Former Attorney General Bill Barr late last year reportedly warned President Donald Trump that his efforts to overturn the 2020 election were doomed to fail, and that his legal team was lying to him about widespread voter fraud.
Axios reports that Barr confronted Trump in the Oval Office shortly before departing the Department of Justice in late December and bluntly told him that there was no widespread voter fraud.
"The president's theories about a stolen election, Barr told Trump, were 'bullsh*t," the publication writes. "For good measure, the attorney general threw in a warning that the new legal team Trump was betting his future on was 'clownish.'"
Trump, however, refused to back down and demanded that Barr watch a "voter fraud" hearing arranged by attorney Rudy Giuliani.
Barr replied that none of what Giuliani and fellow Trump lawyer Sidney Powell were peddling made any sense.
""I'm a pretty informed legal observer and I can't f*cking figure out what the theory is here," he said. "It's just scattershot. It's all over the hill and gone."
Less than a month later, Barr would resign.
"A hefty wall" of evidence has already been built against former President Donald Trump by special counsel Jack Smith - and more keeps coming, a former FBI general counsel said Wednesday.
Andrew Weissmann, who was a senior prosecutor on Robert Mueller's team, discussed new reports about Smith's investigation with Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC.
A Wednesday New York Times report cited Smith interviewing Donald Trump's former cyber-security chief Chris Krebs. He was the aide that called the 2020 election the safest in history as the former president mounted a conspiracy campaign that the election had been stolen from him. Krebs was subsequently fired via tweet.
Weissmann explained that Krebs is going to be a perfect witness for the prosecutors – who are investigating classified documents found at Trump's Mar-a-Lago home and delving into Trump's part in trying to overturn the 2020 election results – because he will have facts and data.
"He's going to talk about, as a Republican appointed by Donald Trump, giving facts saying there was no fraud in the election. And on the other side, there are no facts," said Weissmann. "So, it's just a wonderful example. You can add it to Brad Raffensperger; you can add it to Mike Pence. You can add it to the president seeking to get rid of Jeff Rosen, the acting attorney general, and replace him with Jeff Clark.
"It's all in place, and this is one really good building block. And when you give that litany, you go, this is going to be quite a hefty wall. This is a lot of evidence."
Wallace said that Krebs joins a list of people that worked with Trump and interacted with him directly who have said that he didn't win the 2020 election.
Former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal, also speaking with Wallace, recalled former Attorney General Bill Barr calling Trump's post-election advisers a "clown show." Barr, he said, would be an expert.
"Barr knows a lot about clown shows," explained Katyal. "That's what I think Smith is doing. He's trying to figure out why is, it in the world, that you would get rid of the one guy who actually talks sense. You just played the clip. He doesn't sound like your typical Trump person. He sounds like someone who plays it straight. That's exactly what Trump's problem was."
Wallace asked Weissmann about Smith's two cases – the Jan. 6 effort and the documents scandal – and the division between the two. Weissmann said that both cases will be brought and that the Jan. 6 case would be strong based on the information that they've collected. But he said the Jan. 6 case is much more complicated than the documents case.
Katyal summed it up by saying Trump can't have X, Trump took X, Trump hid X, Trump refused to give X back, Trump is indicted for it. Whereas the fraud for the Jan. 6 case involves a lot of pieces.
"I somewhat disagreed with the attorney general when he said this is the most massive investigation we've ever undertaken," said Weissmann. "I mean, this isn't. It's just, it's big, but it's not terribly complicated. The evidence is — this is the kind of evidence when you're a prosecutor, you're sort of like dying for this because there's so much proof.
"Mar-a-Lago is just a much more discreet set of facts. You still have to tie everything down, you have to interview all of the witnesses. But that is one, if I were a betting man to answer these kinds of questions, I would say Mar-a-Lago is going to go first. And that seems to me, I mean, I hate to use the phrase because Fani Willis has used it, it does seem imminent to me. And I think that Jack Smith will feel the pressure to bring it -- not because he wants to rush it, but I think the American people are entitled to know the answer to whether a candidate for office has committed a state and federal crimes."
After Weissmann spoke, CNN dropped a bombshell report that there was a tape of Donald Trump speaking to biographers for Mark Meadows in which he revealed he took classified documents from the White House that involved a potential attack on Iran.
See the conversation with the legal experts below or at the link here.
Former Mueller prosecutor thinks the document scandal case is more 'imminent' now www.youtube.com
Former GOP strategist turned Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt ripped into Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in a new episode of his political podcast, "The Warning."
"There he is," said Schmidt, showing an image of DeSantis during his interview with Fox News in which he claimed he would "smash" leftism in the United States as president. "Governor Ron DeSantis. The Mussolini of Tallahassee, using a U.S. Navy war vessel as a visual prop just days after his disastrous launch, which spawned the fantastic hashtag, "#DeSaster."
"Who is it that he wants to smash?" said Schmidt. "Is he going to arrest Bernie Sanders? Is he going to send AOC to a rehabilitation and re-education camp?"
This moment, for Schmidt, encapsulated how DeSantis is unfit for office — and how his presidential campaign, hyped by numerous GOP donors looking for an alternative to Trump, will crash and burn.
"Ron DeSantis' campaign is going to be epic," said Schmidt. "As in, an epic debacle for the ages. He will raise more money against lower vote results than any presidential candidate in American history. He's going to make Texas Senator Phil Gramm look like Bill Clinton, when it comes to politics, by the time this is done."
"Let me just say this about Ron DeSantis, and his wanting to smash and break and hurt," he continued. "The job of the American president is to temporarily lead the American people, and to make the Union more perfect. Ron DeSantis doesn't understand that. He's as unfit at a moral level, at a character level, as any person has ever been, including Donald Trump, running for this office."
"He will fail," said Schmidt.
Watch below or at the following link:
Why Ron DeSantis's aims of "destroying leftism" prove he is unfit to be president | The Warning www.youtube.com
Federal prosecutors are in possession of an audio recording of Donald Trump in which the former president admits he kept a classified document describing a potential attack on Iran, CNN reports.
Trump is heard on the recording suggesting that, although he wishes to share the information, he’s aware that as a former president he can’t declassify them, multiple sources told the cable news channel, indicating he understood he was in possession of classified material.
CNN has not heard the audio.
The part of the recording in which Trump discusses the Iran document is about two minutes long and part of a larger conversation, according to the report.
Katelyn Polantz, Paula Reid, and Kaitlan Collins write for CNN that “Special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the Justice Department investigation into Trump, has focused on the meeting as part of the criminal investigation into Trump’s handling of national security secrets. Sources describe the recording as an ‘important; piece of evidence in a possible case against Trump,' who has repeatedly asserted he could retain presidential records and ‘automatically’ declassify documents.”
According to the report, prosecutors have interviewed witnesses before a federal grand jury about the about the recording and the document, and Gen. Mark Milley, was also questioned.
Polantz, Reid, and Collins further write that, “The revelation that the former president and commander-in-chief has been captured on tape discussing a classified document could raise his legal exposure as he continues his third bid for the White House.”
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