- Former AG Bill Barr says Trump was fixated on "crazy" allegations of voter fraud.
- Barr recounted a meeting with Trump, at which he thought Trump had "become detached from reality."
- "There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were," Barr said of Trump.
Former Attorney General William Barr said that former President Donald Trump was more fixated on "crazy" allegations of voter fraud than knowing the "actual facts" on the matter.
Barr's testimony to the House panel investigating the January 6 Capitol riot was aired on 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. 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 the Dominion voting machines.
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 that 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 the Dominion voting machines' flaws 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 President Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential election has been touted by 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 announced that 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," although 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," said Barr.
Barr has publicly declared that he does not believe Trump's voter fraud claims, calling them "bogus" during this testimony. He also laughed at the Trump-lauded conspiracy theory film "2000 Mules" during his deposition, saying it did not change his belief that the election wasn't stolen.