Jake Tapper Confronts Bill Barr With His 2020 Comments About Voter Fraud: ‘Do You Bear Any Responsibility’ For Misleading People?

CNN’s Jake Tapper confronted former Attorney General Bill Barr over comments he made in 2020 about voter fraud, asking Barr if he thought he bore any responsibility for misleading Americans.

The conversation happened in the context of the latest interview Barr has done to promote his book, One Damn Thing After Another.

Tapper brought up a passage in the book in which Barr recalled telling the Associated Press that the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud before the election.

“You voiced your concerns about the potential for fraud because of the increased use of paper ballots,” said Tapper, bringing up a June 2020 NPR interview in which Barr raised questions about mail-in ballots. Tapper played the video clip:

BARR: There are so many occasions for fraud there that cannot be policed. I think it would be very bad. But one of the things I mentioned was the possibility of counterfeiting.

NPR HOST: Did you have evidence to raise that specific concern?

BARR: It’s obvious.

NPR later issued an article correcting that claim, Tapper said, that quoted experts calling Barr’s claims “nuts” and “ridiculous.”

The CNN host then played a clip of Barr’s September 2020 interview with Wolf Blitzer, in which the then-attorney general again brought up what he called evidence of voter fraud.

BARR: Mail-in voting is fraught with the risk of fraud and coercion. For example, we indicted someone in Texas. 1,700 ballots collected from people who could vote. He made them out and voted for the person he wanted to. Okay?

“Your staff later admitted that you had been given wrong information,” said Tapper. “That was not accurate. It was one single ballot. Prosecutors reviewed 700 ballots and found one. Hardly widespread.”

“Do you bear responsibility for all the people out there that thought that there would be all this widespread voter fraud, given that you were very vocally sounding the alarm based on theories and bad information?” Tapper asked.

“Not at all,” Barr replied. “And I stand by all of that.”

He explained that in “such a closely divided country” it was necessary to “keep strong protections against fraud and protect the integrity of the election.” Otherwise, there was a risk that people “will not have confidence in an election whether or not fraud occurs.”

Maintaining public confidence in elections, said Barr, “requires a lot of vigilance and not diluting the safeguards, [and] that’s a separate question about whether fraud actually can be shown to have occurred.”

He was also critical of “universal mail-in ballots where they send out the ballots to all the people on the voting list.”

“Like they do in Utah and have for years,” Tapper interjected.

“Perhaps,” Barr continued. “But the bipartisan commission that looked at that, I think it was in 2006, said that that kind of process is fraught with the risk of fraud, and I think it is. And the other thing I was talking about was ballot harvesting, which I think is a terrible practice. With these practices in place, whether or not fraud occurs, people are going to think there was fraud.”

Watch the video above, via CNN