Donald Trump tore into his former ally William Barr on Friday, furious that the former Attorney General has been making the media rounds in recent days acknowledging he never found any evidence of substantive voter fraud during the 2020 election.
“Former Attorney General Bill Barr wouldn’t know voter fraud if it was staring him in the face — and it was,” Mr Trump said on Friday in a statement posted to Twitter. “The fact is, he was weak, ineffective, and totally scared of being impeached, which the Democrats were constantly threatening to do.”
As far back as December 2020, Mr Barr was clashing with Mr Trump, announcing while he still led the Department of Justice that “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
The former AG has renewed these claims—and going even further—in recent days as he promotes his forthcoming memoir, One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, which comes out this month.
In an interview this week with NBC News, Mr Barr said he blamed the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol on Donald Trump.
“I do think he was responsible in the broad sense of that word in that it appears that part of the plan was to send this group up to the Hill,” Mr Barr said. “I think the whole idea was to intimidate Congress, and I think that that was wrong.”
In excerpts of the memoir published in The Wall Street Journal, Mr Barr also recounts telling the then-president his claims about election fraud were “bulls***.”
“The fact is, we have looked at the major claims your people are making, and they are bulls***,” he recalls of one exchange, adding that he once told Mr Trump, “I’ve told you that the fraud claims are not supported. … But your legal team continues to shovel this s*** out to the American people. And it is wrong.”
Some, like Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, argue that Mr Barr was far from the stalwart defender of election integrity he’s been fashioning himself as in recent interviews, writing in a recent article that “nobody in the administration did more to enable Trump’s deceptions and assaults on democracy than Barr.”
Mr Barr sided with Mr Trump throughout the hectic months surrounding the election, and made a number of controversial decisions, including breaking DOJ norms by opening an election fraud investigation before tallies were counted, falsely asserting mail-in ballots were insecure, lavishing praise on Mr Trump in a December 2020 resignation letter, spinning the findings of the Mueller report to the public, and directing the DOJ to pull back its prosecutions on Trump allies Michael Flynn and Roger Stone.
