Watch Live: House Jan. 6 committee’s focus turns to Trump’s false claims in second hearing

In the days after the election, then-Attorney General Bill Barr testified to the committee that he knew the claims coming from Trump allies were “bogus” and “silly.” Still, the Department of Justice investigated specific, credible investigations of fraud anyway. 

“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,” Barr said in recorded testimony that was shown Monday. 

“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 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,” Barr continued in his recorded testimony. 

“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,” Barr added. “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.” 

Be recalled telling an Associated Press reporter that there could not have been fraud in a widespread way that could have changed the outcome of the election, a statement he knew would anger Trump. He had a meeting scheduled at the White House that same day, Nov. 23. 2020.

“I went over there and I told my secretary that I would probably be fired and told not to … not to go back to my office, so I said, ‘You might have to pack up for me,'” Barr said. 

Sure enough, when he went to the White House for a meeting, he said then-chief of staff Mark Meadows said the president was angry. 

“The president was as mad as I’ve ever seen him, and he was trying to control himself,” Barr said, adding that Trump was going off about allegations like the “big vote dump” in Detroit. 

Barr said he told the president there was no indication of fraud in Detroit, and told the president the claims of fraud were false. 

Barr said he didn’t see any supporting evidence for the claims being made, particularly when it came to the Dominion voting machines. Barr recalled Trump at one point saying there was definitive evidence of fraud on Dominion machines, and that Trump held up a report with supposed evidence for those claims. 

“While a copy was being made, he said, ‘This is absolute proof that the Dominion machines were rigged. The report means that I’m going to have a second term.’ And then he gave me a copy of the report. And as he talked more and more about it, I sat there flipping through the report and looking at it.”

“And to be frank, it looked very amateurish to me,” Barr continued. “… And the statements were made very conclusory, like ‘these machines were designed to engage in fraud’ or something to that effect, but I didn’t see any supporting information for it. And I was somewhat demoralized because I thought, ‘Boy if he really believes this stuff, he has you know, lost contact with — he’s become detached from reality, if he really believes this stuff.'”

Barr says he told Trump how crazy the claims were. 

“There was never, there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were,” Barr said in his recorded testimony. “And my opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud.”