During its June 13 hearing, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack shared clips of a deposition from former Attorney General Bill Barr, who described his view that “that the election was not stolen by fraud,” and how former President Donald Trump had no interest in “what the actual facts were.”
Barr said that after Election Day, “There was an avalanche of all these allegations of fraud that built up over a number of days, and it was like playing Whack-a-mole because something would come out one day and the next date would be another issue.”
But these claims were “bogus and silly and usually based on misinformation,” he said.
When Trump spoke of the possibility of election fraud in public, Barr met with an AP reporter to declare there was no fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election. In response, Trump nearly fired him.
“The president was as mad as I have ever seen him and trying to control himself. The president said, ‘This is killing me. You did not have to say this. You must have said this because you hate Trump,’” Barr said.
Barr also described his reaction a report, which he described as “amateurish,” on Dominion Voting machines. Deeming the report noncredible, Barr said Trump seemed like he had become “detached from reality.”
The hearing was the second of several planned by the Jan. 6 committee that focused on how Trump actively spread false information about the 2020 election outcome – what has become known as the “big lie” – in the run up to the Jan. 6 insurrection. In the year since its creation, the committee has conducted more than 1,000 interviews, seeking critical information and documents from people witness to, or involved in, the violence that day.
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