AG Bill Barr privately shot down Trump’s fraud allegations after publicly pushing election conspiracies for months, book reveals

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President Donald Trump with Attorney General William Barr at the 38th Annual Peace Officers Memorial Service on Capitol Hill Wednesday, May 15, 2019, in Washington. AP Photo / Evan Vucci

Former AG Bill Barr privately put an end to the theories of voter fraud after pushing them for months.

Barr expertly explained the voting machines and central counting systems to Trump following the election.

Barr, however, had launched a baseless conspiracy regarding foreign interference in postal voting throughout 2020.

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Attorney General William Barr has forcefully shut down former President Donald Trump’s fraud allegations following the 2020 election in private after months of publicly pushing his own election conspiracies, a new book reveals.

A post-election conversation recounted in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s upcoming book, “Peril,” showcases Barr’s in-depth knowledge of election administration and his frustration with Trump’s wacky theories and the lawyers behind them.

Barr’s attitude contrasts with his own willingness months earlier to launch a baseless electoral fraud plot, which Trump would repeat throughout 2020 in his quest to preemptively discredit the 2020 election.

In December 2020, Barr told Trump his fraud allegations were “bullshit” and that he was having a “clown show,” rather than a real legal team, according to the journalist’s book from “Peril” and the Wall Street Journal Michael Bender, “Frankly We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of Trump’s Loss.”

“All the self-respecting lawyers in the country have run for the hills. Your team is a bunch of clowns,” Barr said, according to “Peril,” telling Trump he had “wasted four weeks” on conspiracies. ” obviously mad “on the vote. Machines.

Barr then provided Trump with a step-by-step description of how ballot scanners and vote tabulators simply speed up the process of counting paper ballots, a tally that can then be confirmed by an audit or a recount, according to the book.

In every swing state of 2020, voters cast votes on either hand-marked paper ballots or a ballot marking device that produced a paper ballot.

The story continues

“If you take a stack of 20 dollar bills and run them through a machine that counts them, it pops up and puts a band around every thousand dollars. Now guess what? The law requires that ballots be kept, just as band money would be saved. So if you say the machine didn’t count well, you just go to the money and see if it’s a thousand dollars, “Barr explained to Trump, adding that if the machine and the hand counted match,” I don’t want to hear all of that stuff about, you know, how this feature was this and that. “

Trump then asked Barr about the fraud in Detroit, Mich., Where a large number of ballots counted early in the morning had strongly favored Biden.

Barr, armed with election statistics, pointed out that Trump actually got a higher share of the vote in Wayne County in 2020 than in 2016.

“Well, there were boxes,” Trump continued to press Barr, “People saw the boxes.”

Barr then detailed to Trump how, unlike other counties in Michigan, Detroit officials count the ballots not at individual polling stations, but at a central counting location in the city.

“And so, all night long these boxes are moved. And so the fact that the boxes come into the meter station early in the morning is not suspect. That’s what they do,” Barr told Trump. , according to the book. “The votes always come at this time and the vote ratio is the same as last time. There is no indication of a sudden increase in additional Biden votes.”

When Trump then turned to Fulton County, Georgia, Barr told him the DOJ “is investigating this stuff, but these things are not working.”

Barr spent months promoting a baseless and highly implausible conspiracy theory that foreign adversaries would flood the US electoral system with fake mail-in ballots.

Barr initially launched the theory in June, telling the New York Times that the idea was “one of the issues that really worries me,” saying that “there are a number of foreign countries that could easily manufacture counterfeit ballots, put names on send them. And it would be very difficult to figure out what’s going on. “

Barr then doubled down on the theory in a September television interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, admitting he had no evidence to back it up and saying he was basing the theory “on logic.”

However, as puzzled election experts have pointed out, ballot stuffing is one of the most readily detectable forms of election fraud by election officials, making it one of the most laborious but least effective ways. for a foreign opponent to try to influence a US Election.

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