Former attorney general William Barr revealed new details about his resignation from the White House during an angry showdown with Donald Trump.
The former president was fuming that Barr had admitted to a reporter that the Department of Justice had turned up no widespread evidence of election fraud, and the former attorney general described their Dec. 1, 2020, confrontation in his forthcoming memoir, "One Damn Thing After Another," of which the Wall Street Journal published excerpts.
“Mr. President,” Barr says he told Trump, “the reason you are in this position is that, instead of having a crackerjack legal team that had its shit together from day one, you wheeled out a clown show, and no quality lawyers who would otherwise be willing to help will get anywhere near it.”
Trump, who had been watching One America News channel covering a Michigan legislative hearing on voter fraud allegations, "pensively" seemed to agree with Barr, but would not concede that his team's legal arguments were bogus.
READ MORE: Trump erupted in third-person rant after Barr told reporter that he'd found no evidence of fraud
“Look, Mr. President, they wasted a whole month with this idiotic claim about Dominion machines,” Barr says he continued. “First, there is no evidence they were compromised. Your team picked the one theory that can be easily disproven.”
Paper ballots were maintained by the Dominion voting machines, which made it easy to verify their accuracy, and no discrepancies had been found, but Trump remained unconvinced and continued spinning off more conspiracy theories about the election, and Barr wrote that he knocked each one down in turn.
“Have you bothered to ask the people who are feeding you this sh*t how the votes compared to the last election?” Barr says he asked the former president.
Trump then demanded to know when U.S. attorney John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Russian probe would be completed, and he erupted when Barr said it would not likely be done until the start of the Biden administration.
“'The first part of the Biden administration!' the president roared harshly, staring daggers at me," Barr wrote. "I could not tell if he was mad at the delay or at my explicit recognition that Joe Biden would be the president."
Trump then changed the subject to his long-standing grievance against Barr for refusing to indict former FBI director James Comey for giving his lawyers memos that contained scraps of confidential information, and an exasperated Barr finally offered to resign.
"Bang. A loud sound, almost like a gunshot, cut me off and jolted us all," Barr wrote.
“'Accepted!' the President yelled. It took me a second to see that President Trump had slammed the table with his palm," Barr wrote. "'Accepted!' he yelled again. Bang. He hit the table once more; his face was quivering. 'Leave, and don’t go back to your office. You are done right now. Go home!' he barked."
Other administration officials, including then-chief of staff Mark Meadows, begged Barr to stay on after he left the meeting, and Barr and the president came to an agreement that he would stay on for several more weeks.
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