Former President Donald Trump recently admitted that he pressured his then-Attorney General William Barr to seriously look into his false voter fraud claims after he lost the 2020 election, even if it meant being Barr finding himself impeached.

Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that Bill Barr did not want to investigate his voter fraud claims because he was concerned about impeachment, even though Barr himself has said many times that the DOJ did not pursue the fraud claims because there was actually no evidence of widespread voter fraud that was big enough to change the outcome of the election loss to Joe Biden.

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Trump said:

“Look, we also had a chance, but Bill Barr, the attorney general, didn’t want to be impeached. How do you not get impeached? You sit back and relax and wait out for your term to end. That’s what he did. And it was a sad thing and a sad day for our country.”

Trump also criticized Barr’s book, which he called a “crummy book” that was “so false.” In that book, Barr outright rejected Trump’s election fraud claims as well as blaming him for the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Donald Trump and William Barr via Flickr / The Office of Public Affairs https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Trump continued:

“Had Bill Barr had the courage, a lot of this could’ve been taken care of. The U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia said Bill Barr told him not to investigate the fraud in the elections, and he said ‘Don’t do it.’ And he wrote a letter to that effect and you know, had Bill Barr had the courage to do what he should’ve done instead of being worried about being impeached.”

And concluded:

“I said, ‘Look, get impeached. I went up a lot in the polls when I got impeached. You have to get impeached, maybe. But he was so afraid of being impeached that he refused to do his job.”

Prior to the election loss, Barr had been very loyal to Trump, helping interfere in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation as well as leading the Trump administration’s crackdown on Black Lives Matter protests.

“Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore is licensed with CC BY-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

After the election, though, Barr enraged the then President by telling him that the election fraud “stuff was bullshit.” Trump reportedly felt blindsided when, in December 2020, Barr said in an interview that the DOJ had found zero evidence of voter fraud, leading to Barr’s “resignation.”

In his book, Barr asserted that Donald Trump surrounded himself with “sycophants” and “whack jobs from outside the government, who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories,” and concluding that the “absurd lengths” Trump went to with his voter fraud claims “led to the rioting on Capitol Hill.”

“Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore is licensed with CC BY-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Despite the breakdown in their relationship and Barr’s criticism of Trump, the former still vowed to vote for Trump if he wins the Republican nomination to run for President in 2024. He did say, however, that he is “going to support somebody else for the nomination.”

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Christopher Powell