Appearing more than life on a giant screen above the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, former Attorney General William P. Barr on Monday offered a shocking assessment of the man who had spent years defending: The In 2020, after the election defeat, President Donald Trump seemed “cut off from reality” and obsessed with the imaginary notions of voter fraud, Barr said. This crude assessment was tantamount to a kind of rhetorical dagger aimed at his former boss, even though it had been shown in a previously recorded, closed-door interrogation session and included many criticisms that Barr had already made in reference books he had written. others. Barr’s view of Trump is more complex than what congressional video clips suggest. In his book and interviews this year, Barr said he does not want Trump to be the Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential election – but if he does, he will continue to vote for him. The former attorney general also said that Trump is responsible, but not criminally responsible, for the January 6 uprising. In a recorded testimony played June 13, former Attorney General William P. Barr said he was not impressed with Dines D’Souza’s film “2000 Mules.” (Video: The Washington Post) However, for a national television and online audience, Barr on Monday was somehow the protagonist of the hearing in the angry rejection of the findings by his own Department of Justice that the allegations of mass voter fraud were misunderstood, nonsense or completely false. The shadow race is underway for the Republican presidential candidacy in 2024 “I thought, boy, if he really believes these things, you know, he’s lost touch, he’s detached from reality,” Barr said. The former attorney general said when he tried to tell the president “how crazy some of these allegations were, there was never any indication of interest in the facts.” Barr said he told Trump the allegations of voter fraud were “bullshit”, a claim he reiterated at his closed-door meeting with the commission. This only angered the president, who – according to Barr – said he “must hate” Trump for saying that. Largely due to Trump’s refusal to accept Barr’s findings on the election, the relationship between the president and the attorney general became so tense that Barr resigned in December 2020, shortly after telling a reporter that the Justice Department did not had found evidence of major electoral fraud. The committee’s next hearing, scheduled for Wednesday, will include testimony from former Justice Department officials who remained after Bar’s departure. They became embroiled in a heated debate with Trump in the days leading up to Jan. 6, when the president tried to remove Barr’s successor, Jeffrey Rosen, from the post of attorney general and replace him with another Justice Department lawyer he had embraced. allegations of massive vote-rigging. Trump’s inner circle has repeatedly warned him that allegations of massive voter fraud were false. This week’s hearings appear to be intended to show that Trump should have known that his allegations of electoral fraud were fruitless, but he nevertheless tried to lure government officials and elected officials to support those allegations. However, much of the evidence that has been offered to date suggests a kind of stubborn insistence by Trump that he was right and that all experienced researchers and professionals were wrong. Former Attorney General William P. Barr told the Jan. 6 selection committee that President Donald Trump made allegations of electoral fraud before evidence emerged. (Video: The Washington Post) Lawmakers played video clips of another former senior Justice Department official, Richard Donoghue, discussing his own tortured conversations with Trump over the issue. Donoghue said there were so many wild allegations of fraud, “if you gave him a very immediate answer to one of them, he would not argue with us about it”, but would go on to make another claim, such as a suitcase full of fake ballots. turned under a table at a polling station in Georgia. “We looked at the tape, we interviewed the witnesses. … And I said, ‘No sir, there is no suitcase. You can watch the video over and over again. “There is no suitcase.” ” Lawmakers on the commission say the exchanges – and Trump’s repeated embrace of the theories put forward by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others – show that Trump knew the election was not stolen. But none of the witnesses on Monday described Trump as accepting that conclusion. Witnesses, on the other hand, said he refused to believe he had lost – a crucial distinction for any criminal investigation into Trump’s conduct. Trump avoided Nancy Mays. Can it survive in the GOP qualifiers anyway? “From a legal point of view, the biggest challenge is proving subjective intent when it comes to allegations of voter fraud that alter the outcome of elections. “It means proving that the person appreciated the wrongdoing of his behavior,” said Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor who now practices privately. “Proof of intent is not a matter of logic or common sense, it requires subjective proof that someone knew their statements were not true at the time they were made or that they were deliberately blind to the truth,” Minz said. “The absolute question for any government lawyer looking at this evidence is whether the president and others knew that their allegations of widespread voter fraud were false or whether they simply chose to ignore the advice of some in favor of what they were being told. they wanted to hear. “ It is unknown at this time what he will do after leaving the post. In an irrelevant press conference Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland again declined to discuss legal or factual issues around Jan. 6, noting that there are hundreds of ongoing cases and the department has a general policy of not discussing investigations. He added, however, that prosecutors are paying close attention to the committee’s hearings. “I’ll watch, I will watch all the hearings,” Garland said. “I may not be able to watch it all live, but I’m sure I will watch it all and I can assure you that the January 6 prosecutors are also watching all the hearings.”
