Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized his former Attorney General William Barr as a slow-moving “swamp creature,” warned that Republican senators who compromise with President Biden are being “played with,” and reveled in the dwindling ratings of liberal cable news networks.
And that was all before lunch.
Perhaps hoping to draw attention away from expected criminal charges against his Trump Organization business empire in Manhattan as early as this week, Mr. Trump — whose Twitter ban remains in force — has been firing off statements through his Save America PAC with tweet-like rapidity.
“CNN ratings are down 70%,” Mr. Trump said Tuesday. “MSDNC is also way down. Actually, they are ALL way down. They say the news is ’boring’ since I left D.C. Morning Joe, Joy Reid (whoever that is?), Nicole Wallace, Jake Tapper, and even Chris Wallace, at Fox, in free fall. A wonderful thing to see!”
Mr. Barr has invited Mr. Trump’s wrath by disclosing in interviews this week that he believed Mr. Trump’s claims of election fraud were “bull——.” His views will be in a book about the Trump presidency written by ABC News journalist Jonathan Karl.
“Jonathan Karl’s story on slow moving Bill Barr is made-up beyond any level imaginable,” Mr. Trump said. “It is, in other words, Fake News! I lost confidence in Bill Barr long before the 2020 presidential election scam.”
Instead, Mr. Trump said he lost confidence in Mr. Barr when he “dismissed and didn’t act on the very powerful” report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who found serious abuses in the FBI’s surveillance of Trump campaign officials.
He complained that Mr. Barr turned over the investigation to former U.S. Attorney John Durham, “who has seemingly disappeared from the planet.”
“We caught them but unfortunately didn’t have an Attorney General who was capable of acting and wouldn’t go against his friends in Washington, D.C.,” Mr. Trump said. “Barr was a ’swamp creature’ who was devastated when the Radical Left wanted to impeach him. He, and other RINOs (you see it all the time!), always fold.”
The acronym refers to “Republicans In Name Only.”
“It takes a very strong and special person to go against the ’mob,’” Mr. Trump said. “Bill Barr was not that person. Despite evidence of tremendous Election Fraud, he just didn’t want to go there. He was afraid, weak, and frankly, now that I see what he is saying, pathetic.”
He said an election audit in Arizona and possibly other battleground states will prove Mr. Barr was wrong.
The former president also said it is “so sad to see certain RINO Republican Senators go back and forth to the White House and continually get nothing for infrastructure or anything else.”
A group of Republicans struck a deal with Mr. Biden late last week on a roughly $1 trillion infrastructure package. But the president quickly imperiled the deal by warning that he would veto it if Congress fails to pass a companion package of costly social programs that only Democrats support.
The president later backtracked on his veto threat.
“When will they learn that they are being played with, and used by, the Radical Left — and only bad things can happen,” Mr. Trump said of the Republican senators. “Should have never lost the Senate in the first place, thanks Mitch [McConnell]! New leadership is needed, and fast!”
The former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., followed up his father’s statements later on Tuesday with an urgent fundraising pitch for the Save America PAC.
“My father was a better President than Joe Biden will ever be,” the younger Trump wrote in the solicitation.
“America was WINNING like never before under President Trump, and now we’re already struggling under Joe Biden’s dismal leadership.”
He noted that the end-of-quarter fundraising deadline is approaching, and the Trump team wants to meet its goal of $2 million.
“If we fall short, we risk losing our country further to the radical Left,” the younger Mr. Trump wrote, promising that any donations before midnight Tuesday would be quadrupled.
The former president also decried on Tuesday that “politically motivated” New York prosecutors had given his legal team an ultimatum before filing expected criminal charges against his company in a tax-evasion probe.
“They will do anything to stop the MAGA movement (and me), even if it involves prosecutorial misconduct and harassment of a political opponent, which they are using at levels rarely seen before,” he said.
He said prosecutors are persecuting him for “things that are standard practice throughout the U.S. business community, and in no way a crime.”
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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