By Amy B Wang
National politics reporter


Former attorney general William P. Barr effectively endorsed former president Donald Trump on Wednesday, despite having previously criticized Trump’s conduct while in office and once comparing him to a “defiant, 9-year-old kid.”

Asked Wednesday whether he would vote for Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, in November, Barr told Fox News that he would vote for the Republican ticket.

“I’ve said all along, given two bad choices, I think it’s my duty to pick the person I think would do the least harm to the country, and in my mind, that’s — I will vote the Republican ticket,” said Barr, who remains a Republican. “I’ll support the Republican ticket.”

Barr served as U.S. attorney general under Trump from 2019 to 2020, resigning from Trump’s Cabinet on Dec. 14, 2020, after publicly disputing the former president’s claims that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Trump would later claim he had demanded Barr’s resignation.

Barr also later cooperated with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, and defended special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump as a “legitimate case.”

In his 2022 memoir, “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General,” Barr wrote about how his relationship with Trump had soured, citing how Trump and his legal team — including Barr’s nemesis, Trump lawyer and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani — pushed absurd claims of mass voter fraud.

“His legal team had a difficult case to make, and they made it as badly and unprofessionally as I could have imagined,” Barr wrote. “It was all a grotesque embarrassment.”

Trump in turn has castigated Barr, calling his former attorney general a “coward” and vowing that, if reelected, he would not make Barr attorney general again.