Former President Donald Trump on Sunday released a raging statement slamming his former Attorney General Bill Barr, calling him “a disappointment” after Barr described Trump’s repeated false claims about the 2020 election as total “bullshit” since the beginning.
In his statement, Trump also accused Barr of facilitating the “crime of the century” in the 2020 election and ranted about the Mueller Report and the “cover up” of “crooked Hillary Clinton.”
“Bill Barr was a disappointment in every sense of the word,” Trump said in a statement issued late Sunday. “Besides which, Barr, who was Attorney General (lawyer) shouldn’t be speaking about the President.”
“Instead of doing his job, he did the opposite and told people within the Justice Department not to investigate the election,” Trump continued. “Just like he did with the Mueller report and the cover up of Crooked Hillary and RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA, they don’t want to investigate the real facts. Bill Barr’s weakness helped facilitate the cover up of the Crime of the Century, the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election!”
In a newly published excerpt from ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl’s upcoming book, “Betrayal,” Barr described the rapidly deteriorating relationship he had with Trump as the then-president became more entrenched in his effort to frame the 2020 election as fraudulent.
“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 told Karl.
Barr also told Karl that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had urged the then-attorney general to push back against Trump’s falsehoods, worrying that Trump’s rhetoric would cost the GOP in January’s Senate runoffs in Georgia. Democrats went on to win both races and control of the chamber as a result.
Trump, in a lengthy statement on Sunday, decried Barr as a “RINO” who “really let down the American people.” He complained about Barr’s handling of the 2020 election and bemoaned that his former attorney general did not sufficiently investigate wrongdoing during the Obama administration. Trump in the final days of the 2020 campaign had pushed Barr to investigate President Biden’s son, Hunter.
“Now it was revealed that Barr was being pushed to tell lies about the election by Mitch McConnell, another beauty, who was worried about damaging the Republicans chances in the Georgia runoff,” Trump said. “What really damaged the Senate Republicans was allowing their races to be rigged and stolen, and worse, the American people to no longer believe their vote matters because spineless RINOs like Bill Barr and Mitch McConnell did nothing.”
Trump has for months spread the false conspiracy that the 2020 election was rigged against him, pointing to what he calls suspicious votes in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. But GOP state officials in Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and elsewhere have concluded there was no fraudulent activity that affected the outcome of the election in their respective states, and numerous judges have dismissed lawsuits brought by the president’s allies over the outcome.