Elie Honig Calls Out Bill Barr’s Belated Criticism of Trump Election Lies: ‘A Transparent Act’ of ‘Self-Preservation’
CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig reacted to former Attorney General Bill Barr claiming that the election lies pushed by former President Donald Trump were “all bullshit.” Barr’s comments came from ABC’s Jon Karl’s upcoming book, Betrayal, a preview of which was published by The Atlantic on Sunday.
“The Bill Barr image rehabilitation tour is underway,” Honig told CNN. “And he’s offering up a bunch of self-serving revisionist history garbage. Did Bill Barr in December 2020 after the election was over, stand up and say there’s no evidence of election fraud? Yes, he did. However, what’s more important is that in the months leading up to the election, Bill Barr was one of the most vocal, most visible proponents of the big lie.”
Both Honig and CNN host Pamela Brown listed examples in which Barr provided inaccurate statements that contributed to the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from former Trump, including an NPR interview from June 2020 in which the former AG expressed concerns about mail-in voting integrity without evidence, comments he made to CNN last September that mail-in voting was “playing with fire,” and his post-election authorization to investigate “substantial allegations” of voter fraud.
Brown pointed out that by December, Barr had seemingly reversed course and said the DOJ had found no evidence of widespread fraud before resigning.
Asked about Barr’s turnaround, Honig called it “too little too late.”
“But really, that’s not even doing it justice because remember, this election fraud big lie had to come from somewhere,” he said. “And Bill Barr was part of the initial kindling. Donald Trump first started sort of frantically tweeting almost daily about the risk of election fraud early in 2020 when it became clear that we were going to have a lot of people voting by mail. And Bill Barr was one of the first people to jump on that bandwagon to fan those flames in his interviews with NPR, with CNN, in front of Congress. And it is so damaging because Bill Barr isn’t just any official. He is the attorney general of the United States. Everything he does carries the weight of the Justice Department behind it.”
Barr “is one of the people primarily responsible for the big lie taking root, taking hold, and spreading,” said Honig. “What he tried to do at the very end was a transparent act of sort of self-preservation, way too little, way too late. He did far too much damage before and after that.”
Watch above, via CNN
