Bill Barr Drags Trump to Hell: He “Knew Well He Lost the Election”

When Donald Trump faces off with the Justice Department over his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, two of his key defenses are likely to be that (1) the claims he made in the weeks and months following his loss to Joe Biden were protected by the First Amendment and (2) not actually lies because he believed the words that were coming out of his mouth. On the first point, legal experts have said such a defense is unlikely to hold up in court, and prosecutors made clear in the indictment that they are not disputing that Trump had a right “to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.” (It’s the conspiracy part that they say was illegal.) As for the idea that Trump somehow did not understand that he had, in fact, lost the election? Numerous people have said that he quite obviously knew he’d lost—including, most recently, his former attorney general.

Speaking to CNN on Wednesday, Bill Barr told Kaitlan Collins that Trump “knew well he lost the election,” and that it was likely that Special Counsel Jack Smith has even more evidence than we know of proving as much. “We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg on this,” Barr said. “I think there is a lot more to come, and I think they have a lot more evidence as to President Trump’s state of mind.” On the First Amendment issue, the former attorney general told Collins: “As the indictment says, they are not attacking his First Amendment right. He can say whatever he wants, he can even lie. He can even tell people that the election was stolen when he knew better. But that does not protect you from entering into a conspiracy.” He added that the allegations in the indictment were “nauseating” and “despicable,” and that “someone who engaged in that kind of bullying about a process that is fundamental to our system and to our self-government shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.”

In his memoir released last year, Barr wrote that Trump’s “self-indulgence and lack of self-control” cost him a second term and that “the absurd lengths to which he took his ‘stolen election’ claim led to the rioting on Capitol Hill.” In the lead-up to said riot, Barr wrote, Trump “stopped listening to his advisers, became manic and unreasonable, and was off the rails.” The former AG has also gone on record that he believes Trump was “responsible” for January 6.

Last month, in an interview with ABC News, former Trump ally turned 2024 GOP rival Chris Christie told George Stephanopoulos, “[Trump] doesn’t believe he won. He was concerned before the election that he was losing, and I know that because he said it to me directly. So, you know, he knows he didn’t win.”

In his testimony before the January 6 committee, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, said that during a meeting in the Oval Office in late November or early December 2020, Trump accepted that he had lost the election. “He says words to the effect of: Yeah, we lost, we need to let that issue go to the next guy,” Milley said, adding, “Meaning President Biden.” As Milley told the House panel: “The entire gist of the conversation was—and it lasted—that meeting lasted maybe an hour or something like that—very rational. He was calm. There wasn’t anything—the subject we were talking about was a very serious subject, but everything looked very normal to me. But I do remember him saying that.”

On Thursday, in what appeared to be a reference to the batshit crazy phenomenon in which his support among Republicans has grown with each passing criminal charge, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “I NEED ONE MORE INDICTMENT TO ENSURE MY ELECTION!”