Attorney General Bill Barr revealed many things at the Jan. 6 Committee hearing on Monday.
But for me, the biggest impression his testimony left was the depths he reached in serving Trump.
Barr narrated the period of time from Nov. 3, Election Day, until he departed on Dec. 23. Over those seven weeks, Barr recounted how Trump began to reach for wilder and wilder claims that might explain why he was not the loser in the election, but rather, the victim of mass electoral fraud.
To do that, Barr also described how he himself became enmeshed in voter fraud investigations, not only pursuing claims that he admitted that he knew were bogus, but also apparently taking a personal role in investigations normally conducted by line prosecutors.
Barr recalled a meeting with Trump he had in early December, after he had made a point of telling the Associated Press that the DOJ had not found evidence of widespread voter fraud in the election.
Trump began to discuss claims of fraud in Detroit. The attorney general was prepared. "At that point, I knew the exact number of precincts in Detroit," Barr narrated.
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It's one example, but it points to a level of granularity that's typically unfamiliar to attorneys general, tasked with overseeing national law enforcement policy.
But let's look at what else Barr told the committee about the voter fraud allegations.
"I was influenced by the fact that all the early claims that I understood were completely bogus and silly and usually based on complete misinformation," Barr said.
A few things are odd here. One is the presumption that any of the claims might have been made in good faith, considering what they alleged, the people making them and the chain of events — including Trump's refusal to concede — that led to them being made.
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Barr himself boosted the suggestion that Democrats would use mail-in voting to steal the election before November, saying at one point that the Democrats were "creating an incendiary situation where there's going to be loss of confidence in the vote, it'll be a close vote. People will say 'The President won Nevada — oh, wait a minute! We just discovered a hundred thousand ballots, every vote must be counted!'"
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After the election took place, Barr removed a longstanding DOJ policy which banned voter fraud investigations until after the results had been certified. That decision accepted the premise of the claims that Trump was making, and also led to the resignation of the head of the DOJ's election crimes branch.
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Barr also told the committee about a mid-November meeting that he held with Trump.
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"The department doesn't take sides in elections. The department is not an extension of your legal team," Barr recalled telling the former President.
Look what he said next:
"Our role is to investigate fraud and we'll look at something if it's specific, credible and could affect the outcome of the election. We're doing that. It's just not meritorious. It's not panning out."
Who made the "specific, credible" claims of voter fraud? Did anybody do so in 2020? If so, please let me know. Otherwise, it seems that Barr was willing to let the DOJ become, in his phrasing, "an extension of [Trump's] legal team," investigating voter fraud claims that could not affect the outcome of the election.
In spite of all this, Barr has still said that he would vote for Trump, the would-be election thief, again in 2024.
And, perhaps more to the point, even as the attempt to subvert the 2020 election was going on, Barr couldn't help but offer Trump cloying praise in his resignation letter.
"Your record is all the more historic because you accomplished it in the face of relentless, implacable resistance," Barr wrote in that missive.
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