Former Attorney General Bill Barr meets with Jan. 6 committee about Trump election fraud claims
WASHINGTON – Former Attorney General Bill Barr met Thursday with the House committee investigating the Capitol attack Jan. 6, 2021, to answer questions about former President Donald Trump's claims of election fraud, according to a source familiar with the meeting.
Questions during the two-and-a-half hour session focused on material in Barr's book, "One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General," and about Trump's claims of fraud, according to the source.
Barr had left the Trump administration weeks before the riot, after saying the Justice Department found no widespread fraud in the 2020 election. But Barr was the nation's top law enforcement officer before and after the election that former President Donald Trump baselessly said was stolen from him.
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The committee meeting came as the panel prepared for a series of hearings on its findings beginning June 9.
Trump claimed repeatedly without evidence he would have won the 2020 election if not for widespread fraud.
But Barr told the Associated Press in early December 2020 the Justice Department hadn't “seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
A federal agency designated to monitor election security also called it the most secure in history.
"The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history," the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its partners said in a November 2020 statement. "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised."
After Barr's departure, Trump pressured Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to fight the election results. Trump also considered replacing Rosen with Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark to investigate state election results, but rejected the move after a group of senior department officials threatened to resign.
Barr, who left office Dec. 23, 2020, about a month before the end of the Trump administration, supported the president for years. Barr was criticized for summarizing the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election before releasing the report.
Barr later appointed special counsel John Durham to investigate what prompted the FBI to begin the Russia investigation.
"The nadir of this campaign was the effort to cripple, if not oust, your administration with frenzied and baseless accusations of collusions with Russia," Barr wrote in his resignation letter. "Few could have weathered these attacks, much less forge ahead with a positive program for the country."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Bill Barr meets with Jan. 6 committee about Trump fraud claims
