Trump-obsessed White House staffer banned from DOJ after berating Bill Barr: new book

A fiercely loyal White House staffer was banned from the Department of Justice after berating then-attorney general William Barr over false claims of election fraud, according to a new book.

Anti-abortion activist Heidi Stirrup was installed as a White House liaison to the Justice Department in November 2020 by personnel chief John McEntee, himself also an underqualified loyalist to Donald Trump who was assisting in efforts to overturn the president's election loss, according to Jonathan Karl's new book, "Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show," republished in excerpt form by The Atlantic.

"She had no legal experience, but she was intensely loyal to Trump — and to McEntee," wrote Karl, the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News. "Her car was easy to spot in the DOJ parking lot; it was covered with Trump bumper stickers — unusual at a department where even the most political of political appointees try to appear to be above the fray."

She barged into the office of a senior DOJ official on her first day on the job, just a few days after the election, and berated that senior government official.

"You need to wake up to the fact this election is being stolen!" she screamed, according to Karl's book. "It needs to be stopped!"

Barr's team was concerned that Stirrup was trying to peek into their investigations of alleged voter fraud, and because she allegedly violated federal hiring policies by offering high-level DOJ jobs to political allies, but not before she personally infuriated Trump's attorney general.

"The next time Stirrup came around to berate the senior official, he asked her if she would like to deliver her message directly to the attorney general, and with that he brought her in to see Barr," Karl wrote. "Most people find Barr intimidating, but not Heidi Stirrup. 'The election is being stolen,' she lectured him. 'You need better people doing these investigations.' And she told him she had a list of people, presumably provided by McEntee, whom he needed to hire."

"Barr later told me he'd never seen this kind of behavior," Karl added. "By the end of the week, he had ordered her banned from the DOJ building. Her pass was deactivated, and security was instructed not to let her in."