Former Attorney General Bill Barr has come out with a book attacking former President Donald Trump, and the president responded Monday night by suggesting Barr was extorted to side with Democrats on election fraud allegations.
"Bill Barr said, and just reiterated, that the Trump campaign was 'spied on,' but did nothing about it; he then said, 'mail-in ballots are prone to fraud,' and then did nothing to catch the fraudsters," Trump wrote in a Save America PAC statement.
Trump's statement came after Barr's interview Monday night on Fox News with Brett Baier and after he offered a scathing rebuke to Barr in a three-page memo to NBC News' Lester Holt.
Barr was unequivocal in denouncing "Russiagate," the effort to link Trump's 2020 campaign and alleged political interference by Moscow. He called it the original "big lie" and a "despicable dirty trick," adding, "I would like to see the thing exposed in a fulsome report by Durham."
"I think there will be a report, and potentially more indictments, but I don't know whether there will be more indictments," Barr told Baier. "I'm sure there will be a report. I directed that he do a report.
"The president's campaign was spied on."
But Barr broke from Trump after President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory was certified, he said, rejecting Trump's claims of widespread election fraud.
Trump said that was because of another maximum pressure campaign from Democrats and the liberal media.
"He was so afraid of being impeached, that he went to the other side — and they left him alone," Trump's statement added. "Barr was a 'Bushie' who never had the energy or competence to do the job that he was put in place to do."
Barr has been making the rounds on mainstream media outlets like NBC and NPR, but the only interview during which Barr definitively said Trump was "spied on" was with conservative-leaning Fox.
"It is a phony scandal, and people talking about the 'Big Lie' after the election forget that there was a big lie at the before, or at the beginning of the Trump administration," Barr told NBC's Savannah Guthrie, before she cut him off on Monday morning's "Today."
Barr circled back to his denouncing of Democrats' attempts to tarnish the Trump administration and Trump's presidency, responding to his processing of special counsel Robert Mueller's exhaustive investigation into that alleged Trump campaign collusion with Russia.
"It was a lie," Barr continued. "It was a lie that the media pushed. It was a feeding frenzy that hobbled the administration and was unfair to the president, and I dealt with it accordingly."
Notably, Monday night, Barr claimed that Democrats' "Russiagate" cleared the way for Russian President Vladimir Putin's eventual invasion of Ukraine during Biden's presidency -- an invasion Barr noted he predicted in his new book before it happened.
"In my book I discuss a little bit about what I expected to happen; this was before the invasion; and I felt that Putin would view Biden as weak and would try to take advantage of that by moving, by grabbing whatever he wanted," Barr told Baier.
"One of the problems was Russiagate," he continued. He called Russiagate "a despicable dirty trick that hobbled the first part of the president's administration, but it also affected a great damage to the United States.
"Russiagate essentially froze the Trump administration from engaging with Russia. That may have been a second-term issue if the president had won re-election but when Biden won, I felt that there would be no incentive on the part of the Russians to try to use diplomacy to reach a stable modus vivendi and they would grab what they wanted under Biden.
"And when he had the kind of exit from Afghanistan which he did, and then when he essentially took America out of energy independence, increasing the leverage of Russia dramatically, I thought it was inevitable."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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