s view, Holder allowed congressmembers to attack him instead of his “ally,” the president. Holder, like Barr, was nominated by a politician and confirmed by more than 50 of them.
Yet, Todd said that Holder “wasn’t political at all,” before also describing Barr’s partisan loyalties as “an uncomfortable thing to hear from somebody who was needing to provide equal justice under the law as attorney general.”
Todd himself worked on a Democrat’s 1992 campaign for president before becoming a newscaster. In 2020, Todd faced criticism for airing a misleading, heavily edited clip of Barr. He apologized two days later for “inaccurately” quoting Barr.
The Horn editorial team.