Attorney General William Barr to step down

Attorney General William Barr is leaving his position, a decision that follows months of complaints from President Donald Trump about the administration’s top lawyer.

The cordial tone of Trump’s tweet on Monday afternoon announcing Barr’s exit was in marked contrast to the president’s public scolding of the attorney general in recent weeks. In Trump’s telling, Barr had failed to make public a financial crimes investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter that was ongoing before the election and failed to muster the Justice Department in support of Trump’s legal campaign to upend the election results.

Rather than echo those complaints, and earlier ones about Barr’s refusal to indict the president’s political adversaries, Trump’s announcement praised the attorney general’s record and suggested nothing was amiss.

“Just had a very nice meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr at the White House,” Trump tweeted. “Our relationship has been a very good one, he has done an outstanding job!”

In a two-page letter that Trump also tweeted out, the attorney general didn’t explicitly say he was resigning, but said he would “spend the next week wrapping up a few remaining matters important to the Administration and depart on Dec. 23.”

Trump had grown so frustrated with Barr that he was considering firing him, but had not decided by Friday whether to do so, a friend of the president’s said. Trump remained angry about the attorney general's remarks that the Justice Department had found no evidence of major election fraud, the associate added.

Over the past few days, Trump continued to criticize Barr both publicly and privately.