- Former Attorney General William Barr aired his complaints about Trump's tweets in his new book.
- Barr reiterated a gripe he made while in office, saying the tweets rendered his job "impossible."
- The key ingredient for "a really good tweet" is "just the right amount of crazy," Trump told Barr.
Former Attorney General William Barr recalled in his new book that President Donald Trump once told him that the key to "a really good tweet" is "just the right amount of crazy."
Barr's book "One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General" went on sale on Tuesday.
In the passage on Trump's Twitter usage — back when he was in office and before he was banned from the social media platform following the January 6 Capitol insurrection — Barr wrote about a meeting about the 2019 Inspector General report into the use of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants. Per the report, there was no evidence that the FBI had "spied" on Trump's 2016 campaign, despite the former president's repeated claims to the contrary.
"The President was unusually relaxed and talkative and did not seem to want to conclude the meeting," Barr wrote. "When he saw me leaning forward as if preparing to stand, he said, 'Well, I better let you get back to work.' Then, studying me, with a twinkle in his eye, he added, 'I am going to go and tweet about this.'"
Barr recounted that he took the "twinkle" in Trump's eye ominously.
"I glanced up with a look of discomfort," Barr wrote. "He smiled playfully. 'Do you know what the secret is of a really good tweet?' he asked, looking at each of us one by one. We all looked blank. 'Just the right amount of crazy,' he said. 'Oh, great,' I said as I stood up."
Like other former members of the Trump administration, Barr said Trump's tweets were often an impediment to day-to-day operations. Notably, Barr said in a 2020 interview with ABC that Trump's tweets calling for a lighter sentence for longtime adviser and convicted felon Roger Stone — whom he later pardoned — made the former AG's job "impossible."
Barr slightly tweaked that assessment in his book.
"The tweeting was always a problem—for nearly everybody in the administration, to one degree or another," Barr wrote. "Indeed, a single tweet would soon make my job almost impossible."
Trump's tweets and retweets about the sentencing in the Stone case put Barr in a tough position, according to the book.
"I knew immediately that, if I insisted on doing what was fair and right in the case, people would say we were responding to the President's tweet," Barr wrote. "I had never discussed Stone's sentencing with President Trump or anyone else at the White House."