Hitpiece

Excerpt

Bill 'Brutus' Barr throws Pres. Trump under the bus

"At one point, I said to the president: 'You know, Mr. President, you're like a bull in a bull ring and your adversaries have your number. They know how to get under your skin, and all they have to do is wave a red flag over here and you go charging and attack it.' And I said, 'At the end of the day, you're going to be in the middle of the ring sweating and someone's going to come and put a sword through your head,"said Barr. "He didn't think much of that metaphor." A natural sympathy for Trump, worn thin by election lies.

Barr worked for the CIA before his first stint as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush. His book spends much time on the culture wars, accusing radical progressives of dividing the country — making it easier to understand what he saw in Donald Trump.

But after the 2020 election, when Barr couldn't tell Trump what he wanted to hear, the attorney general finally broke with the president.

It was Trump's persistent, baseless claims about election fraud that pushed the two-time attorney general to finally split with the president.

As he told The Associated Press at the time, Barr said the Justice Department found no evidence of any widespread voter fraud in the election. Barr says in his book that he told the president to his face that the stolen election claims were "bull****."

The president angrily accepted Barr's resignation on the spot. He took it back moments later, but Barr resigned for real in December 2020.

"After the election, he didn't seem to listen to anybody except a group of sycophants who were telling him what he wanted to hear," Barr said.

When the DOJ investigated the baseless election fraud claims, Barr said, "it was like playing whack-a-mole. All the theories of the day that came out, when we looked into them, they just evaporated. They were just completely without foundation."

Barr called attention to an NPR interview with Trump in January, in which Trump repeated election lies. "He's had a year to think about it," Barr said, and still has no better evidence than a false claim that Biden received "more votes than voters" in Philadelphia. The claim has been disproven, "and yet you continue to hear this thing repeated," he said.

He calls his Trump-friendly decisions a refusal to criminalize politics.

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/07/1084510375/ag-bill-barr-book-trump-2024