Bill Barr said that even while the Justice Department investigated Donald Trump's voter fraud claims, he always knew it was 'all bulls**t', according to an upcoming book.
Trump's former attorney general told Axios' Jonathan Karl in interviews published in The Atlantic Sunday, that he concluded early on when declaring the investigation that it was highly unlikely that any evidence existed that would change that outcome of the 2020 election.
'My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,' Barr told Karl. '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**t.'
Karl revealed this excerpt and others from multiple interviews with Barr conducted as part of his upcoming book.
Barr said he opened an investigation because he knew former Trump was going to confront him about his claims of fraud and a 'rigged' election, and he wanted to be able to say he looked into it and found nothing.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr said that he knew from the start that Donald Trump's election fraud claims were 'bulls**t' despite opening a Justice Department investigation into it
Trump is still pushing his claims that he is the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. He told a crowd at his first post-election rally in Ohio on Saturday: 'This was the scam of the century and this was the crime of the history.' He also said Democrats 'used COVID in order to cheat'
The former attorney general also said that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell urged him to speak out against Trump's election fraud claims because he felt he wasn't in a good position to do so himself.
'Look, we need the president in Georgia,' McConnell said, according to Barr. 'And so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now.'
At the time, the Republicans were vying in two key Senate elections in Georgia, which ultimately decided the Democratic majority in the upper chamber after both Republican incumbents were defeated.
Barr said that McConnell told him: 'You're in a better position to inject some reality into this situation. You are really the only one who can do it.'
Following Joe Biden's declared win in November 2020, Trump immediately launched claimed of widespread voter fraud by Democrats and began a series of lawsuits and probes into the election – especially involving the mass amount of mail in ballots in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
The former president is still spewing these claims, including at his first post-presidency rally in Ohio on Saturday night where he said that he is the legitimate election winner.
'This was the scam of the century and this was the crime of the history,' he said to a massive crowd gathered in Wellington, Ohio.
Last December, Barr told the Associated Press: 'To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.'
Karl said Barr told him about a conversation he had with Trump after the report went out.
'Did you say that?' Trump had asked Barr, according to the former attorney general.
'Yes,' Barr responded.
'How the f**k could you do this to me? Why did you say it?' he shot back
'Because it's true,' Barr said he told the then-outgoing president.
'You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump,' he responded, referring to himself in the third person.
Barr was Trump's attorney general from February 2019 until December 2020, when he prematurely left the administration following Trump's announcement of resignation just a month before the end of his term
Trump insisted to supporters at his Ohio rally Saturday that in some states there were 'more votes than voters', that there was 'North Korean-style turnout' and that 'ballots were wheeled in backdoors.'
'There's just mountains of evidence,' Trump claimed, adding that Democrats 'used COVID in order to cheat.'
He said the Trump campaign lost dozens of court cases because 'many of our judges were gutless.'
'And I am ashamed of our Supreme Court,' the ex-president said.
The court, which skews 6-3 conservative thanks to three Trump nominees making it through in his four years, refused to take up the election fraud cases.
Trump gave a shout out to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who has been publicly pushing the conspiracy that Trump won.
'Where's Mike, the pillow man?' Trump asked the crowd as he referred to Lindell as a 'patriot.'
He also raged at the government's treatment of the 'greatest mayor in the history of New York' Rudy Giuliani, who lost his law license Thursday over the election fraud farce. He also had his home raided by the FBI earlier this year and 18 electronic devices were seized.
'I'm not the one trying to undermine American democracy, I'm the one trying to save American democracy,' Trump went on.
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