Attorney General Bill Barr said on Wednesday that he doesn’t remember President Donald Trump asking him to hold a press conference to declare that Trump had not broken the law with his phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“If you’re talking about press reports that he asked me to have a news conference, the fact is, I don’t remember any such request,” Barr told a reporter when asked about the Washington Post’s report on Trump’s alleged request.
“In fact, my recollection is that I told the White House that we would do what we would normally do, and that is issue a press statement, which we did, and that was not an issue,” he continued. “There was no pushback on that.”
The statement Barr referred to was the Justice Department’s declaration that there was “no campaign finance violation” present in Trump’s call and therefore “no further action was warranted.”
The Post reported last week that Trump wanted Barr to hold the presser after the White House had published its memo of Trump’s call with Zelensky, during which he asked the Ukrainian president to investigate his political enemies. Barr did not do so, and Trump has reportedly been grumbling about it in recent weeks.
Trump accused the Post of making up the story and ranted against the three “lowlife reporters” who had written it, prompting the publication to rebuke the President’s “repugnant” attacks.
