- Election 2024
TOPEKA, Kansas. — Former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr said the disappointing nomination of Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden for president of the United States would compel voters to make a decision about which of two unfit candidates would be the lesser evil during the next four years in the White House.
Barr, a conservative Republican who served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Trump, said during an appearance Monday at the 100th anniversary of the Kansas Chamber that he would vote for the Republican ticket given the option of two major party nominees he viewed as unfit for office.
He said he would cast a ballot for former President Trump, who was his boss for nearly two years as attorney general, rather than endorse reelection of President Biden, who defeated Trump in 2020.
“I opposed Trump for the nomination and I spoke out, you know, from the time I left the administration to just about now, hoping that someone else would be the Republican nominee,” Barr said. “What I’m saying is that between the two of those candidates, Biden and Trump, I plan to vote Republican.
“I don’t think either of them are good candidates, and I think I have to vote for the person I think will do the least damage,” he said.
Trump took to Truth Social to express a degree of gratitude to Barr by deleting the word “lethargic” from a previous description of him as “weak, slow moving, lethargic, gutless and lazy.” Trump also blasted Barr for not aggressively investigating allegations of widespread voter fraud in the United States. Barr, who resigned as attorney general after Trump’s loss to Biden, said claims that a multistate conspiracy denied him reelection in 2020 were groundless.
Working class hero
Barr, who also served as attorney general under the first President Bush, spoke to hundreds of people at the Kansas Chamber’s annual gathering in Topeka. In 2023, the organization’s keynote speaker was former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who represented Kansas in the U.S. House before joining the Trump administration.
In a news conference, Barr declined to say whether a person ordered by a court to pay multimillion-dollar civil judgments and facing dozens of felony charges should be considered a viable candidate for president.
“It’s too early to tell exactly how these criminal cases are going to work out. I personally think a lot of them are bogus,” Barr said. “I’ve said I didn’t think he’s fit to be president. I don’t think Biden’s fit to be president. So, it’s a comparison. You have to look at the whole picture of all the pros and cons and given that I think the country will be far worse off after four years of Biden than four years of Trump.”
Barr, who began work with the American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce after leaving the federal government, said the appeal and resilience of Trump on the campaign trail was built on frustrations of working-class Americans who felt ignored by the government and gravitated to Trump in 2016, 2020 and would again in 2024.
While Barr disputed Trump’s theories about election fraud in 2020, he said attempts by politicians to gain marginal advantages in elections by adjusting laws to tilt the playing field one way or another were counterproductive to rebuilding confidence in the electoral system.
“There’s a lot of passion in the system and it’s absolutely critical that people have confidence in the outcome of the election. If we want to avoid the breakdown in the system completely, all Americans should get behind absolute integrity in elections,” he said.
Barr said states should prohibit the gathering of completed ballots — a process referred to by critics as “ballot harvesting” — for delivery to election offices or ballot boxes. He said mail-in balloting, if allowed, had to be restricted to verified, qualified voters. He said the window for advance voting should be no longer than a few days and certainly not a span that resembled “an election season.”
Biden: Buying votes
In terms of national security, Barr said he couldn’t recall a more dangerous moment in his lifetime as it related to challenges facing the United States. He said expansionist objectives of Russia, Iran and China were intended to displace the United States as a global power. China, in particular, was dedicated to completing a geopolitical shift by seizing Taiwan to the embarrassment of the United States, he said.
It meant U.S. presidents and members of Congress had to be firmly committed to Taiwan, Ukraine and Israel to avoid the appearance of abandoning allies, Barr said.
“The United States needs friends in the world,” said Barr, who worked for the CIA early in his government career. “Collective security is important.”
Barr said Biden blundered into a crisis on the border with Mexico by reversing Trump administration policies forbidding undocumented foreign nationals from entering the United States pending evaluation of asylum claims. He said champions of border security shouldn’t be intimidated by allegations they were “racists or hated foreigners” for seeking an orderly and fair system of immigration.
He said he was puzzled by Biden’s insistence on eliminating without congressional authority repayment of college loan obligations after the U.S. Supreme Court shot down an executive order waiving hundreds of millions of dollars in debts.
“To me, it was a clear example of trying to buy votes using public assets — to buy votes in an election year,” Barr said.
Barr faulted higher education administrators for failing to curtail protests on college campuses by critics of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The Gaza Health Ministry says airstrikes, street fighting and a six-month siege had led to the death in Gaza of an estimated 33,000 people since Hamas infiltrated Israel to kill more than 1,000 people and take hostages.
He drew a distinction between protests against the U.S.-led war in Vietnam when he was a student at Columbia University in 1968 and current campus unrest in opposition to fighting by Israel in Gaza. He said protesters in the 1960s had a personal stake because they could be drafted to fight an unpopular war in Southeast Asia. There was no parallel connection for Americans to the battle in Gaza, he said.
“I don’t understand why it’s taking these cities and college administrators so long to restore order on campus,” Barr said. “It’s part of the general lawlessness that is gradually overwhelming our system. This has nothing to do with First Amendment rights and expression. You can express your view. You can hold your sign. But this kind of violence, this kind of bullying of everybody else, it has to be met firmly.”
This story was originally produced by the Kansas Reflector which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network, including the Daily Montanan, supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
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