Producers’ Pick | Bill Barr: Donald Trump Improved the Republican Party

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Visit Samsung.com to learn more about Galaxy Z Fold 4. In Ukraine, the latest on the fight as they continue to hold out and Kyiv gets closer and closer to being surrounded. But if I'm the Ukrainian, I'm not that worried about it as normally I would have been two weeks ago.

When you see the lack of gumption and drive the Russians have, I'm not too sure they're poised to take a city, especially in the north where the fighting force isn't as strong. Coming up in about a half hour, Tim Tebow with me right now in studio, best-selling author William Barr. You know him as attorney general under President Trump who also served under Bush 41. His new book is fascinating.

It's called One Damn Thing After Another. Mr. Attorney General, welcome to the studio. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you, Brian. It's great to be with you. First off, we didn't see or heard much of you since your tenure ended with the Trump administration.

Oh, I had post-traumatic stress disorder. I wonder why. Did you know, I guess you've had to know, and after seeing the first year and a half of President Trump's term, that you were walking into a firestorm. Did you know? Absolutely. What did you think?

What was it like? I knew it was, as you say, a firestorm. And I also thought we were potentially headed toward a constitutional crisis with the way the Russiagate narrative was being handled. Yeah, we'll just move the mic a little bit closer to you.

It might be a little bit easier. When did you realize, because a lot of people on the right that were Trump supporters couldn't figure out what really was the deal with the Russia situation. The Mueller goes underground and we hear rumors about subpoenas and raids and we see this. We didn't know quite what was going on. When did you realize that this was a hoax? Well, it wasn't until I got into the government and could get all the information that I became convinced that it was that way. But I was skeptical about it from the beginning.

It just didn't fit. You know, there's no reason why Putin and the Russian intelligence services would have colluded with anyone in the United States. If they wanted to do something and hack into something and dump some documents, they would do it. They don't need to coordinate that with anybody. It would be very risky for them to do that. So it never really fit together with me.

And the more I found out about it, the more skeptical I became. From what I've read in the book, you know what my takeaway is? You're like a true conservative.

What matters more to you is the country. And what worries you most of all is the progressive line of thought. It doesn't seem like a Democrat. Bill Clinton was centered left.

That's called run against issues. Right. What's different now that motivated you in your 70s to get back into government at an extremely difficult time? Yeah, I think that there's been a transformational change in the Democratic Party under Obama where it lurched very sharply to the left.

And as I say in the book, this is no longer a family feud within the family. I think that the progressive left has left the family. They are not part of the liberal democratic tradition of the United States. They're trying to tear down our institutions. They're no longer for free speech. And I think it's a mortal danger to the republic of this progressive agenda. And I supported Trump once he got the nomination and I thought it was important to stop their momentum, which he did. So you can get away that other Republican candidates wouldn't have.

See, that's an interesting question. In a way, yes. You know, maybe someone else could have won the election, but he had some traits that I thought fit the times. And one of them was the ability to fight back against the establishment, against the mainstream media, not be cowed by them, keep on going. And he could take a punch.

He could take a punch like no one I have ever seen and keep going. And those that were the traits that were needed. And he has taught the Republican Party something. He's taught the Republican Party had a fight. I think that's a fair, fair to give him credit for that. And I think that that's improved the party going forward. I think there's a lot of positive things about the president. You're willing to accept the fact that it's atypical for a politician. You never saw anyone quite like him.

You mentioned he can take a punch. You also had clarity of views. Especially at the border, things like the border, things about America first. That wasn't just a line in a campaign that some speechwriter put in because it was poll tested or focus group tested.

Right. I mean, he had I sort of call him red meat issues. There were certain issues with him where he took a strong common sense position and he was right about it and nothing could get him off it. And I admired that about him.

Crime, the drug war, the cartels in Mexico, the immigration issues, big tech, censorship. These were his issues that he was very fixed on and he was unshakable on them. And he had the energy to push them through. What I say is his impulsiveness had some downside to it, but it also had an upside. And one of his upside was it gave dynamism to the administration and push things along.

How do you explain the loyalty generated? From his base. I think his base, I think that what happened in 2016 is that a lot of ordinary middle class, working class Americans were just fed up with the the smugness of the elites and the excesses of the liberals at the progressives. And they were mad and they wanted to push back. And they felt the progressives had taken a wrecking ball to the country and they wanted their own wrecking ball. And they liked the fact he was so plain spoken and got in their face and he was combative. And that helped them. And he was sort of speaking for them. And that's where I think that loyalty came from. I think that and that's why in many cases it's still there and he still polls highest amongst Republicans.

You said in 2016 you would have crawled across glass to vote for him. Yes. And just on one issue alone. And that was the courts and the appointments and the Supreme Court, too, and the vacant judgeships.

Right. And he delivered on that as he delivered on a lot of what he promised. And just just the courts in my mind justified supporting him. I never I thought I always thought the never Trumpers were 180 degrees wrong. So what do you think about the Supreme Court justice pick now?

I think they're they're good. You know, over the long haul, they're going to be good justices, all of them. You know, the president has this idea that if he picks somebody, they have to vote the way he thinks from then on in perpetuity.

That's not the way it works. What about Biden's nominee? I don't know much about her, but I think she's going to be, you know, probably more left than Breyer was, more to the left than Stephen Breyer. What about the way Breyer was treated at the end? Yeah, I mean, it was pretty it was pretty harsh. I think he probably would have liked to stay another year.

They basically retired him without his permission. Have you ever seen anything like that? Well, you know, Johnson once negotiated someone off the Supreme Court by offering to make his son the attorney general. So sometimes these games are played. I want to hear a couple of things. We're in the middle of this Russia Ukraine war.

Yeah. You saw a lot of the foundation, the Russian hoax, really laid the foundation for something like this to happen, because we could not make any progress and directly deal with Russia because for two years, Vladimir Putin was looked at as enemy number one of America and a close confidant of President Trump, which we now know is not true. In what way did that play into what we're seeing now? Because I think it was very clear during our administration, during President Trump's administration, that the main enemy was China over the long term and that Putin had made it very clear what his red lines were. And what should have happened was an effort to reach some kind of modus vivendi with the Russians, diplomacy to try to figure out what the framework is for us coexisting with the Russians in Europe going forward. Now, maybe there was a solution, maybe there wasn't, but Trump's hands were tied by Russiagate. If he even met with behind closed doors or if we tried to negotiate with the Russians, you know, the whole Russiagate thing would have been used against him. Can you imagine if it was during your term, we left Afghanistan like this, and during your term, Russia invaded the Ukraine? Right. But the two biggest disasters, President Trump doesn't know what he's doing, and then he promised Vladimir Putin in a back door room, he could have in a back door deal, he could have Ukraine.

Right. Now, you know, one of the things I point out in my book is the media has been, the mainstream media has been biased for a long time, and I reminded people how they brought down H.W. Bush. Nineteen months before his reelection in 1992, he was 89% popularity, and they used the phony Iraq gate scandal and a number of other things to bring him down, even though we had economic growth for those 19 months. And I remind people of that, but things are much worse today, and that was one of the things that I saw right away when I went back into government 28 years later.

The press had become even more partisan and more rabid, generally speaking. Tell me if you think this is an honest assessment of why gas prices are so high. Here's President Biden, who, even though we're in the middle of an oil, gas crunch and an energy crisis, went to Texas, where so much energy, oil and gas, the industry thrives, and decided to talk about burn pits. But here it was, he answered this one question.

The audio's not great, but you can hear it. Cut nine. So the gas prices have gone up almost 100% since you guys left office, and he says it's Russia's responsible for the gas prices. They started welling up troops a year ago. Is that true?

No, obviously not. He's going to use Russia as the excuse, but he has basically destroyed America's energy independence. He doesn't realize the fact that the United States is floating in energy, and that is a tremendous benefit to the United States.

That allows us, going forward, to restore American manufacturing, low-cost manufacturing, and brings our cost of production way down. It's good for the middle class and working class to have cheaper energy, and yet he's ruined that by essentially putting the kibosh on our energy. The reason I put this in the best terms I understand is that there's now a push, with Janet Yellen leading, to not provide financing for any oil and gas project in America. There's $244 billion in liquid natural gas stalled right now because they can't get financing to drill and to frack. And Janet Yellen is threatening these institutions that want to finance these oil and gas companies to mine or drill for gas and oil. Even though it means profits for mutual funds, big and small, and for these companies, how dare you do that in a free-market economy?

That's right. I mean, all the regulation is skewed against exploiting our natural resources, making us more dependent on other countries for energy. One would have thought we'd learned during COVID how dependence on foreign countries is a dangerous thing. There's nothing more important for our national security than energy independence and our economy moving forward and the price of heating homes and so forth. Is that allowed, Mr. Attorney General? Is that allowed to tell companies financial institutions do not provide financing for X, Y, and Z company to refine, to drill, to explore? Well, they can game the rules and the regulations and the oversight to create such uncertainty in the regulatory regime that you cannot make investments, and that's the problem. And the Obama administration had the same problem. They don't understand that people have to have predictability in the regulatory regime to make these huge investments. Same with R&D when it comes to defense.

We can't get our budget together. The Attorney General, stay with me one more segment because his book is out. It's number one, one damn thing after another, Memoirs of an Attorney General. Bill Barr here. Don't move. You're listening to The Brian Kilmeade Show.

Don't go anywhere. Brian Kilmeade will be right back. A talk show that's real.

This is The Brian Kilmeade Show. Putin is angry and frustrated right now. He's likely to double down and try to grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties. That was Bill Burns testifying yesterday as CIA director, and so far that was pretty clear.

They wanted to quickly get in within two days, decapitate Kiev, the capital, and basically take the government hostage, put his own one in. William Barr, my guest right now, not only is his book One Damn Thing After Another out, he also is a conservative thinker, understands the political landscape, not just a great legal mind. Mr. Attorney General, what do you think Putin does now from what we've seen so far?

I think Burns was right. I think he has bit off more than he can chew and there's no exit ramp for him. And I think he's just going to double down and grind this out to try to claim military victory.

But then he's going to be stuck with guerrilla warfare, continued casualties. You're working with Bush 41 when the wall comes down and we have a post-Cold War. And it's Mikhail Gorbachev and then it's Boris Yeltsin. And from what you saw then as we tried to help them become a capitalist country, I thought, and they ended up being a lot of corruption oligarchs and not being, the people never felt that capitalistic thing that we maybe take for granted. Having said that, do we have a Putin problem or do we have a Russia problem? I think we have both in that Putin represents a certain strand of Russian thinking and Russia's cultural history, which is they conceive of themselves as a great power.

They're generally very paranoid about people coming from the East or the West. And they were humiliated by the end of the Cold War. And so he is interested in building up Russia more. And I think that's why he has broad support in Russia.

But I think that's going to evaporate because I think they have had, the Russian people have had enough of a taste of sort of the Western style of life that they're not going to like what they see when they're being strangled economically. This MiG situation you say is indicative of what? The fact that we can't get 29 outdated 1980s MiGs into the Ukrainian, the country of Ukraine or struggling to is indicative of what? I think it was a major mistake by Biden not to put those planes and other hardware in earlier. We knew what was, he knew what was coming. We knew that he was facing a potential invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

You told everybody. Right. And yet the only way to deter that would have been to flood in lethal aid, including planes. Now we're in the middle of the war. It's more risky to put those planes in. I'm not saying I'm against it, but it certainly has raised the risk for us a lot.

And that's the kind of step that we could have taken beforehand that might have actually deterred the attack, along with more missiles and so forth up front. You understand Trump's language sometimes, gets him in trouble. When he said originally, when he started moving on the Ukraine, he said this is brilliant. In Trump terms, what did he mean by that? Well, I don't always understand what he's saying. You know, he does have this tendency to admire certain strongmen.

I mean, that's a fact. You know, Erdogan and Putin and Xi, there's something he admires about them and their decisiveness. And I think that's what he was referring to. Right.

But people like to jump on that and then say he's out of touch. What he's trying to say is you can be evil and make a move that's in your best interests, but not in the world's interests. Right. He views things as transactions, and it's a series of transactions. From my observation, his basic move in transactions is you get to jump on the other guy and you put him at a disadvantage right up front. So they want to negotiate away the advantage you've just seized right at the beginning. Right.

So what I think he was saying was Putin's smart because he's jumping on it quickly. I have another job for you, press secretary for a second Trump term. I'm going to see what I can do. You can work with Kayleigh.

I'll see you in the hall. A radio show like no other. It's Brian Kilmeade. What they're doing with this bill is even amid the torrential downpour of nonsense that we get from these people, it manages to stand out. Because what we know about them is, look, the left, they have no integrity, they're liars, they're also good at branding. They've taken this bill and branded it the don't say gay bill, when not only does the bill not do that, the bill doesn't even mention the word gay anywhere in it. All it says, as the governor points out, is very specifically that you cannot, there cannot be classroom instruction by a teacher about gender identity or sexual orientation for kids up to grade three. And that was Matt Wallace talking about Governor DeSantis's, Florida generated Governor DeSantis to sign a bill, the people labeled don't say gay bill.

What they're trying to do is stop talking about gender and sexuality to kids that don't know anything about it in kindergarten, first, second and third grade. That is causing outrage. Governor DeSantis not backing off. William Barr, my guest, his book is out one damn thing after another, Memoirs of an Attorney General. Enough said, Mr. Attorney General. How do you feel about this bill?

Will it stand this test of scrutiny? Because the federal government is threatening to take some money or financing away if it goes through. I think it will withstand scrutiny, even if it takes getting it up to the Supreme Court. And I think it's an entirely reasonable bill.

It's very reasonable to say that kids at that kind of tender age, that subject matter shouldn't be raised in school at that point. Are you amazed that we have to have this conversation? I am.

I am. What happened with education in your mind? You have a long view of it in your book about what happened to the American education. We had a public school system that welcomed Christian Judeo values. So there was no reason to really do what Europe has done.

Could you expand on that? Well, the Western tradition has been that moral formation and moral education was the job of the parents and the church. And it wasn't the state's role to tell people what the good life was and make men in their own image. But then when we established public schools in the middle of the 19th century, the religion that was taught there was basically consistent with the mores and the beliefs of most Americans. Up until 1960, 95 percent of the American people identified themselves as Christian. And the schools were basically Christian. They taught the Bible.

They said the Lord's Prayer and so forth. Then starting in the 1960s, they tried to secularize school by stripping out Christianity. And then starting under the Obama administration, it was more like indoctrination. It wasn't taking out Christianity. It was putting in something else, something else that tells someone why to be good. In other words, if you say to someone, thou shalt not do this, then you better be able to explain why.

And once you do away with Christianity, how do you tell people why? They started affirmatively putting in ideology, alternative ideology, like critical race theory or transgenderism and things like that. Some anti-American views. Right, anti-American views. And so the state doesn't have any business doing that.

The state doesn't have any business. And what's weird is the original settlers in the United States ran away from England because of religious liberty. But how did the English run school?

Choice. They pay for everyone's education. And as long as the school is accredited, you can send your kid to a Church of England school, a Catholic school, a Hindu school, a Muslim school. Which means you think we should head in what direction?

Vouchers. I think in a pluralistic society, we can't have the state hostile to the traditional beliefs of the people and undermine the authority and the religion of a family by teaching these ideological doctrines. And so I think we need to have school choice. And that's, do you think, kind of the organic uprising that we saw last midterm election with people of Virginia and others saying, what are you teaching my kid?

Right. And I'd like to see more governors aggressive on this. And the other part of it is, you know, I've said the systemic racism that exists in our society is the public school system in the inner city and how we're warehousing these black children in the inner city and not giving them school choice. We shouldn't be having school choice, charter schools, parochial schools. Let the parents decide.

And you see them line up for these other schools, these alternative schools. My view of you and Mike Pence were the two MVPs of the Trump term. Well, thank you very much. And I don't think there's any question for people that wanted to see, I want to see every president successful. But for somebody that knew Donald Trump 20 years before, I never claimed to be great friends with him. But he was always very respectful, covered him even when he was promoting fights, when I had no idea he was going to be in that.

To see you come in and steady the ship like you did and to see Mike Pence provide the congressional background and understand how the, you know, how everything ran in Congress and what he did in Congress was indispensable. What does it say that both those people are really not on speaking terms with the former president who wants to be president again? Well, you know, I think one of the things about Trump is it's hard for anyone to have a durable relationship with him unless you are essentially dependent on him.

I can't think of anybody that's lasted very long in any relationship with him who's an independent person. And I think that speaks to him. I think that he has many, many strong points, but he also has failings and that's one of them.

And handling criticism or people to push back against? He wants people to tell him what he wants to hear. You really said the clown show around him after January, after the election to January 6th led him down that path. Do you think that he took their advice or do you think he kept people around that agreed with him like Jenna Ellis and Rudy Giuliani and others? I think he's more comfortable being told what he wants to hear.

I think they were telling him with great gusto that exactly what he wanted to hear, most of it was false, but he was guided by it. Did you take Rudy Giuliani aside and say, Rudy, you know this isn't true? No, I didn't. You know there's nothing there? No, I didn't.

Do you wish you did? No, because that would have been a scandal. The attorney general privately talking to Rudy Giuliani.

Oh, you thought that would have been overstepping? But did you ever question his lawyers and say, what are you basing this on? I looked at this thing.

I have my whole staff look at this. Or is there such a separation that you can't? Well, no, they threw appropriate channels. You know, they let it be known what their arguments were and we looked at what their arguments were and there was nothing to them. I mean, a lot of them were just completely silly and based on false information. I mean, the president repeated it as recently as January 13th this year where he said that his big piece of evidence about fraud was that more people voted in Philadelphia than there were registered voters in Philadelphia and that was completely wrong. Completely wrong. And you looked at it with a fresh set of eyes and if there was something you would have spoke up.

Absolutely. You know, I wanted him to win reelection. I went in and it was rough for me to go back into government and I did it and I wanted him to win reelection. I would have been happy if there was evidence, not happy in the sense that if it turned out that he did win, but he did not win the election. And if he had won, would you have won a stay? Actually, no.

It would have been won and out. You landed the plane after the Mueller report like I don't think anybody else would have. One damn thing after another, memoirs of an attorney general. It's going to be a bestseller for a long time and I'm so glad you came in. Hopefully I'll talk to you on One Nation this weekend. Sure, thank you. Great to meet you in person, Mr. Attorney General.