- Former Attorney General Bill Barr discussed Donald Trump with the January 6 panel.
- Barr recounted a meeting in which he thought Trump might've "become detached from reality."
- "There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were," Barr said of Trump.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr told investigators that former President Donald Trump was more fixated toward the end of his term on "crazy" allegations of voter fraud than on knowing the "actual facts" on the matter.
Parts of Barr's testimony to the House panel investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot were shown Monday as part of the second of the committee's six public hearings on their investigation.
In a videotaped deposition, Barr recounted a meeting with Trump on December 14, 2020, soon before Barr stepped down as attorney general. Barr said Trump "went off on a monologue" during the meeting about what he claimed to be "definitive evidence" of election fraud being carried out via voting machines made by the company Dominion.
According to Barr, Trump then "held up the report" and claimed it showed "absolute proof that the Dominion machines were rigged." Barr added that Trump then declared that the report meant he would have a second term.
According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — a Department of Homeland Security branch — there has been no evidence to show that flaws in the Dominion voting machines have ever been exploited, per The Washington Post.
The baseless conspiracy theory claiming that the Dominion machines were used to flip votes from Trump to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election was touted by the Trump-allied lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. It is also still being aggressively pushed by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a Trump ally who recently said he would be releasing a documentary to spread the word about the baseless theory.
Having looked through the report, Barr said it seemed "amateurish" and didn't include the credentials of those involved in creating it. He added that the report also contained statements that the Dominion machines were designed to engage in fraud but didn't provide any supporting evidence.
"And I was somewhat demoralized because I thought: 'Boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has, you know, lost contact with it. He's become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,'" Barr told the January 6 panel's investigators.
The former attorney general said he told Trump that some of the allegations seemed "crazy" but his opinion didn't seem to register with Trump. "There was never — there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were," Barr said.
Barr has publicly said he doesn't believe Trump's voter-fraud claims, calling them "bogus" during the testimony. He also laughed at the Trump-lauded conspiracy theory film "2,000 Mules" during his deposition, saying it didn't change his belief that the election wasn't stolen.