Former AG Bill Barr testimony played during Jan. 6 committee hearing

[0:00] Last week, we presented the testimony of former Attorney General Bill Barr, who testified before this committee. [0:10] Today, we present additional evidence, including his testimony that former President Trump started making claims of election fraud [0:19] immediately after the election, and that Barr concluded the claims were untrue. [0:24] Now, due to the length of Attorney General Barr's testimony, we're only going to include relevant portions at the hearing today. [0:33] So let's play the video. [0:39] The department, in fact, when we received specific and credible allegations of fraud, made an effort to look into these to satisfy ourselves that they were without merit. [0:53] And I was in the posture of trying to figure out there was an avalanche of all these allegations of fraud that built up over a number of days. [1:04] And it was like playing whack-a-mole because something would come out one day and then the next day it would be another issue. [1:09] Also, 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. [1:22] And so I didn't consider the quality of claims right out of the box to give me any feeling that there was really substance here. [1:30] For the first time since the election, the Attorney General spoke personally with the President on November 23rd, and this was at the White House. [1:42] Let's play the video, please. [1:45] So on November 23rd, I hadn't spoken to the President since the election, and in fact, as I said, since the middle of October, roughly. [1:53] And it was a little getting awkward because obviously he had lost the election and I hadn't said anything to him. [2:01] And so Cipollone said, you know, I think it's time you come over here. [2:06] And so I came over to meet with the President in the Oval Office and Meadows and Cipollone were there. [2:13] And the President, and this is leading up to this conversation with Kushner, the President said there had been major fraud and that as soon as the facts were out, the results of the election would be reversed. [2:32] And he went on on this for quite a while, as he's prone to do. [2:36] And then he got to something that I was expecting, which is to say that apparently the Department of Justice doesn't think that it has a role of looking into these fraud claims. [2:49] So I said, you know, that has to be the campaign that raises that with the state. [2:53] The Department doesn't take sides in elections, and the Department is not an extension of your legal team. [3:00] And our role is to investigate fraud, and we'll look at something if it's specific, credible, and could have affected the outcome of the election. [3:09] And we're doing that, and it's just not, they're just not meritorious. [3:14] They're not panning out. [3:16] And as I walked out of the Oval Office, Jared was there with Dan Scavino, who ran his, ran the President's social media, and who I thought was a reasonable guy and believe is a reasonable guy. [3:29] And I said, how long is he going to carry on with this stolen election stuff? [3:38] Where is this going to go? [3:40] And by that time, Meadows had caught up with me, leaving the office, and caught up with me and said that, he said, look, I think that he's becoming more realistic and knows that there's a limit to how far he can take this. [4:03] And then Jared said, you know, yeah, we're working on this, we're working on it. [4:08] Even after his attorney general told him his claims of election fraud were false, President Trump continued to promote these claims. [4:18] I felt that things continued to deteriorate between the 23rd and the weekend of the 29th. [4:28] And then on November 29th, he appeared on Maria Bartiromo's show, Sunday Futures, I believe it was. [4:36] And he said that the department was missing in action. [4:40] Well, no, we had glitches where they moved thousands of votes from my account, Biden's account. [4:46] And these are glitches. [4:47] So they're not glitches, they're theft. [4:49] They're fraud. [4:50] Absolute fraud. [4:51] This election was over. [4:53] And then they did, they call them dumb mess in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, Department of Justice. [5:05] I don't know, maybe they're involved. [5:07] But how people are allowed to get away from this, with this stuff is unbelievable. [5:13] Now, spurred by what he saw, Barr told the Associated Press on December 1st that there was no evidence of election fraud. [5:22] And immediately after Attorney General Barr's statement went public, Mr. Trump berated and he nearly fired Barr. [5:30] But Barr persisted in telling the president that there was no evidence to support the fraud claims. [5:36] This got under my skin, but I also felt it was time for me to say something. [5:43] So I had, I set up a lunch with the AP reporter, Mike Balsamo, and I told him at lunch, I made the statement that to date we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election. [6:02] I had a later meeting scheduled at the White House at 3 o'clock with Meadows. [6:11] This was previously scheduled, so I knew this was going to come up. [6:15] And I went over there and I told my secretary that I thought I would probably be fired and told not to go home. [6:23] I mean, not to go back to my office. [6:24] So I said, you might have to pack up for me. [6:26] And so when I got over there, I met with the chief of staff. [6:31] He said the president was angry. [6:33] He didn't really go get into the issue of the fraud. [6:39] And then I went up to Pat Cipollone's office and we were talking with each other. [6:45] And word came down that he wanted us both to go to the Oval. [6:49] And the president was as mad as I've ever seen him and he was trying to control himself. [6:53] The president said, well, this is killing me. [6:57] You didn't have to say this. [6:58] You must have said this because you hate Trump. [7:00] You hate Trump. [7:02] And then he raised the big vote dump, as he called it, in Detroit. [7:08] And he said people saw boxes coming into the counting station at all hours of the morning and so forth. [7:15] And I explained to him that at that point I knew the exact number of precincts in Detroit. [7:21] I think it was 630 something. [7:23] I said, Mr. President, there are 630 precincts in Detroit. [7:27] And unlike elsewhere in the state, they centralize the counting process. [7:31] So they're not counted in each precinct. [7:33] They're moved to counting stations. [7:36] And so the normal process would involve boxes coming in at all different hours. [7:41] So there's nothing. [7:42] And I said, did anyone point out to you? [7:44] Did all the people complaining about it point out to you? [7:46] You actually did better in Detroit than you did last time. [7:50] I mean, there's no indication of fraud in Detroit. [7:54] And I told him that the stuff that his people were shuttling out to the public was bullshit. [8:00] I mean, that the claims of fraud were bullshit. [8:03] And, you know, he was indignant about that. [8:08] And I reiterated that they'd wasted a whole month on these claims on the Dominion voting machines. [8:18] And they were idiotic claims. [8:20] And I specifically raised the Dominion voting machines, which I found to be among the most disturbing allegations. [8:29] Disturbing in the sense that I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations. [8:34] But they were made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people, members of the public, [8:42] that there was this systemic corruption in the system and that their votes didn't count [8:48] and that these machines controlled by somebody else were actually determining it, which was complete nonsense. [8:54] And it was being laid out there. [8:56] And I told them that it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on it. [9:03] And it was doing a grave disservice for the country. [9:07] OK, so the very next day, the president released a video rehashing some of the very same claims [9:15] that his chief law enforcement officer had told him were, quote, nonsense. [9:21] Here's an example. [9:25] This is Michigan. [9:27] At 6.31 in the morning, a vote dunk of 149,772 votes came in unexpectedly. [9:40] We were winning by a lot. [9:43] That batch was received in horror. [9:52] We have a company that's very suspect. [9:56] Its name is Dominion. [9:57] With the turn of a dial or the change of a chip, you can press a button for Trump and the vote goes to Biden. [10:07] What kind of a system is this? [10:12] Barr again told the president that there was nothing to these claims on December 14th. [10:19] When I walked in, sat down, he went off on a monologue saying that there was now definitive evidence involving fraud through the Dominion machines. [10:38] And a report had been prepared by a very reputable cyber security firm, which he identified as Allied Security Operations Group. [10:47] And he held up the report. [10:49] And then he asked that a copy of it be made for me. [10:53] And while a copy was being made, he said, you know, this is absolute proof that the Dominion machines were rigged. [11:01] The report means that I'm going to have a second term. [11:05] And then he gave me a copy of the report. [11:08] And as he talked more and more about it, I sat there flipping through the report and looking through it. [11:15] And to be frank, it looked very amateurish to me. [11:20] Didn't have the credentials of the people involved, but I didn't see any real qualifications. [11:26] And the statements were made very conclusory, like, you know, these machines were designed to, you know, engage in fraud or something to that effect. [11:36] But I didn't see any supporting information for it. [11:40] And I was somewhat demoralized because I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has, you know, lost contact with, with, he's become detached from reality. [11:52] If he really believes, on the other hand, you know, when I went into this and would, you know, tell him how crazy some of these allegations were, there was never, there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts are. [12:12] My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud. [12:20] And I haven't seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that, including the 2000 Mules movie. [12:32] Well, maybe you can assess that 2000 Mules since people are talking about that. [12:38] Well, I mean, just in a nutshell, you know, I just think the GBI was unimpressed with it. [12:43] And I was similarly unimpressed with it because I think if you, because I was holding my fire on that to see what the photographic evidence was. [12:53] Because I thought, well, hell, if they have a lot of photographs of the same person dumping a lot of ballots in different boxes, you know, that's hard to explain. [13:02] So I wanted to see what the photographic evidence was, but the cell phone data is singularly unimpressive. [13:12] I mean, it basically, if you take 2 million cell phones and, and figure out where they are physically in a big city like Atlanta or wherever, just by definition, you're going to find many hundreds of them have passed by and spent time in the vicinity of these boxes. [13:29] And the premise that, you know, if you go buy a box, you know, five boxes or whatever it was, you know, that that's a Mule is just indefensible. [13:41] It, it, it, by definition, you're going to have a lot of hundreds of this. [13:44] I mean, one, I saw one contractor said, we figured out that our truck alone would account for six cell phone signals. [13:52] This was a, you know, some kind of contractor and, you know, our route would take us by these things on a regular basis. [14:00] So I, I, but then when the movie came out, you know, I think the photographic evidence in it was completely lack. [14:11] I mean, it was, there was a little bit of it, but it was lacking, you know, it didn't, it didn't establish widespread illegal harvesting. [14:21] The other thing is people don't understand is that it's not clear that even if you can show harvesting, that that changes the, the results of the election. [14:32] You're not going to, the courts are not going to throw out votes and then figure out what votes were harvested and throw them out. [14:40] You'd still the burden on the challenging party to show that illegal votes were cast. [14:45] Votes were the result of undue influence or bribes or, or there was really, you know, the person was non-composmentous, but absent that evidence, I don't, I just didn't see courts throwing out votes anyway. [14:57] I felt that, uh, before the election, it was possible to talk sense to the president, uh, and while you sometimes had to, uh, engage in, uh, you know, a big wrestling match with him, uh, that it was possible to keep things on track. [15:16] But I was, uh, felt that after the election, he didn't seem to be listening and I didn't think it was, uh, you know, that I, that I was inclined not to stay around if he wasn't listening to advice from me or his other cabinet secretaries. [15:32] So on December 14th, Barr quit. [15:37] Hi, everyone. George Stephanopoulos here. Thanks for checking out the ABC News YouTube channel. [15:43] If you'd like to get more videos, show highlights, and watch live event coverage, click on the right over here to subscribe to our channel. [15:49] And don't forget to download the ABC News app for breaking news alerts. [15:53] Thanks for watching.