Bill Barr was a special case. I will need a few posts to deal with Barr’s views of Trump. He knew him well.
Bill Barr was a loyal Attorney General for Trump until very near the end of his presidency. He stayed loyal until he just could not be loyal anymore. And really that is unfair. He was not disloyal. He just could not do Trump’s bidding any more.
Bill Barr was a loyal advisor and Attorney General in the Trump administration for years, and who, in the opinion of many Democrats went much too far in protecting Trump from the ill-effects of the Mueller Report, but when he was ordered by Trump to check into claims that Democrats fraudulently stole the election, he conducted a thorough investigation and when it was done, was blunt in his assessment that there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to overturn the results. “Bullshit,” he said. Can’t be much clearer than that.
This is what the New York Times said:
“Bill Barr, whom Mr. Trump appointed as attorney general, said of him, “He will always put his own interest and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country’s interest.”
Pretty blunt words from Trump’s own loyal Attorney General.
According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costas, in their book Peril, which shows the extent to which the country was imperiled during his presidency, said, after the election was certified in favor of Joe Biden: “Barr said in a statement that Trump orchestrated a “mob to pressure Congress” and called his conduct a “betrayal of his office and supporters.”
On Nov. 23, 2020 Barr privately told Trump the claims of major problems with voting machines were “nonsense.” Of course, that had no effect on Trump. To this day Trump continues pushing those false claims that his own Attorney General, after a thorough investigation, dismissed as “bullshit”.
After Thanksgiving 2020 when Trump publicly chided the attorney general on Fox News for not turning up voting fraud, Barr decided to speak out. On Dec. 1, he gave an interview to the Associated Press, whose stories circulated in thousands of television and newspaper markets across the country. “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” the attorney general declared. That was Barr’s considered view.
Barr and his advisers knew the statement would infuriate Trump but hoped it would also “breathe some reality into the situation,” the second official recalled, and shifted the burden of proof back to the president’s lawyers. Instead, it marked the beginning of the end of Barr’s tenure. Two weeks after the statement, he announced he would leave the job.
Barr could no longer work for Trump and Trump no longer wanted the rebellious Barr.
This is what former Attorney General William Barr testified before the Congressional Hearings,
“I had 3 discussions with the President that I can recall. One was on November 23rd, one was on December 1, and one was on December 14, 2022 and I been through the give and take of those discussions and in that context I made it clear that I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff which I told him was bullshit. You know I didn’t want to be a part of it and that’s one of the reasons that went into me deciding to leave when I did. I observed I think it was on December 1st that you know you can’t live in a world where the incumbent administration stays in power based on its view unsupported by specific evidence that the election, that there was fraud in the election.”
As Chairman of the House of Representatives, Bennie Thompson, a Democratic Senator, said this about Bill Barr, in his opening statement, based on Barr’s sworn evidence at the hearing:
“Bill Barr on election day 2020, he was the Attorney General of the United States, the top law enforcement official in the country, telling the President exactly what he thought about claims of a stolen election. Donald Trump had his days in court, to challenge the results. He was within his rights to seek those judgments. In the United States law abiding citizens have those tools for pursuing justice. He lost in the courts just as he did at the ballot box. And in this country that is the end of the line. But for Donald Trump that was only the beginning of what became a sprawling multi-step conspiracy aimed at overturning the presidential election, aimed at throwing out the votes of millions of Americans. Your votes. Your voice in our democracy and replacing the will of the American people with his will to remain in power after his term ended. Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy and ultimately Donald Trump the president of the United States spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down the Capitol and subvert American democracy. Any legal jargon you hear about seditious conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding; conspiracy to defraud the United States boils down to this: January 6th was the culmination of an attempted coup. A brazen attempt, as one rioter put it, shortly after January 6th to overthrow the government. The violence was no accident. It represents Trump’s last stand a most desperate attempt to halt the transfer of power.”
Chairman Thompson also chided the Members of Congress who resisted an independent investigation or any other investigation of what happened on January 6th. He says “they tried to whitewash what happened on January 6th, to rewrite history, call it a “tourist visit” label it “legitimate political discourse.” As Thompson said, “This scheme was an attempt to undermine the will of the people.”
It was an insurrection without guns.