“Bill, I look around, and you are the only person who can do it,” Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell told then-Attorney General William Barr, one of Donald Trump’s most faithful cabinet members.
It was post-election November 2020. Trump had lost reelection. McConnell needed Trump in Georgia stumping for GOP Senate candidates for the January runoffs. Trump’s stolen-election narrative might hamper McConnell’s efforts there and depress GOP turnout. But McConnell could not attack Trump’s story himself. The notoriously vindictive Trump might sabotage Georgia Republicans instead.
On December 1, Barr admitted to the Associated Press’ Michael Balsamo between bites of salad that “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” The AP story ran shortly thereafter.
Barr now tells The Atlantic‘s Jonathan D. Karl:
“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr told me. “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 bullshit.”
Barr had expected Trump to lose, he tells The Atlantic. Still, he asked the U.S. Attorney in Michigan to look into Trump’s claim that “ballot dumps” in Detroit had won the state for Joe Biden. There was nothing to it. Biden simply beat Trump badly in the Detroit suburbs.
“In every other county, they count the ballots at the precinct, but in Wayne County, they bring them into one central counting place,” Barr said. “So the boxes are coming in all night. The fact that boxes are coming in—well, that’s what they do.”
Doing Trump’s unbidding
Three Republicans and one Democrat from the Michigan Senate oversight committee charged with investigating allegations of fraud in 2020 last week found no evidence “to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.”
Barr also looked into allegations that voting machines across the country were rigged to switch Trump votes to Biden votes. He received two briefings from cyber-security experts at the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. “We realized from the beginning it was just bullshit,” Barr told me, noting that even if the machines somehow changed the count, it would show up when they were recounted by hand. “It’s a counting machine, and they save everything that was counted. So you just reconcile the two. There had been no discrepancy reported anywhere, and I’m still not aware of any discrepancy.”
As is his nature, Trump felt betrayed at Barr’s refutation of Trump’s conspiracy claims. Shortly after the AP story ran, he called Barr to the president’s personal dining room. Red-faced and trying to control himself, Trump confronted Barr about the AP story:
“Did you say that?”
“Yes,” Barr responded.
“How the fuck could you do this to me? Why did you say it?”
“Because it’s true.”
The president, livid, responded by referring to himself in the third person: “You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump.”
Trump spouted off about the supposed ballot dump and coverage of a committee hearing of the Michigan legislature taking testimony about massive election fraud.
By his account to Karl, remember, Barr was unmoved:
“You know, you only have five weeks, Mr. President, after an election to make legal challenges,” Barr said. “This would have taken a crackerjack team with a really coherent and disciplined strategy. Instead, you have a clown show. No self-respecting lawyer is going anywhere near it. It’s just a joke. That’s why you are where you are.”
It’s not clear whether Barr ceremonially washed his hands in front of Jonathan Karl after the interview, but that is obviously the point. On Thursday, the state of New York suspended Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani’s law license. Potentially in advance of his dis-Barr-ment.
The former attorney general must be looking over his shoulder.