CNN Analyst Trashes Barr: ‘Helped Light a Fire, Fanned the Flames, Watched It Burn Down the House, and Then Only at the End Sorta Tossed His Drink on It’

CNN legal analyst Elie Honig said Monday that former Attorney General Bill Barr’s recent attempts to distance himself from his former presidential boss are “image rehabilitation, pure and simple.”

In an upcoming book by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl, Barr says that Donald Trump’s claim about election fraud in the 2020 presidential election was false.

“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” said Barr. “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”

Honig ripped into Barr.

“Bill Barr has always been very conscious of his image and the way he’s perceived,” said Honig, who did note that in December, Barr spoke out against his former boss’s Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election. But, Honig said:

He publicly was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Big Lie in the months leading up to the election. It’s like if Bill Barr had helped to light a fire, fanned the flames, watched it burn down the house, and then only at the end sorta tossed his drink on it. He gets no credit for this. Let’s keep it straight. He was one of the biggest perpetrators of the Big Lie. It’s on him.

Earlier in the day, CNN’s Jake Tapper similarly criticized the former attorney general, and showed a montage of Barr questioning whether the election could be free of fraud in the months leading up to it.

“But that was then,” said Tapper. “This is now.”

Watch above via CNN