Seems that Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, had a bit of a run-in with The Man a while back.
Barr describes Trump’s ongoing whine about last year’s election having been stolen from him as “bullshit.”
According to a book by ABC Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl entitled Betrayal and scheduled to be published in November, Barr says that his attitude toward Trump’s claims amounted to “put up or shut up time.” That, he says, is why he gave prosecutors the OK to investigate the claims and opened his own investigation.
“If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it,” Barr told Karl. “But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”
Trump claims that voting machines all over the country were somehow rigged to switch votes from himself to the man who defeated him, President Joe Biden.
“We realized from the beginning it was just bullshit,” Barr told Karl.
“It’s a counting machine, and they save everything that was counted. So you just reconcile the two. There had been no discrepancy reported anywhere, and I’m still not aware of any discrepancy,” Barr added. And he’s exactly right. Trump and his followers to the contrary, the bottom line is that the technology to do what Trump claims was done with voting machines all over the country simply doesn’t exist, and even if it did, using it would have been absolutely impossible to conceal and incredibly easy to document. Yet Trump and his supporters have never been able to produce a single bit of evidence to substantiate his claims, and literally every court case he brought- even before judges Trump himself appointed- has been laughed out of court.
Barr also told Karl that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urged him to speak out on Trump’s claims because they could hurt the Republican Party in the upcoming Senate runoff elections in Georgia and said that they were “bad” for both the party and the country. Karl says that McConnell confirmed the conversation when he asked him about it. McConnell apparently thought that maintaining the personal goodwill of Donald Trump was a higher priority than either the Republican Party’s prospect in Georgia or the welfare of the nation.
The way in which the nation’s Republican politicians, with rare exceptions, tremble before the wrath of the psychlogically unsound former president is an amazing thing. Apparently they are conscious of the degree to which the Republican rank and file buys into the Trump line no matter how outrageously he lies or how complete is the lack of evidence to support his claims.
Barr, who isn’t seeking elective office, faced no such constraints. But McConnell apparently believed that Trump’s support was vital in Georgia despite the damaging character of his bizarre claims about the election.
Apparently he found himself on the horns of a dilemma.“Look,” he told Barr, “we need the president in Georgia. And so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now. But you’re in a better position to inject some reality into this situation. You are really the only one who can do it.”
“I understand that,” Barr replied, according to Karl. “And I’m going to do it at the appropriate time.”
When Trump heard about Barr’s statement that there was no evidence of fraud, the Former Guy demanded to know why Barr had said it. ,“How the f— could you do this to me?,” Trump demanded. “Why did you say it?”
Barr answered, “Because it’s true.”
Interestingly, Trump didn’t dispute the statement. Instead, referring to himself in the third person, he responded, “You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump.”
The disconnect between reality and the radical right where Donald Trump is concerned is one of the things that puzzles me the most about them. I’ve cited and documented evidence that Donald Trump was unfit to be President since before the Orange One was even nominated in 2016, and routinely had it ignored by his supporters and dismissed with the accusation, “You just hate Trump.” Statements of the simple, documented and established truth continue to be dismissed as “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” And the sheer terror he strikes into the hearts of Republican politicians seems to have robbed them of any sense of duty to confront even lies they concede are hurting the country.
There can be no question but that Trump’s lies about the election have undermined his successor, damaged the country’s reputation abroad, and undermined the confidence of the American people in the integrity of our elections and of our most basic institutions. One wonders how long it will be before people like McConnell and other Republicans have enough, and put the welfare of the country ahead of their fear of an unstable demagogue.
They fear that if they do, they’ll be replaced by others who will have no compunctions about putting their loyalty to Trump ahead of their loyalty to the country. Perhaps. But one has to wonder how much worse off we would be in that case than we are now.
Watersblogged 