Former Trump-era Attorney General Bill Barr is trying desperately to rehabilitate his image and reputation now that the dust has begun to settle from Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency — and absolutely no one is letting him get away with that nonsense.
In the wake of the release of his new tell-all book about his days under Donald Trump’s reign — where mind you, he spent just short of four years trying to turn the United States Department of Justice on its head to protect the corrupt president and punish his various perceived enemies — Barr has been regularly speaking out against the former president. But he doesn’t seem to realize that precisely no one has forgotten what he did.
Today, the former Attorney General made an appearance on CNN with host Jake Tapper, where they discussed the recent NPR interview Barr did to promote his new book, One Damn Thing After Another.
During his CNN appearance, Tapper was quick to call out the former head of the DOJ over remarks he made in 2020 regarding voter fraud, and ultimately flat-out asked Barr if he bore any responsibility for misleading the American public.
“You voiced your concerns about the potential for fraud because of the increased use of paper ballots,” Tapper said, alluding to a portion of Barr’s book where he recalled telling the Associated Press that the Justice Department was unsuccessful in finding any evidence of widespread voter fraud ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
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Tapper then played a video clip of Barr’s 2020 NPR interview, during which Bill publicly questioned the validity of mail-in ballots.
“There are so many occasions for fraud there that cannot be policed. I think it would be very bad. But one of the things I mentioned was the possibility of counterfeiting,” Barr said at the time.
The CNN host followed with another clip, this time of Barr’s September 2020 interview with Wolf Blitzer, where the now former-AG once again brought up what he claimed was evidence of voter fraud.
“Mail-in voting is fraught with the risk of fraud and coercion. For example, we indicted someone in Texas. 1,700 ballots collected from people who could vote. He made them out and voted for the person he wanted to. Okay?” Barr said in the 2020 interview with Blitzer.
“Your staff later admitted that you had been given wrong information,” Tapper stated. “That was not accurate. It was one single ballot. Prosecutors reviewed 700 ballots and found one. Hardly widespread.”
“Do you bear responsibility for all the people out there that thought that there would be all this widespread voter fraud, given that you were very vocally sounding the alarm based on theories and bad information?” the CNN host pointedly asked.
“Not at all,” Barr confidently responded. “And I stand by all of that.”
The former AG went on to try to excuse his response by stating that in “such a closely divided country” it was necessary to “keep strong protections against fraud and protect the integrity of the election.” Otherwise, he claimed, there was a risk that people “will not have confidence in an election whether or not fraud occurs.”
Barr claimed that ensuring confidence in an election “requires a lot of vigilance and not diluting the safeguards, [and] that’s a separate question about whether fraud actually can be shown to have occurred.”
He then went on to criticize “universal mail-in ballots where they send out the ballots to all the people on the voting list.”
Tapper was quick to interrupt, “Like they do in Utah and have for years.”
“Perhaps,” Barr shot back. “But the bipartisan commission that looked at that, I think it was in 2006, said that that kind of process is fraught with the risk of fraud, and I think it is. And the other thing I was talking about was ballot harvesting, which I think is a terrible practice. With these practices in place, whether or not fraud occurs, people are going to think there was fraud.”
Never forget, this man is irredeemable. Full stop.
You can watch the clip here:
Tapper: Do you bear any responsibility for all the people who thought there was going to be widespread voter fraud given the fact you were sounding the alarm based on theories and bad information?
Barr: Not at all and I stand by all of that… pic.twitter.com/BQWlyuhHdw— Acyn (@Acyn) March 11, 2022
Featured image via screen capture
