Bill Barr Slams Trump's 'Foul' Language On Immigrants: 'Racist Overtones'

William Barr has denounced former President Donald Trump’s recent rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.”

“I’m offended by it because it has racist overtones,” Barr, who served as Trump’s attorney general, told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview Wednesday.

Barr suggested that while border control is an important issue, immigrants from Latin America “have made great citizens.”

“The fact that we have a reservoir to our south of these people who come out of the Western tradition, they’re religious people, good family people in general, is a boon to the United States,” he said.

“Does that mean they all are like that? No. And does bringing in a lot of people at once from a different country, does that put strains on our system and harm the country to an extent? Yes, it does,” he continued. “But the attacks on, the idea that they pollute our blood, I think they’re foul.”

Trump had made the remarks about immigrants at a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday, drawing condemnation and comparisons to Adolf Hitler, who used similar rhetoric in the fascist manifesto “Mein Kampf.”

The GOP presidential front-runner’s language attracted backlash even from some Republican lawmakers, though others tried to soften it and spin it, or said they simply did not care.

Trump on Tuesday said that he’d never read “Mein Kampf,” but doubled down on the same themes about immigrants “destroying the blood of our country” anyway.

Barr resigned as attorney general in December 2020 after refusing to support Trump’s baseless conspiracies about widespread fraud in that year’s presidential election. He and the former president have been critical of one another since.

Watch the interview below on CNN.