MSNBC Guest: Bill Bar Was ‘Genuinely Upset’ Because Trump Was Making It Harder to Protect Him

Attorney General William Barr was ‘upset’ with President Donald Trump because the President has been making it more difficult for Barr to protect him, according to Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog. Speaking on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Wittes explained that Barr is trying to defend Trump.

“I want to come back to Bill Barr, because I think I can settle the dispute between the other panelists over him,” Wittes said.

“Look, I think Bill Barr was probably genuinely upset, because what Bill Barr wants is to carry the President’s water on matters like Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, on which he appears to have done basically the same thing with respect to sentencing, and not have the President shine a light on it in public, and embarrass him.”

“What the President did here was, Barr, you know, was doing something pretty awful on his behalf internally, overruling career prosecutors after they had filed a brief, and the President comes in and says, hey, look, everybody, Bill Barr is — is, you know, turning the Justice Department on its head, and that is not the kind of scrutiny that you want if you’re the Attorney General doing — doing what Barr is doing.”

“So I think he probably was, you know, genuinely a little bit irritated and feels like the rug’s been pulled out from under him, and he’s telling the President in a kind of public way, hey, if you do that stuff, it’s — it makes it really hard for me to protect you, which is what the President really cares about, and I — so I think there’s an element of genuine irritation in what he said yesterday.”

Barr said publicly that Trump’s tweets about Roger Stone were making his job more difficult. Barr is widely believed to be appeasing Trump by seeking a reduced sentence for Stone.

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.