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Former Attorney General William Barr repeatedly, and colorfully, dismissed the wide array of voter-fraud conspiracies being floated by Trump and some of his allies after his 2020 election loss, video from his interviews with the committee shows.

Barr ripped some of those conspiracy theories as “bulls—,” “nonsense,” “idiotic” and “crazy stuff,” and said he told Trump to his face after the election that that the claims are “not panning out.” He ran the Department of Justice from Feb. 14, 2019 to Dec. 23, 2020,

The panel played a clip of Barr recounting an Oval Office meeting a few weeks after the Nov. 3, 2020, election, in which he had to tell Trump that the DOJ “is not an extension of your legal team” and can’t be used to “take sides in elections” by investigating fraud claims.

“We’ll look at something if it’s specific, credible, and could have affected the outcome of the election, and we’re doing that and it’s just not meritorious, they’re not panning out,” he said.

After seeing Trump spread those claims on Fox News, Barr on Dec. 1, 2020, told an Associated Press reporter that the DOJ has not seen fraud on scale that could affected outcome of election. When he next met with Trump, Barr said he thought he was going to be fired, telling the committee, “the president was as mad as I’ve ever seen him.” The then-president accused him of making the statement “because you hate Trump.”

Elsewhere, Barr recalled, “I told him that the stuff that his people were shoveling out to the public was bulls—. I mean, that the claims of fraud were bulls—. And he was indignant about that.”

“I reiterated that they’d wasted a whole month on these claims on these Dominion voting machines, and they were idiotic claims.” Barr said he found those claims, that Dominion voting machines were rigged to flip votes to Joe Biden, were “disturbing” in that “I saw absolutely zero basis” for them.

“But they were made in such a sensational way that they were obviously influencing a lot of members of the public,” even though they were “complete nonsense,” Barr said.

“I told him that it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on that and it was doing a grave disservice to the country,” Barr said.

— Kevin Breuninger