- The House January 6 hearings have aired extensive footage from William Barr's deposition.
- Barr called the election fraud claims "bullshit" and laughed off a pro-Trump documentary.
- The attention has made Barr an unlikely star of the House January 6 panel's initial hearings.
Rep. Bennie Thompson gave fair warning: "This content," he said, "contains strong language."
It was Thursday night, and the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol was seizing on primetime coverage to play never-before-seen footage at its first hearing. But what followed Thompson's warning was not mayhem at the Capitol but rather former Attorney General William Barr, flanked by lawyers in a nondescript conference room, recalling conversations with former President Donald Trump after the 2020 election.
"I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit," Barr said in the recorded deposition.
Barr has only continued to feature prominently in the House committee's hearings, with the erstwhile Trump ally emerging as an unlikely star in a public presentation that is placing the blame for January 6 squarely on Trump and his relentless stoking of widespread election fraud claims.
During the Trump administration, Barr's own aides nicknamed him the "buffalo" for his hard-charging approach and predilection for profanity. Barr appeared to stay very much on-brand in his closed-door deposition: not holding back and exhibiting a style — strong language included — that the House January 6 committee has showcased in its first two hearings.
On Monday, the House committee made extensive use of recorded testimony from Barr, who only appeared for the closed-door deposition on June 2 — a week before the panel's first hearing. Barr testified that he believed Trump had grown delusional as he insisted on advancing unsupported claims of widespread election fraud.
"He's become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff," Barr told the panel, in recorded testimony played publicly on Monday."There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were."
Barr labeled the voter fraud claims as "bogus" and appeared to bemoan having to deal with Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell as they peddled — via increasingly wild and unverifiable conspiracy theories — Trump's argument that the election had been stolen.
Recalling the "avalanche" of voter fraud claims from Trump allies, Barr said, "It was like playing Whac-a-Mole."
In another portion of the recorded interview, Barr could not restrain his laughter at the absurdity of the claims, including one alleged scheme involving the former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013.
Barr also ridiculed a pro-Trump documentary, 2,000 Mules, that claimed to have "smoking gun" evidence of massive voter fraud in the 2020 election.
"I haven't seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that, including the "2,000 Mules" movie," he said.
"In a nutshell," he added, "I was unimpressed with it."
In addition to Barr, the House committee featured other Republicans and Trump allies who recalled telling Trump in no uncertain terms that he'd lost the 2020 election. Legal experts said that testimony could help prove Trump's intent — a critical part of any case connected to his efforts to overturn the election results.
With the airtime devoted to Barr, the House committee has apparently taken the view that Trump's former attorney general makes for a compelling narrator. But the renewed attention on Barr's private pushback against Trump has brought renewed criticism and questions about why he did not tell the public sooner of his belief that Trump was doing a "disservice" to the country spreading claims of pervasive election fraud.
Instead, Barr warned of the dangers of mass mail-in voting and exaggerated the facts of a small ballot fraud case in Texas two months before election day. Barr later told Trump of an investigation in Pennsylvania involving fewer than 10 ballots found in a trash can, prompting the then-president to tout the inquiry as proof of widespread fraud. It turned out to be a case of human error.
Barr previously drew criticism for allowing the politicization of the Justice Department and intervening in prosecutions to the benefit of Trump's political allies. And within months of his confirmation, in early 2019, Barr confronted criticism that he spun the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller III's investigation to present them in a favorable light for Trump. Mueller, known for his silence through the inquiry into Russia's interference in the 2016 election, wrote Barr a letter asserting that his summary "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance" of the special counsel office's work.
And in spite of his private beliefs and pushback, Barr resigned from the Justice Department in December 2020 with glowing praise for Trump. As recently as April, he said that while he hopes Republicans don't nominate Trump again, he would not rule out voting for him.
"It would be a big mistake to put him forward," Barr said, "but if he was the nominee I would vote for him over the Democrat."