Former Attorney General Bill Barr says the DOJ is close to having enough evidence to indict Donald Trump

• The DOJ is likely close to indicting Donald Trump, former Attorney General Bill Barr has said.
• But he expressed hope this would not happen, given Trump's status as former president.

Former Attorney General Bill Barr said that the Justice Department is "getting very close" to having enough evidence to indict former President Donald Trump for keeping hold of government records, including highly classified information, after leaving office.

In an interview on Fox News on Wednesday, Barr discussed the DOJ's investigation into Trump, whom he served as attorney general. He said that the core issues are whether the DOJ can make a case to prosecute Trump, and whether it ought to do so given Trump's status as a former president.

Barr gave an at times contradictory analysis of the legal peril facing Trump, arguing for the the strength of the DOJ's case yet also saying Trump should escape legal repercussions.

"Will the government be able to make out a technical case, will they have evidence by which — that they could indict somebody on, including him?" Barr said.

"That's the first question, and I think they're getting very close to that point, frankly," said Barr, who resigned as attorney general shortly before Trump left office.

"But I think at the end of the day, there's another question, [which] is do you indict a former president? What will that do to the country, what kind of precedent will that set, will the people really understand that this is not, you know, failing to return a library book, that this was serious," Barr said.

"And so you have to worry about those things, and I hope that those kinds of factors will incline the administration not to indict him, because I don't want to see him indicted as a former president," Barr said.

"But I also think they'll be under a lot of pressure to indict him, because — one question is, look, if anyone else would have gotten indicted, why not indict him?" he added.

The FBI in the August 8 search of Trump's Florida resort recovered stashes of government records, including highly classified documents, they believe Trump may have illegally taken with him after leaving office.

Trump has claimed he broadly declassified the records, and his lawyers were successful this week in their bid to have an independent official assigned to review the documents to establish if any ought to be returned to Trump under executive privilege rules.

Barr was regarded as one of Trump's most loyal aides, but fell out with the then president when he would not back his claims that the 2020 election had been tainted by mass fraud.

In his recent memoir, 'One Damn Thing After Another', he calls for the Republican Party to move on from Trump.