Former Attorney General Bill Barr suggested Monday he would vote for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election if he wins the Republican nomination — despite saying that the GOP should move on from the former president.
“I certainly have made it clear, I don’t think he should be our nominee and I’m going to, you know, support somebody else for the nomination,” Barr told NBC “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie ahead of the Tuesday release of his new book “One Damn Thing After Another.”
However, Barr hedged when Guthrie pressed him about whether he would vote for a Democrat over Trump in a hypothetical general election.
“Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party, it’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee,” Barr responded.
In the book, Barr writes that Trump’s actions before and during last year’s Capitol riot threatened democracy and spells out his belief that the 45th president lied in making claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.
“It’s hard to project what the facts are going to turn out to be three years hence,” added Barr, who served as attorney general from February 2019 to December 2020. “But as of now, it’s hard for me to conceive that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee.”
Trump hasn’t officially thrown his hat in the ring for 2024, but has hinted that he would seek the nomination again.
“We did it twice, and we will do it again. We’re going to be doing it again a third time,” he told an audience last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando.
Trump also easily won a straw poll of likely 2024 Republican candidates conducted at the same event.
Trump received 59 percent of the vote, far ahead of second-place finisher Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Barr sat for a series of interviews with “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt in the leadup to his book’s publication, which aired as part of a one-hour special Sunday night.
In those interviews, Barr accused Trump of orchestrating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and described the former president’s claims of election fraud as “bulls—.”
Trump lashed out at his former attorney general last Friday, saying that Barr “wouldn’t know voter fraud if it was staring him in the face—and it was.”
On Monday, Axios also published a three-page letter Trump sent to Holt last week responding to the Barr interview.
“Bill Barr cares more about being accepted by the corrupt Washington Media and Elite than serving the American people,” Trump’s letter began. “He was slow, lethargic, and I realized early on that he never had what it takes to make a great Attorney General. When the Radical Left Democrats threatened to hold him in contempt and even worse, to impeach him, he became virtually worthless to Law and Order and Election Integrity. They broke him just like a trainer breaks a horse.”
“I would imagine that if the book is anything like him, it will be long, slow, and very boring,” the former president went on. “I made many great appointments during my Administration, and we accomplished more than most Administrations could even dream of, but Bill Barr was not one of my better picks.”
