Incitement.
He’s gonna make a hell of a witness against Trump at the impeachment trial. The good news for MAGA, though, is that they have a ready line of attack if/when he takes his seat in the witness box. Namely, didn’t Bill Barr himself do plenty of preemptive election-questioning this fall, spooking Americans about mail ballots and falsely suggesting that people who voted that way might not be able to keep their vote a secret? The time to worry about “stop the steal” propaganda “precipitating” violence was when he seized the opportunity to chip in a little propaganda towards that effort himself, not 13 days after a cop was murdered by fanatic believers. Watch, then read on. It’s not that interview that makes me think he’d be a tough witness for Trump before the Senate, even though he strongly hints in the clip that he thinks the president is morally if not legally culpable for what happened at the Capitol. It’s this report from Axios published a few days ago. Barr reportedly warned Trump privately many weeks ago that the “stop the steal” allegations were BS. Trump wouldn’t listen. “These things aren’t panning out,” Barr told the president, standing beside his chief of staff Will Levi. “The stuff that these people are filling your ear with just isn’t true.” Barr explained that if Trump wanted to contest the election results, the president’s internal campaign lawyers would have to do it. The Justice Department, he continued, had looked at the major fraud allegations that Trump’s lawyers had leveled. “It’s just bullsh*t,” Barr told the president. Cipollone backed up Barr by saying the DOJ was investigating these claims. Trump pointed at the TV and asked if Barr had been watching the hearing. Barr said he hadn’t. “Maybe you should,” the president said. Barr reiterated that the Justice Department was not ignoring the allegations, but that Trump’s outside lawyers were doing a terrible job. “I’m a pretty informed legal observer and I can’t f***ing figure out what the theory is here,” he added. “It’s just scattershot. It’s all over the hill and gone.” That was December 1. Imagine Barr testifying before the Senate that for more than a month after that meeting, Trump ignored the fact that the head of the Justice Department had informed him personally that there was nothing to the “stop the steal” conspiracy and persisted in it anyway, culminating in the attack on January 6.
