Former Attorney General William Barr reportedly told President Donald Trump in a private meeting that his allegations of widespread voter fraud were not true.
Axios reported that Barr had a meeting with the president at the White House on December 1, after he gave an interview to The Associated Press where he revealed that the Department of Justice (DOJ) had not found evidence of widespread fraud.
Having read the AP story, Trump asked Barr, “Why would you say such a thing? You must hate Trump. There’s no other reason for it. You must hate Trump.”
“These things aren’t panning out,” Barr responded. “The stuff that these people are filling your ear with just isn’t true.”
He added, “It’s just bulls***.”
Barr said that he is a “pretty informed legal observer” and, “I can’t f***king figure out what the theory is here. It’s just scattershot. It’s all over the hill and gone.”
Barr disputed the president’s unsubstantiated claims of widespread in an interview with the AP as he said that the DOJ and FBI agents looked into allegations of fraud and, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Roughly two weeks after Trump met with Barr, he announced on Twitter that the attorney general would be resigning by the end of the month.
Despite Barr’s insistence that there was no evidence of widespread fraud, Trump did not halt his campaign to overturn the election results.
In a phone call earlier this month with Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.”
“We won the election, and it’s not fair to take it away from us like this, and it’s going to be very costly in many ways and I think you have to say that you’re going to reexamine it,” he added.
And on January 6, shortly before Congress met to certify the results of the Electoral College vote, Trump told a crowd of supporters gathered outside the White House, “We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about.”
“We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he added.
He also said he and his supporters would “walk down” to the Capitol and “try and give [lawmakers] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country” to encourage them to disqualify electoral votes in states that he lost.
After his comments, hundreds of rioters stormed the Capitol, leaving at least five dead and bringing a halt to the proceedings. However, lawmakers reconvened hours later and voted to certify the election results.
The House voted just one week later to impeach Trump for “incitement of insurrection” — the first time a president has been impeached twice.