| | | BOOM: Barr kneecaps Trump: ‘Never an indication of interest’ in facts
Analysis by Philip Bump
National correspondent
June 13, 2022 at 1:02 p.m. EDT
washingtonpost.com
In recorded testimony played on June 13, former attorney general William P. Barr said he was unimpressed with the Dinesh D’Souza film “2000 Mules." (Video: The Washington Post)
Until Nov. 3, 2020, history’s depiction of William P. Barr’s second tenure as attorney general would have been straightforward. He was a stalwart defender of executive power who helped Donald Trump navigate some of the trickiest parts of his presidency. He was, in short, the loyalist Trump had long sought within the executive branch.
But that legacy became more complicated after Trump lost his reelection bid. A few weeks after the race had been called, Barr became the first senior member of the administration to publicly reject Trump’s claims about election fraud. Behind the scenes, Barr was trying to make the same case to the president. Until he abruptly left the administration, Trump’s top law enforcement official repeatedly pushed back on public insistences about the election being stolen.
In recorded testimony presented to the House select committee investigating the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — and investigating Trump’s effort to steal a second term in office — the extent of Barr’s efforts to convince Trump of reality came to light.
They were not successful.
“There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were,” Barr told investigators at one point in the recorded testimony. It’s a damning assertion, suggesting explicitly that Trump was uninterested in the reality of the election results in favor of what he chose to believe. And it’s important for consideration of the actions Trump took in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot. If he truly believed the election was stolen, his efforts to pressure Congress take on a different hue than if he simply refused to believe it had been.
The testimony from Barr that was included in the hearing on Monday covered a span of several weeks after the election itself. He described how the Justice Department actually looked at the allegations that had been elevated by Trump and his supporters — an effort akin to “whack-a-mole” given how quickly new claims would emerge.
“All the early claims that I understood,” he said, “were completely bogus and silly and usually based on complete misinformation.” That, he added, tended to make him treat further claims with additional skepticism.
He tried to make the case for skepticism in a meeting with Trump on Nov. 23, 2020.
“The president said there had been major fraud and that as soon as the facts were out, the results of the election would be reversed,” Barr testified. But the focus of the meeting, he said, was on Trump’s frustration that the Justice Department wasn’t announcing fraud probes. Barr told Trump that his campaign had to raise such concerns with states — which, of course, had occurred without effect. That weekend, Trump went on Fox Business to complain about the Justice Department’s perceived inaction.
Barr sat down with a reporter from the Associated Press on Dec. 1 and explained that no observable rampant fraud had occurred. Predictably, Trump soon demanded to speak to Barr.
“You didn’t have to say this,” Barr says Trump told him. “You must have said this because you hate Trump. You hate Trump.”
Then, Barr says, he told Trump that his assertions about a surge in votes in Detroit were meritless.
“Unlike elsewhere in the state, they centralize the counting process so they’re not counted in each precinct. They’re moved to counting stations. So another process would involve boxes coming in at all different hours,” Barr said. “I said, did anyone point out to you that — all the people complaining about it point out to you — you actually did better in Detroit than you did last time? I mean, there’s no indication of fraud in Detroit.”
This is a key point. There was no evidence of fraud in Detroit in terms of ballots being submitted and no irregularity in how the ballots were counted. Trump overperformed in the city relative to 2016. And this was Barr, Trump’s loyal ally, making all of this clear in response to Trump’s fury.
But then, on Dec. 2, Trump released a 46-minute video alleging rampant fraud in the election, as the House committee noted. Among those claims was that there had been a suspicious dump of ballots … from Detroit.
In his Dec. 1 meeting with Trump, Barr was also handed a report on alleged vote-switching by voting machines, a claim that has been debunked scores of times. That report was from something called the Allied Security Operations Group, which, The Washington Post reported last year, engaged in a broad and eccentric effort to prove fraud. The report, Barr said, looked “very amateurish.”
“I was somewhat demoralized,” Barr testified, “because I thought, ‘Boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has become detached from reality.’ ”
He understood the risk — as did others close to Trump, Barr said. After his meeting with Trump on Nov. 23, Barr ran into Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.
“I said, ‘How long is he going to carry on with this stolen-election stuff? Where is this going to go?’ ” Barr testified he asked.
Meadows, he said, responded, “ ‘Look, I think that he’s becoming more realistic and knows there’s a limit to how far he can take this.’ And then Jared said, ‘You know, we’re working on this. We’re working on it.’ ”
All of this matters specifically because it reinforces that Trump was repeatedly offered accurate information about the election results — and rejected it. There was no reason for him to believe that rampant fraud had occurred and plenty of reason for him not to. Nonetheless, he chose to keep insisting that fraud had affected the result, leading directly to the Capitol riot.
“My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud,” Barr testified, “and I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that.”
“Including the ‘2000 Mules’ movie,” Barr added, with a laugh. “2000 Mules,” of course, is the broadly debunked film that has been Trump’s recent obsessive vehicle for asserting that fraud occurred. But then, as Barr put it, Trump has never had an indication of interest in the facts of what occurred. |
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