Former Attorney General Bill Barr totally saw this coming, really!
On Monday, Barr told ITV News that he was “sad to see but not surprised” by the pro-Trump insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, asserting that loss of faith in the elections was “the thing that precipitated” the violence.
However, the former attorney general seemed to give some cover to President Donald Trump’s primary role as the instigator of the mob attack.
“I don’t know if I’d use the word ‘inevitable,’ but I think that when you start suppressing free speech, when people lose confidence in the media, and also when they lose faith in the integrity of elections, you are going to have some people resort to violence,” Barr said.
Yet the ex-attorney general refused to mentioned President Donald Trump, who persistently regurgitated lies about election fraud and was the one who incited his supporters to attack the Capitol on the basis of those lies, by name.
“I’ll leave it to the people who are looking into the genesis of this to say whether incitement was involved,” Barr said.
The former Trump official’s remarks on Monday marked a glaring contrast with the way he had mocked “liberals” in September who (accurately) predicted that Trump would undermine the election results and refuse to concede if he lost to Joe Biden.
“All this bullshit about how the President is going to stay in office and seize power? I’ve never heard of any of that crap,” Barr told Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass. “I mean, I’m the attorney general. I would think I would have heard about it.”
“They are projecting,” he continued. “They are creating an incendiary situation where there will be loss of confidence in the vote.”
