Former Attorney General Bill Barr said on Sunday that he has not seen any evidence that shows former president Donald Trump was “legally responsible” for the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
Asked by NBC News’ Lester Holt during an interview on Sunday whether he considered Trump “responsible” for the Capitol attack, Barr said: “I do think he was responsible in the broad sense of that word, in that it appears that part of the plan was to send this group up to the Hill. I think the whole idea was to intimidate Congress. And I think that that was wrong.”
“I haven’t seen anything to say he was legally responsible for it in terms of incitement,” Barr added.
Last week, the select House committee investigating the Capitol riot argued in a court filing that Trump and members of his campaign “engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States” when they tried to block the certification of electoral votes in Congress on Jan. 6.
In the interview on that aired in Sunday, Barr also said he would not prosecute Trump for taking top secret documents from the White House when he left office.
“The whole classification system is done under executive order. It’s the president. The president decides everything,” Barr said. NBC noted that there’s no indication Trump formally declassified the documents before he took them from the White House.
Barr sat for the interview in advance of the publication of his book “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General,” about his time serving in the Trump administration.
