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Former Attorney General William Barr reflected this week on what happened when he told Donald Trump there simply wasn’t any evidence that the 2020 election was fraudulent. As NBC News reported, the then-president apparently didn’t take it well.
“I told him that all this stuff was bulls--- ... about election fraud. And, you know, it was wrong to be shoveling it out the way his team was,” Barr said in an interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt.... “He was asking about different theories, and I had the answers. I was able to tell him, ‘This was wrong because of this,’” Barr recounted. Trump listened, but “he was obviously getting very angry about this.”
According to the former attorney general’s version of events, after telling Trump the truth he didn’t want to hear, Barr also offered to resign. Slapping his desk, the then-president said, “Accepted. Accepted.... Go home. Don’t go back to your office. Go home. You’re done.”
At face value, the story is very easy believe. After all, Barr made related comments about the election results in December 2020, resulting in similar hysterical Trump tantrums.
What’s more, it’s important to emphasize that the former attorney general is clearly eager to rehabilitate his tarnished reputation — or at least try to — after a highly controversial tenure in which he brazenly politicized federal law enforcement in ways unseen in the post-Watergate era.
But there’s another dimension to this that may not be immediately obvious.
The New York Times explained in a new report the significance of this week’s court filing from the Jan. 6 committee.
In laying out the account, the panel revealed the basis of what its investigators believe could be a criminal case against Mr. Trump. At its core is the argument that, in repeatedly rejecting the truth that he had lost the 2020 election — including the assertions of his own campaign aides, White House lawyers, two successive attorneys general and federal investigators — Mr. Trump was not just being stubborn or ignorant about his defeat, he was knowingly perpetrating a fraud on the United States.
The list is both long and important. Trump’s attorney general told him he lost, fair and square, and he could not legally overturn the results of his own country’s legitimate election. Trump’s top White House lawyer said the same thing. So did officials on Trump’s campaign team. And in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. And Trump’s Justice Department.
The point is not just that people around the former Republican president recognized reality and had the courage to tell him the truth. Rather, the point is that Trump was repeatedly told the truth by members of his own team, and he made a conscious decision to perpetrate a fraud anyway.
And that, according to the court filing from the bipartisan House select panel, may not have been legal. A Washington Post report added:
The committee’s goal was to convince a federal judge there is a “good-faith basis” for concluding Trump and others engaged in a “criminal conspiracy” to defraud the United States and obstruct Congress before the attack on the Capitol — and to prove that Trump was acting corruptly by continuing to spread lies about the election long after he had reason to know he had legitimately lost.
By all accounts, proving intent in this area can be difficult, but that’s what makes the chorus of voices all the more significant: Trump can’t say he didn’t know the truth when so many of those around him had already told him the truth.
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the Jan. 6 committee, told the Post, “I mean, he understood what he was doing was wrong. I’ve never really doubted that from the beginning. But all of this evidence makes it certain that he had consciousness of guilt as he proceeded to try to overthrow the election result.”