US President Donald Trump is ramping up pressure on two of his most loyal Cabinet members to produce information that could damage former US vice president Joe Biden’s prospects as polls show his Democratic challenger leading ahead of the Nov. 3 presidential election.
Trump said in an interview with the conservative outlet Newsmax that he is “not happy” with the evidence he has seen coming out of US Attorney General William Barr’s Department of Justice and would not say whether he would keep him on in a second term.
Earlier on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo vowed that his team was doing “everything we can” to release additional e-mails from former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure at the department, something Trump demanded last week in a rare rebuke of his top diplomat.
Both men — seen as among Trump’s most steadfast loyalists — are under pressure to deliver for a president known for quickly turning on aides who do not do his bidding, or cannot deliver.
Barr has weighed in ways that pleased Trump in a number of criminal cases — including those of former US national security adviser Michael Flynn and longtime confidant Roger Stone — but two high-profile probes have not so far generated the damaging information the president has sought.
Trump said in an interview last week on Fox Business Network: “To be honest, Bill Barr is going to go down as either the greatest attorney general in the history of the country or he’s going to down as a very sad situation.”
Trump’s comments to Newsmax followed a report in the Washington Post that a federal prosecutor tapped by Barr to investigate whether officials during former US president Barack Obama’s administrations improperly requested the “unmasking” of names of Americans in intelligence reports — including those related to the Russia investigation — did not find any major instances of wrongdoing.
“I’m not happy with all of the evidence I have, I can tell you that,” Trump said when asked about the report. “I’m not happy.”
Pressed on whether he would be willing to keep Barr if there is a second Trump term, the president said it was “too early” to say.
Barr was in New Mexico on Wednesday, where he brought the president’s law-and-order message and warned against those who he said want to cut police budgets.
“If you want to be safe, if you are tired of the blood and mayhem on the streets, then you have to start paying attention to who you vote for,” Barr said.
Pompeo, the longest-serving member of Trump’s National Security Cabinet, has found himself in the unusual position of having to respond to the president’s public criticism after he and Barr were singled out last week.
At a news conference on Wednesday at the State Department, Pompeo snapped at a reporter who questioned whether doing the president’s political bidding on the Clinton e-mails would constitute a violation of the Hatch Act, which restricts the political activities of government employees while they are on the job.
“Releasing e-mails for the sake of transparency can’t possibly be a violation of the Hatch Act,” Pompeo replied. “That’s a ridiculous question.”
Pompeo said that the department has long since published about 35,000 e-mails from Clinton’s tenure and that any recent delays in getting more messages out has been due to staffing issues during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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