June 28, 2021 – 10:17 p.m.
William Barr said he believed it was his obligation to publicly state that there was no evidence of voter fraud in 2020 no matter how angry it made then-President Donald Trump, the former attorney general is quoted as saying in an article published in The Atlantic.
Barr added: “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bulls—.”
The former attorney general told Karl that he knew Trump would push him to conduct investigations and confirm the president’s frequently stated belief that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him — and that Barr suspected from the get-go that no widespread fraud had taken place.
He also said that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell — understandably concerned about upcoming Senate runoffs in Georgia — encouraged him to speak out about the integrity of the election.
Barr’s conclusion that there was no widespread fraud, which he shared with an Associated Press reporter at the start of December, drew the wrath of Trump, who spoke of himself in the third person.
“You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump,” Barr quoted Trump as saying in a subsequent meeting.
Karl wrote: “Barr thought that the president was trying to control himself, but he seemed angrier than he had ever seen him.”
Barr said he also told Trump that the president had undermined his own efforts by launching a scattershot, incoherent legal team (“a clown show”) to challenge election results — something which he said Trump agreed with.
“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr told Jonathan Karl in the article headlined “William Barr Speaks”.
