Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr said dealing with ‘bogus’ 2020 voting fraud claims was like ‘playing Whac-a-Mole’

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Former Attorney General Bill Barr said that dealing with baseless claims of voter fraud from Donald Trump’s team was like “playing Whac-a-Mole,” and that he believed the allegations that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump were “bogus.”

Barr made the comments during an interview with the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, which the committee televised during a hearing on Monday.

Trump sought to have the Department of Justice, which Barr oversaw at the time, investigate accusations of voter fraud after Joe Biden won the the 2020 election.

In his interview with the committee, Barr described dealing with an “avalanche” of voter fraud claims from Trump and allies like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who became the campaign’s primary peddlers of election fraud claims.

“It was like playing Whac-a-Mole,” Barr said, in reference to a game where players must strike a robotic rodent with a mallet before it disappears into a hole. He added that he believed the accusations “were completely bogus, and silly, and usually based on complete misinformation.”

Barr also said he met with the president in the weeks after the presidential election, and told Trump that, “the claims of fraud were bullshit.”

The testimony from the nation’s former top law enforcement official was part of several interviews presented by the January 6 committee on Monday, during which several members of Trump’s 2020 legal team and inner circle said they did not believe his claims of voter fraud had merit.

The committee seeks to show that Trump orchestrated a plot to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which culminated in the violence of January 6, when a mob of his supporters ransacked the US Capitol building to stop the certification of the election results.