‘His verbal skills are very limited’

Ex-Attorney General Bill Barr mocked former President Donald Trump’s “verbal skills” Friday, calling them “very limited.” 

Barr made the stinging remark during an event at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, after being asked by CBS reporter Jan Crawford if his 77-year-old former boss was “losing it,” in light of his comments earlier this month praising terrorist group Hezbollah as “very smart.”     

“His verbal skills are limited,” Barr, 73, responded, prompting a chuckle from Crawford and laughter from the crowd.

“If you get him away from ‘very, very, very,’ you know, the adjectives … they’re unfamiliar to him and they spill out, and he goes too far,” he said. “He’s not very disciplined when it comes to what he says.” 

Barr, who resigned from Trump’s cabinet in December 2020 over what he has called “bulls—” election fraud claims by his then boss, went on to suggest that something that happened in the former president’s childhood may be to blame for his “fragile ego.” 

“He’s already saying it’s going to be about retribution,” Barr said of a possible second Trump term. “And he’s, you know, he’s a very petty man. And it’s all about him. And he has a very fragile ego and you know, something happened to him as a kid and I’m not going to spend time psychoanalyzing it but, you know, every encounter he has to come out showing the other guy that he’s better.”

“It’s all about, you know, the assertion of his ego, and I think he will be self indulgent in a new administration and won’t be as effective as he could otherwise be and probably things would start moving toward chaos,” Barr warned. 

The former attorney general, however, has previously said that he wouldn’t rule out voting for Trump in the general election – even if he were to be convicted of a crime in one of the four criminal trials he’s facing. 

“I will jump off that bridge when I get to it,” Barr told Fox News host Neil Cavuto in August, noting that he would have to “see all the evidence that comes out about his conduct.”