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May 15, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

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William Barr | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 125

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	The Democrats have taken a very sharp turn to the left, especially under Obama.
	They tried to patch it up by clearing the playing field and putting in Biden, who's overwhelmed by the issues we face.
	And that lays the groundwork for a Reagan-type victory that allows you to make the kind of significant changes and institutional changes that have to occur.
	For four years, the media and Democrats claimed that Donald Trump was a Russian tool.
	The Russians offered help.
	The campaign accepted help.
	The Russians gave help.
	And the president made full use of that help.
	And that is pretty damning.
	That assessment was based largely on empty allegations planted by allies of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
	Those allegations provided the basis for spying on members of Trump's campaign and served as the predicate for a years-long investigation by Robert Mueller and America's intelligence apparatus.
	This specious theory became known as Russiagate, and now Russiagate itself is under investigation by Special Counsel John Durham.
	To ensure Durham's work would continue after Trump's term, then-Attorney General William Barr appointed him that status of Special Counsel.
	Looking into the origins of these lies and finding the truth was the chief task for A.G.
	Barr.
	William Barr is no stranger to the Department of Justice, having spent time at the DOJ during Reagan's and H.W.
	Bush's presidencies.
	He is, in fact, one of only two people to hold the role of Attorney General twice.
	His record is characterized by tough on crime policy as well as a strict constitutional interpretation of the law.
	Attorney General Barr's new book, One Damn Thing After Another, chronicles the rollercoaster of events while he was the AG under President Trump.
	The aforementioned Russian collusion fabrication, COVID, the Black Lives Matter riots, the 2020 election.
	We will discuss all of it.
	Plus, we'll get his thoughts on the unprecedented leak from the Supreme Court and the current Department of Justice's January 6th investigations and arrests.
	In this episode, Attorney General Barr joins to break down the difference between actual crimes and the media's constant hysteria.
	Hey, hey, and welcome.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
	This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Protect your online privacy today at expressvpn.com slash ben.
	Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with the Attorney General.
	The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.
	Head on over to dailywire.com, become a member, you'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
	Attorney General Barr, thanks so much for joining the show, really appreciate it.
	Good to be here, Ben.
	and thanks for having me.
	So why don't we begin sort of with the role of the DOJ in general.
	So you served as attorney general twice.
	You did it in the H.W. Bush administration and of course under Donald Trump.
	And there seems to be sort of widespread misperception about what the attorney general does.
	On the one hand, the attorney general is expected by whoever the president's supporters are to be the wingman for the president.
	On the other hand, the attorney general is expected to be some sort of independent agent who is just there to establish justice on his own.
	What is the actual law with regard to what your role was as Attorney General?
	Well, there are basically three functions.
	One is a policy advisor on the justice system, including criminal justice, and there you're a political appointee, providing advice as to the president's political program, his policy program.
	The other is providing legal advice to the president and the executive branch, and you do that again as a presidential subordinate.
	Who's providing advice from the standpoint of someone who's in sympathy with the administration's program.
	And you try to help the administration attain its objectives within the law.
	And then the third role is administering the criminal justice system.
	Chief prosecutor essentially.
	And there you are subordinate to the president.
	But attorneys general generally believe and should attempt to administer the criminal justice system without regard to partisan Uh, feelings and apply one standard of justice for everybody.
	That's what the rule of law is all about.
	Now that doesn't mean the president can't say, you know, I'd like you to pursue, you know, these kinds of crimes aggressively or, you know, I just saw something on television that bothers me.
	Someone was beaten up.
	Are you looking into that?
	That's fine.
	But if the president starts intervening and directing that certain people be prosecuted, regardless of what the attorney general thinks the evidence is, And the law is, then that would generally be considered an abuse, and I wouldn't do it, and I don't think most attorneys general should, or would.
	Why don't we go back to when you were first asked by President Trump to become attorney general.
	So immediately preceding that, he'd had Jeff Sessions as his attorney general.
	He had moved sort of along a broad spectrum of feelings about Jeff Sessions.
	Sessions was one of his earliest supporters, obviously, when he was senator from Alabama.
	And then when Sessions recused himself during the Russiagate investigation, this angered President Trump.
	Why don't we start from your perspective as somebody who actually served as Attorney General on whether it was right for Jeff Sessions to recuse himself in the Russia investigation in the first place, which sort of led to this chain of events.
	I think that he was right in recusing himself from parts of it, but I think he had a very sweeping general recusal that probably went too far.
	So when it comes to, you know, so President Trump basically became very angry with Sessions for doing this, and eventually Sessions left, and then you get the call that the President wants you to become the Attorney General.
	What are your thoughts when you get that call?
	Well, I was very reluctant to do it.
	I was in a very good place where I wanted to be entering retirement and my family was not keen on the idea.
	I was under no illusions about Trump's personality and the way he treated lawyers.
	All my business, I had never met him, but all my business friends in New York who had worked with him said that I should stay away.
	But I wasn't going in to be the buddy of the president.
	I felt that We were headed toward a potential constitutional crisis.
	I was skeptical of the Russiagate matter, and I thought that that could be essentially being used as a weapon to hobble the administration and drive the president from office.
	And so I thought there was a potential crisis coming up.
	Also, the Department of Justice and the FBI were being buffeted, you know, under attack from both sides.
	I felt someone had to go in there and steady the ship, and I tried to propose other people, but no one else got traction, and eventually I decided that if the president asked me, I really had to do it.
	And it sort of summed up in the advice some of my colleagues from the Bush administration gave me, which is, The country's facing some challenges, and what's important for the country is that somebody have these jobs and know what they're doing.
	And so I said that I would accept it if offered, and he did offer me the job.
	So why don't we talk about Russiagate, because obviously that played a major role in your decision to take the job in the first place.
	So Russiagate obviously originated in 2015, 2016 with all these allegations that the president of the United States, at that point just a candidate, was colluding with the Russians in order to skew the outcome of the election.
	This led to a series of abuses, including FISA warrants against Carter Page that were, it appears, entirely unsubstantiated.
	It led to the release via a very sort of jerry-rigged process of the completely unsubstantiated so far Steele dossier, which turns out to now be basically just a bunch of garbage rumor mongering that was trafficked in Washington, D.C.
	and then eventually wandered into the FBI.
	What was your perspective on Russiagate from the outset And then how did you treat that as Attorney General?
	So when it first came up, I was skeptical of it because from my experience I didn't think the Russians would would need to collude with anyone or want to collude with anyone in the United States in order to carry out a A hack and dump operation, which is essentially what it was, stealing emails and dumping them into the public forum.
	And, you know, the more I found out about it, the more I became skeptical of it.
	I looked at the dossier when it first came out, and to me it was a joke, and I think A number of professional intelligence people over at the agency, the CIA, just felt it was garbage.
	So I always felt it hard to explain why the FBI was following up the way they did on it, both before the election, but particularly after the election when they started finding out what a piece of rubbish it was.
	They seemed to double down.
	And I want to, in just one second, get to sort of the release of the Steele dossier, which seems pretty suspicious in terms of how that was actually released.
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	You had James Comey, who's the head of the FBI, coming and presenting President Trump with the news that there was this Steele dossier and it was floating around, and, Mr. President, you need to know about this thing.
	And then, almost simultaneous with that, BuzzFeed releases the full entirety of the Steele dossier and uses as the news hook the fact that Comey has now told the President of the United States about all this. All of this seems really, really suspicious.
	And then we learn, of course, that there have been coordinations between members of the media and people who are working within the FBI on some of this stuff. I'll admit that as a conservative, I tend to be somewhat of an institutionalist, and it really undermined a lot of my trust in places like the FBI.
	Well, I've frequently said that January 6th to me was a very important date.
	And I'm talking about January 6th, 2017, when the intelligence people went in to brief the president-elect.
	And as you said, even Comey's own memo say that he advised the president that CNN was just looking for a news hook to go with the dossier.
	And then right after that meeting, they seem to have gotten the news hook and reported on the dossier.
	Uh, and not even the parts of the dossier that, including parts of the dossier that were not raised with the president-elect.
	So I've been very suspicious of that meeting, uh, and, uh, for obvious reasons.
	I, I'm wondering what games, or I'm concerned about what games were being played at that point, uh, not just by the Hillary campaign and the people trying to explain her defeat but also by, uh, the senior levels of the FBI.
	That's what Durham is designed to get to the bottom of.
	So a lot of folks on the right are, I would say, annoyed that there have been no prosecutions of anyone in the Hillary camp or anyone in the FBI over any of this.
	There's been people who have been losing their jobs, temporarily losing their pensions in some cases, but there haven't been any sort of top-level prosecutions of any of the named people in these particular areas.
	Do you foresee that there will be, or do you think that this is sort of going to come to a quieter terminus?
	I'm hopeful there'll be a thoroughgoing report, and to the extent he can prove any cases, I think he will not hesitate to pursue them.
	But I am a little tired of hearing that from people in my own party, because you have to remember that Durham did not get access to the IG's report.
	And the IG did not complete his report until December of 2019.
	The end of 2019 is when he got the big data dump.
	And before that, he was working on other aspects of Russiagate, like whether the foreign intelligence services were involved.
	So at the end of 2019, he gets into the FBI part of it.
	And then what happens three months later?
	COVID, which shuts down all the grand juries across the country.
	What that means is no one's going to come in voluntarily because they know you cannot go to a grand jury and get a subpoena.
	And so they'll just say, look, I'm not going to talk to you voluntarily, period.
	So the investigation was dramatically slowed down because of COVID, and that didn't lift until October of the election year.
	So, I'm not very sympathetic to people who complain that more progress was made, and I try to explain to them.
	The criminal justice process, there are two things about it that don't make it a useful political weapon.
	One is, if done right, it's It's secret.
	You don't find out about what's going on.
	And number two, it takes a while, especially in this kind of case where you don't have an overt act like burning documents or something like that.
	You're basically saying the person acted with corrupt intent.
	They were doing something they have the power to do.
	Like looking for a spy, but they had corrupt intent.
	And that's a very difficult case to put together.
	So Attorney General Barr, when you take office, obviously this is part of the task that you're given, but the other part of the task is to advise the President of the United States.
	You mentioned that his personality is pretty unique.
	What was it like working with President Trump?
	You're trying to bring about, I think, a certain level of stability in the AG's office.
	What was that like on a day-to-day basis?
	Well, on what I call the red meat issues, the issues where he had a good sense of what the right thing to do was and, you know, that conformed to my views of good policy on being tough on crime, of getting control over the border.
	Uh, going after Chinese espionage in the United States, going after the drug cartels.
	On those issues, he was great.
	He let me and the department do our thing.
	He gave us his support and backing and he was very pleasant to deal with, especially during the first year.
	But as he went into the election year, he didn't, you know, the liberal view or the Democrats tried to portray him as sort of controlling the Justice Department.
	Actually, he kept his word to me, and his word was when I agreed to serve, that he would not discuss criminal cases with me.
	And he didn't.
	But what he did was tweet and go on news shows and start talking about, you know, if Bill Barr He wants to go down in history as great and instead of just, you know, a nebbish, he's going to go after Biden and, you know, Biden is a criminal and Obama's a criminal.
	And that put, you know, me in a difficult position.
	And he was frustrated because he wanted to see some scalps, obviously, during the election year.
	And we were not in a position to deliver them and still, you know, do our job at the Justice Department.
	Yes, Attorney General Barr, it seems like one of the things that was kind of a repeated motif during the administration, it was from virtually every department, is that very often the president would have sort of these ideas that broke taboos or that were not good.
	And advisors would say, we're just not going to do that.
	And there was some hotly fought conflict.
	Over that, and then it seems almost in virtually all cases, with a few exceptions which we'll talk about, the president basically backed down.
	Once he was told, you're not allowed to do X, he actually would not do X. And then there'd be a news report about how he had considered doing X, but then he was dissuaded from doing so.
	But it seems like in the vast majority of cases, when he was told by his advisors that this is either a bad idea or this violates the law, that he didn't then just go forward with it.
	And so most of the news coverage tended to be about the things that he was thinking and the considerations of doing it as opposed to what he actually did.
	That's absolutely right.
	The way I would sum up his administration is, up until his defeat in the election, was that his impulsiveness did lend some dynamism to the administration.
	He was able to roll over the resistance and the obstruction and the inertia in the bureaucracy and in the political process.
	But the bad side of it was he would sometimes have very bad ideas.
	But in all of those cases, we could talk him out of going as far as he wanted and usually figure out a way to accomplish his objective within the law.
	And that's why I've said this whole idea that he was an autocrat is simply wrong.
	I mean, he would agree with his advisors ultimately.
	We'd litigate it.
	We'd win.
	You know, these things that have been attacked like the travel ban or the wall or other things.
	We all won those cases.
	So you mentioned before sort of the entrenched bureaucracy here, and there's an argument on the part of a lot of people on the right that there is, in a lot of these various branches of government, the so-called deep state.
	That's the phrase that's used.
	How true do you think it is that there are entrenched bureaucrats in positions of power who have been there for a lifetime and are innately opposed to the agenda, not just President Trump personally, but the agenda of people like President Trump makes it very hard to Or steer the ship of state in a different direction when you do take over?
	And how much did that hamper Trump?
	I think it hampered him a great deal, and I do think there is a deep state.
	Now, it's not necessarily the people who have been there a long time, maybe some of them, but it's also younger people who have come in in more recent years.
	And each agency has its share of the deep state.
	At the Department of Justice, one of the manifestations of it was leaks.
	I've said several times that criminal cases or criminal investigations that were embarrassing to the Republicans were leaked while I was there, whereas the cases that were embarrassing to Democrats were never leaked.
	And that's, you know, that's the difference.
	There were people trying to use the criminal justice process, just like this leak at the Supreme Court, to achieve their higher good, which is, you know, they're the vanguard of history and know where to lead the country.
	And anything goes when you're, you know, when you have the high moral ground like that.
	I'm talking, of course, about the progressive mindset.
	So in just one second, I want to get to fast forward to the Ukraine phone call, which leads to the first impeachment attempt against President Trump.
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	Attorney General Barr, one of the big crises of the administration, this happens within your first year and a half working with the administration, is that the president has this phone call with Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine.
	He's obviously been tweeting, you mentioned earlier, about Hunter Biden and about Joe Biden, about the idea that there's a vast amount of corruption in Ukraine and that this had some impact on both the 2016 election and going forward it was going to have impact on Joe Biden and his presidential possibilities in 2020.
	And there is this famous phone call, infamous phone call between him and Vladimir Zelensky.
	He describes it as a perfect phone call.
	His opponents suggest that he's threatening the president of Ukraine that unless he finds some reason to essentially create a prosecution out of whatever is available against Hunter Biden, implicating Joe Biden, that the aid to Ukraine will go away.
	When were you first made aware of this and what was your perspective on the phone call?
	So I was not aware of the phone call at the time it was made.
	By the way, it was made right after Mueller's testimony on Capitol Hill, which was effectively the end of the Russiagate debacle.
	And then the very next day he talked to Zelensky.
	I didn't hear about it until in August when it was raised with me.
	And information that there was a so-called whistleblower that had raised concerns about it.
	And when you read the transcript, were you made aware of what had happened on the phone call before you read the transcript?
	How were you made kind of aware of the details of it?
	No, I was told initially that Whistleblower thinks that there was a violation of law, that the President had violated the law and was essentially soliciting a campaign contribution.
	And I looked at the transcript, as did others at Justice, and I thought that That, you know, it was sort of an unseemly call, but it was not a crime.
	There was no violation of law.
	I was personally mad because in his typical sloppy fashion, he threw around my name and Giuliani's name interchangeably when we had very different roles and were involved in very different things.
	So that annoyed me, but I didn't recriminate it about it.
	I advised the president he should get the transcript out as quickly as possible, which He procrastinated on, and a big head of steam built up before he got out the transcript.
	The Justice Department didn't really play a role in the impeachment, but I felt the whole impeachment episode shows, I think, one of the President's weak points, which is that he sometimes gets these harebrained ideas, and when the apparatus in government says no, Or won't pursue it to his satisfaction.
	He tries to set up a little skunk works of outsiders to run a play.
	Without the knowledge of people in the government and it gets him in trouble sometimes.
	And this was one of those occasions.
	I thought the whole idea that getting the Ukrainian government to investigate the firing of Shokin and that that somehow would be a big breakthrough in the campaign was stupid.
	And so I think it was a harebrained scheme and it was Well, I've noticed that he hasn't been prosecuted by this administration.
	And if people thought there was a crime and they have evidence of it, I assume they would.
	where the DOJ decided this is not a crime, what happened on the phone call?
	Because of course the entire left then suggested that you are deeply corrupt for not prosecuting the president of the United States on the basis of the phone call.
	Well, I've noticed that he hasn't been prosecuted by this administration.
	And if people thought there was a crime and they have evidence of it, I assume they would.
	They seem to be doing everything else they can to, you know, to hobble Trump.
	But no one has brought any charges.
	I just didn't think that that amounted to a crime.
	So fast forward, we're now in covid era, I mean, and really is the name your book is one damn thing after another.
	And that really is I mean, this this this two and a half year period, a two year period of your life.
	It's about 80 years, it sounds like, in terms of personal experience.
	But about five seconds after the Ukraine phone call happens, And the impeachment happens, we get the outbreak of COVID.
	I mean, it's really just a couple of months later.
	And now there are all of these legal issues that are cropping up in terms of what the federal government can do, in terms of what the federal government should do.
	What was the position inside the administration?
	What were the discussions like inside the administration as far as the power of the federal government to leverage its authority to do all the things that it ended up doing?
	Well, you know, I think most people, and I wasn't directly involved or didn't have a big role in the main issues involving COVID, but I think most people felt that we're a federal system.
	And at the end of the day, the president is going to have to work with the governors.
	The states have so-called police power.
	They have the primary duty of protecting the health and safety of their citizens.
	And I think any president would have had to work with the governors.
	And that sometimes meant herding cats.
	And of course, that's not the President's strong suit, patients and herding cats.
	So, overall, I'm not sure that the President did a bad job on COVID.
	The returns are still out as to, you know, how we fared under it.
	I think some countries that people thought were great have ended up in a worse position.
	But I do think that a fundamental mistake was made in empowering Fauci.
	And this is the one thing that I raised with the president, is I felt they were putting Fauci too much up in front and making him the face and the spokesman for COVID and empowering him.
	And I know a number of people were urging the president to bring in people from the private sector.
	There were some very prominent public health doctors on the outside that I think would have come in and given him better advice.
	And yet he stuck with Fauci, and I think that was a self-inflicted wound.
	And to me it shows something else about the president.
	And later we can talk about some of the areas where I think he deserves a lot of credit.
	But sometimes when there's a complicated issue like this, instead of making a decision and leading and getting a broad range of advice, he'll sort of stand back and then snipe at the people publicly.
	And I contrast that with what DeSantis did in Florida, which is he appointed a public health advisor who seems to be very sharp and able, and then he made the hard decisions and withstood the blowback and stood his ground, and it looks pretty successful what he did.
	And we didn't follow that model in the federal government, and the president sometimes seemed erratic.
	People forget that the reason he initially got into a fight with Governor Kemp of Georgia was because he was lambasting Kemp for opening up Georgia too early.
	So, you know, there was a lot of erratic behavior there.
	So in the middle of all of this, the COVID really sort of breaks into the public scene late February, early March.
	And then within a couple of months, you have major riots in America's major cities, thanks to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
	And this is where a lot of the headlines really start to center in on the DOJ and what law enforcement is doing, not only with regard to how to deal with the riots and the loss of You know, public safety in a lot of these major cities, but also with regard to President Trump's personal response, because he's very voluble about the violation of law.
	There are a bunch of very controversial photo ops that happened.
	So what was the debate inside the administration over how to deal with the outbreak of violence in virtually every major American city?
	Well, I think there was no difference of opinion that we had to respond and protect the community against violence.
	And I think, in theory, everyone agreed that the people who had to do this at the outset and had primary responsibility had to be the states and local government.
	They have the resources.
	To do it.
	And the federal government, a lot of people don't understand this, we have limited resources to deal with civil unrest.
	You know, most of our tactical units are geared for SWAT teams and things like that, not dealing with that kind of demonstration and rioting.
	And so my position was we've got to keep the pressure on the local governments to do all they can, including bringing out the National Guard.
	But the president frequently got impatient and wanted to, you know, have a much more direct federal role.
	Which would have meant using regular army, and I felt that was a last resort.
	We had used it in the Los Angeles riots in 1992, and both of the last times we used regular military, I was involved in that and approved it and oversaw it.
	But in this situation, I felt it would be a mistake to deploy regular troops, because I felt that he wanted to do it in Portland, for example.
	When the riot had died down and was really just in Portland and Seattle.
	And I said that, you know, if we do it in Portland, there are going to be sympathy riots all around the country.
	It's going to break out again all around the country.
	And we don't have enough troops to send into all the cities.
	And you know what?
	The Democrats will sit back and say, you broke it, you fix it.
	And we'll be scurrying around playing whack-a-mole.
	Throughout the election year, using the regular army in American cities, and that's not a good look.
	And so I was opposed to using the regular army in Portland.
	So in a second, I want to ask you about the famous photo op of President Trump walking out past the White House and to the church nearby and holding up a copy of the Bible.
	I want to ask you about that in just one second.
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	All righty, so Attorney General, there's this big controversy obviously over the president and the clearing of Lafayette Park of what the authorities suggested was actual violent activity and what opponents suggested was just peaceful protest so that Trump could theoretically walk out and do a photo op in front of this burned out church near the White House.
	How did the deliberations around that go around?
	Are you privy to sort of what that conversation was?
	Well, I cover that in my book.
	What led up to that, what led up to June 1st, were three days of very savage rioting outside the White House where over 100 law enforcement officers were injured.
	I think there were 22 taken to the hospital.
	There were concussions and other serious injuries.
	And what had been decided on Sunday was Sunday night, it was that they were going to put up a non-scalable fence at the end of Lafayette Park because, you know, to protect law enforcement.
	And that was going to be done as soon as the fencing was there on Monday and as soon as enough units were there to push the crowd back so they could erect the fence along H Street.
	And so the idea that this was done, the clearing of the park was done for the president to have a photo op is simply false.
	It was planned long in advance in order to erect a fence.
	And the crowd was asked to move back three times.
	They didn't.
	And so the line of law enforcement moved forward and pushed them back and the fence was put up.
	So I think the whole thing was unobjectionable from the standpoint of, you know, protecting the federal property and the White House and the President.
	You know, the President had been taken down to the bunker earlier in the weekend because of the ferocity of the rioting.
	They broke into the Treasury Department.
	Things like that were happening.
	Of course, the media didn't cover any of that.
	So, you know, I thought it was sort of an example of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory when the president made a victory march over to St.
	John's Church.
	I have no problem with the president going over to St.
	John's Church.
	I would have just had more of a delay between the actual operation and the president going over there because it gave the impression of spiking the football, and I think that was unfortunate.
	Attorney General, on a broader level, obviously these riots break out.
	The entire media and the left in the United States suggests that it's because of widespread systemic racism in the criminal justice system.
	You're the head of the DOJ.
	What do you make of the accusation that police, the law enforcement system generally, the justice system generally, are systemically racist and are discriminating against black Americans?
	I reject that.
	I don't think that's the truth.
	Now, in some communities, you know, could it be that policemen profile or do other things that raise concern in the African American community?
	Yes, but overall, I would say the system is not systemically racist.
	Take this whole, what I call in the book, you know, the BLM's big lie, which is, No one quarrels that black lives matter, but the idea that the police pose this unique threat I think is wrong.
	You know, every day in our country there are 50 serious attacks on police officers.
	I'm talking about, you know, attacks with weapons and so forth.
	Fifty a day.
	And there are less than three people shot each day by the police.
	Shot and killed each day.
	Three people a day.
	Less than that.
	And of those, a quarter, you know, given the attacks that occur on police, that doesn't show a trigger-happy police force.
	And then of those, a thousand or so people who were shot and killed by the police, a quarter are African American.
	Now the idea that this is Shows racism is based on the idea that there are 13% of our population is black, but a quarter of the people shot Are african-american half of homicides and robberies are committed by african-americans and 37% of violent crime is committed by african-americans, so you know the police are disproportionately patrolling in these high crime areas and so the fact that
	Twenty-five percent of those shot are African American is not out of whack.
	So the whole argument that this is, you know, the police treating people differently is false.
	And the real careful studies of it have shown the opposite, that in fact white perpetrators are more apt to be shot.
	Okay, so let's fast forward toward the election.
	So, in the run-up to the election, you're hearing arguments on both sides that the election is essentially going to be rigged.
	You're hearing from Democrats in the run-up to the election that Louis DeJoy is burning post office boxes.
	I know we all memory hold this now, but there was an argument made in the run-up to the election that the Trump administration was somehow going to rig the federal election processes to prevent the Democrats from winning.
	And then you heard the simultaneous argument from people on the right side of the aisle that the election was going to be rigged.
	So, election night happens.
	The president in the early returns appears to be leading in a lot of the swing states.
	There are some pauses in places like Georgia and Michigan.
	The results come in in their completeness the next day and the president appears to have lost.
	What was the mood at the White House when all of this was happening before there was all this talk about election rigging and how the election had been stolen?
	Well, I went to the election night watch at the White House.
	The President hadn't come downstairs yet.
	People were hopeful because of the President's last few days and the big crowds he was getting.
	So there was cautious optimism.
	I was not optimistic.
	I left early because I felt the President was going to lose.
	you know, right out of the box, the president claimed major fraud. And I had been worried about I was very concerned about that.
	But in my mind there are two different questions.
	outspoken about the changes and rules that were being made because of COVID and also about universal mail-in ballots and harvesting and other things.
	I was very concerned about that.
	But in my mind, there are two different questions.
	One set of issues is the importance of having public confidence in the outcome of elections.
	And I kept on saying that in a tightly divided country like ours where the stakes are so high it's critical that we do everything to tighten up the integrity of elections.
	And that the Democrats' approach of running them like an honor system will mean that people don't have confidence in the election.
	And that's going to be very damaging to our country.
	When you dilute the protections, whether or not the fraud or illegalities occur, people are still going to not have confidence in the election, and we're seeing that now.
	The other question, which I see as a distinct question, is was there in fact fraud that swayed the election?
	Based on what I've seen, I don't think there was.
	But people are lumping together three different things, Ben.
	You know, there's the gaming of the system and the skewing of the playing field by changing the rules, and the Republicans have to fight that.
	But once those rules are set, you have to play by those rules.
	You have to do the best you can under those circumstances.
	The second thing are violations of rules that are meant to prevent fraud, such as, you know, maybe keeping observers out of the poll or permitting harvesting where it's actually prohibited.
	Those are violations of rules that create an opportunity for fraud, but they're not direct evidence of fraud itself.
	You still have to show that people who were not qualified to vote voted, or that there was undue influence in their vote, or their votes were bought.
	And then the third thing is fraud, which is some scheme where people who are not qualified or dead people voted or legitimate votes are thrown out.
	And people are lumping all of that together.
	The Department of Justice is only responsible for the third part of it.
	The states handle the first two aspects of it.
	I kept on trying to explain to the president that with a presidential election you only have five or six weeks to win your arguments, and you have to pursue those initially in the states.
	If there is criminal fraud, Evidence of it, the Justice Department will pursue it.
	And we did look into those things, and all the stuff raised initially by Giuliani and the others were just wrong.
	They were false.
	Those allegations, the Dominion machines, you know, the trucking of ballots from New York into Pennsylvania, that more people voted in Philadelphia than there were people, all of that was wrong.
	And so I told that to the president, that there was no evidence of systemic fraud.
	So in one second, I want to get to more questions on this.
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	OK, so Attorney General, I want to break this down further with you because I think that you're exactly right, obviously, in the attempt to sort of conflate in everybody's mind all of these issues.
	And you can be worried about the first two and still say there's no evidence of number three, actual manufactured ballots, dead people voting, people who are not capable of voting voting.
	So, the real question I have there is sort of how robust are systems of detection for this sort of stuff?
	Because you've heard a wide variety of answers to that question ranging kind of where you are on the political spectrum.
	The right basically suggests that there's not a robust system for detecting actual voter fraud that, for example, signature checks are not sufficient because theoretically people could get ahold of Volver rules and manufacture signatures, or the only way to challenge a vote theoretically is somebody wants to vote and they show up and then they realize their vote's already been cast, but how many times are people actually going to do that?
	So how robust are systems for actually detecting hardcore, real, legal voter fraud?
	Any system to be effective really has to be in place at the time of the vote.
	Because going back after the votes is very hard to do and to establish fraud.
	There are a lot of hurdles to that in addition to the narrow time frame.
	And I do think that we diluted some of those protections, you know.
	uh... by dialing back the signature check uh... sensitivity and and things like that uh... so i would urge i i think the governors in in uh... georgia and texas and elsewhere there tightening up on the system are doing the right thing and that's what i think The Republican Party has to stand for the integrity of elections.
	I think most people want to make sure that our elections are fair.
	And I think they understand we need things like IDs and other things like that.
	But I don't think they're strong enough.
	And I also feel I have no problem and in fact support efforts to go back retrospectively and check things.
	I think we should have more auditing.
	of election results. Some states do do quality assurance auditing in order to determine generally whether there was evidence of fraud, but I think that has to be expanded. And I do think we have to prohibit harvesting. Harvesting, you know,
	Back when they established the bipartisan commission chaired by Baker and Jimmy Carter, they identified universal mail-in ballots and harvesting are the two biggest areas of potential fraud and abuse.
	And I think harvesting is a terrible development.
	It has to be stopped.
	It does away with the secret ballot.
	It opens people up to undue influence.
	It permits the buying of votes.
	And you lose the ability of really knowing who it is who's casting that vote.
	And so I think we have to continue to push for all of those things.
	So one of the big issues that's come up in the last few weeks, obviously, is there's all this information that a group called True the Vote has been putting out about digital communications or actually the cell phone ping signals of people who are allegedly moving from or past non-profit organizations and then going to multiple Dropboxes, going to 20, 30 Dropboxes.
	At a time which, as you mentioned, would fall under probably issue two, not necessarily issue three.
	And there's been a sort of attempt to conflate in the public mind the serious, real issue of the ballot harvesting or ballot trafficking of people who are gathering ballots in one place and then distributing them all over the city, which is a serious problem and raises the prospect of voter fraud with actual proof that the ballots that are actually being submitted are fraudulent ballots.
	That's right.
	But also I think, frankly, I think that the 2,000 mules thing is irresponsible because the cell phone evidence, so-called, is to me worthless.
	I was waiting to see what the video showed, whether they actually had photographs of the same people doing that in any kind of scale, and they didn't appear to.
	The phone call stuff is nonsense because if you take one million or two million phone calls in a big city and then you say how many times did they come within 100 feet of these ballot collection boxes, which are in highly trafficked areas, you're by definition are going to have several hundred easily.
	And so statistically it shows nothing.
	And I think it's irresponsible for them to basically say, if people go by multiple times, five times or whatever, ballot boxes, then they're mules.
	It just doesn't, it just is not true.
	And that's why it was rejected by the Georgia Bureau of Investigations.
	Am I saying there was no harvesting?
	No, in my book I think that's probably an area where there was abuse and there was harvesting, but it doesn't explain the president's loss in the key states that he had to win.
	And one of the things I point to is say, look, he ran weaker than the Republican ticket in Arizona, in Wisconsin, in Pennsylvania.
	And that's why he lost.
	You go and look at the votes and where the margins were.
	He lost because a lot of Republicans didn't vote for him.
	In Arizona, 75,000.
	He lost by 10,000 votes.
	You know, in Pennsylvania, he lost 60,000 Republicans.
	10,000 votes.
	In Pennsylvania, he lost 60,000 Republicans.
	50,000 to 60,000 Republicans didn't vote for him.
	You're not going to win a national election, a close national election, if you're running below the Republican ticket.
	So let's talk about sort of what happens in the immediate aftermath of the elections.
	There are a bunch of lawsuits that are filed.
	None of them are taken up by the courts.
	Many of them do not really allege voter fraud sufficient to actually overturn the elections.
	What are the conversations that are happening between you and the president during this time when he's openly alleging that the election was stolen and that effectively it should be overturned?
	Well, I told the president that I thought he was not being well served, because he only had five or six weeks to get his act together, and that his group of lawyers was out there.
	They weren't really alleging fraud, and to the extent they were, it was this absurd dominion machine theory, and they wasted five weeks on that.
	And I said, the Justice Department is not a player in this other than pursuing crimes of fraud.
	And usually those take two years to investigate.
	And they're done in secret.
	So, you know, the department is not a good tool to come in to, you know, affect the outcome of an election.
	He has to do it through his campaign lawyers and the lawyers for the Republican Party in the states and so forth.
	And if there's fraud, we're looking at it.
	And so far, the stuff they're talking about is nonsense, including the thing down in Fulton County, Georgia.
	But he didn't seem to listen to me at all about that.
	So, time progresses, we move past the certification of the... all of the states certify their electors.
	That really was the last day when a difference could have been made.
	If there was going to be any difference made, if any of the state legislatures were going to take this up, they could have elected a different slate of electors.
	None of them did.
	This happens in early December.
	And then you start to hear the argument crop up that suddenly the Vice President or the Senate of the United States can refuse to certify the slates of electors in the absence of a competing slate of electors under the Electoral Count Act.
	When did you first hear about this argument being circulated and what did you make of it?
	So I had already resigned, so I had my sort of conflagration meeting with the president on December 1st where he basically accepted my resignation.
	I said, look, I know you're unhappy.
	I'm willing to resign.
	And he said, accept it.
	And then he brought me back.
	But on the 14th of December, I gave him my letter of resignation because that was the day of the Electoral College.
	And I didn't think there was any way that the election could be changed after the Electoral College sent its votes to Congress.
	After I left on December 23rd, I heard about this cockamamie idea that the vice president could unilaterally, you know, turn around the vote in Congress, and I thought it was a nonsense argument.
	But my opinion, I didn't formally give my opinion to anyone on that because I was already on the outside.
	So obviously you served in prior administrations.
	What is the typical process at the end of an administration when people leave?
	Because you did leave, obviously, before the president was out of office.
	Is that unusual or do people generally start giving resignations, you know, a month before the actual end of the term?
	That's actually not unusual.
	People frequently leave before January 20th, Inauguration Day.
	But obviously, me leaving what I did, people took note of that because of the efforts being made by the President to stay in office.
	Fortunately, I got out before January 6th.
	I hadn't heard anything about, you know, some so-called insurrection or anything.
	I heard the President was going to have a rally on January 6th.
	That's all I really knew about it.
	When I saw what was happening on TV, With the attacks on the police and the use of force to break into the Capitol, I was incensed and said publicly that I was.
	And I thought the President, while he didn't incite the riot as far as I could tell, and technically wasn't legally responsible for it as far as I could tell, I felt he had a certain degree of responsibility because he had led people to believe that there was something to achieve That the vice president had the ability to do it and there was something to achieve by going up the hill.
	And there was an element in that group that clearly came, you know, cruising for a bruising.
	They were wearing battle gear, essentially, the way Antifa does.
	So I thought the president shouldn't be sicking a crowd to intimidate another branch of government as it carries out its constitutional duties.
	I've said that from the beginning.
	Whether or not it's a crime, One branch shouldn't be trying to intimidate another branch by using mobs to do that.
	And so I see a similarity between what happened on January 6th and what people are doing with the Supreme Court today.
	Let's talk for a second about the argument that's now made that the people who were prosecuted for January 6th are being unfairly prosecuted for January 6th.
	And it seems like there are several different kind of groups of people on January 6th.
	There's who the media sort of treat as the entire group, which is they'll say that that's Everyone, including the people who were at the rally, was actually kind of a smaller group of breakaway folks who are actually going into the building.
	Then there were a group of people who actively were attempting to do violence to police officers who were breaking into the building, who were shouting threats at the Vice President of the United States, and all the rest.
	And then it does seem like there were some people who sort of idiotically wandered into the Capitol building under the misimpression that they were allowed to be in the Capitol building.
	I mean, there's video of some of those people.
	How does law enforcement go about distinguishing these people?
	You've been watching the prosecutions.
	What do you make of the DOJ's treatment?
	Well, I don't know all the evidence in each of these individual cases, but I think the distinctions you make are right.
	I think the people who attacked police, who used force to gain entry, who clearly knew that they were not permitted in the building, gained entry by using force, those people should be prosecuted.
	I think people who sort of wandered in, I mean there are video of Park Police, I mean Capitol Hill Police welcoming them to their house and all that kind of stuff.
	I don't think those people should be prosecuted.
	There were some that were clearly almost sort of looking around, almost like tourists.
	But there clearly was a group that should be and they should do it based on the evidence as to each of these.
	You know, I think there's clearly a big appetite at the department to throw the book at everybody and they're being hyper-aggressive on this.
	You know, it's probably one of the biggest efforts the department has ever engaged in.
	I could not have gotten that off the ground over the summer of 2020.
	The department was, various offices were far more lethargic in pursuing the violent rioters there who were attacking federal property.
	We did.
	We arrested a lot of people.
	We have prosecuted a lot of people.
	We've prosecuted the arsonists, for example.
	But that's not reported later in the news and there's a view that they all got away with it, which they didn't.
	But another thing I tell my Republican friends who complain about the double standard is part of it also has to do with the way these things were done.
	The left is very ingenious about how they work the scene between the First Amendment and criminal activity.
	They dress in black.
	They operated at night.
	It was hard to pinpoint who was throwing the brick and who was engaging in violence.
	And it was hard to get them into custody because they used tactics to de-arrest people.
	by blocking the police. But in any event, it was hard to identify these people, the way they operated.
	Meanwhile, the people who went up to Capitol Hill are all wearing distinctive clothing.
	They're going into one of the most heavily photographed places in the world, hundreds and hundreds of cameras. And so it was very easy to identify them and catch them red-handed.
	And.
	If Antifa did something like that, I think they would be prosecuted, just the way the people on January 6th.
	So what do you make of the media treatment in the aftermath of January 6th of this as a major insurrection, threat to the republic?
	I mean, from where I sit, it looked like a riot and like it was cleaned up within hours of the riot.
	And then it looks like the business of government went about its business within the next I essentially agree with that.
	the election was certified. There's been an attempt to turn January 6th into sort of a landmark moment in American history, the sort of modern apotheosis of the worst of American politics. And I got to say that in comparison to the sort of damage that was done during 2020, it kind of looks like a pinprick. I essentially agree with that. I don't consider it an insurrection. I think it was a largely peaceful demonstration in the sense there were thousands
	of people of there who did not try to get into the Capitol.
	There was a hard core group of rioters who clearly broke the law and it was a riot.
	I don't think the Republic was ever in danger.
	I didn't think the Republic was in danger after December 14th when the Electoral College, when those certified votes were cast.
	And no one was going down that route.
	The vice president wasn't going down that route.
	None of the states, none of the state legislators who the president was lobbying and so forth did anything to turn around the votes in their state.
	So I just never saw a prospect of the process really being seriously jeopardized.
	So now let's move forward in time to today.
	You mentioned a moment ago the fact that you now have protesters who are attempting to actively intimidate justices of the Supreme Court.
	I mean, that's why you show up at somebody's house.
	You don't show up at somebody's house for any other reason other than intimidation, which is why it is actually against municipal law for people to do this sort of thing.
	Meanwhile, you have some mush words from the White House, some members of the media suggesting that this is an act of good, because after all, rights are threatened So I want to get to your opinion on that.
	I want to first kind of get your general opinion on the leak of the majority opinion, the draft majority opinion from the Supreme Court.
	Is there any criminal activity there?
	Because, I mean, certainly that is a violation of whatever rules of the Supreme Court exist.
	Yeah, I think there clearly is criminal activity.
	I think if the intent was to derail the opinion and influence the court, which I think it gives every indication that was behind the leak, and if that's the case, I think it's clearly an obstruction of justice.
	It's an attempt to influence the due administration.
	of justice, and I think there are a number of other federal laws that are implicated, including the conversion of a government document for one's own purposes, and fraud against the United States, a conspiracy to defraud the United States.
	So I think there are a number of criminal laws that are implicated, and I think it's a manifestation, along with the In an effort to intimidate the court of the, you know, means justify the ends attitude of progressives.
	They have a religious fervor that they're on the vanguard of history and they know where to take the country and anyone who opposes them is evil and therefore it justifies anything they do.
	And they're the ones, as I've said all along, are shredding norms and attacking our institutions.
	They are the ones that are eating out the innards of our institutions and have been for decades.
	So, moving back to the sort of activity that we're seeing, I mean, I can't say that I'm particularly shocked by the fact that so many on the left are defending this sort of activity outside of Supreme Court justices' houses, but it still seems like we were promised that we would be reaching a new age of comedy and unity in the aftermath of the Trump administration.
	Joe Biden came into office promising unity.
	I'm not spotting it too much.
	No, I agree.
	But also, their tolerance of violence goes back a way.
	I mean, even during the campaign in 2016, there were a whole series of attacks on Trump supporters, you know, in San Jose and Costa Mesa and Albuquerque and so forth.
	And that seemed to be tolerated.
	And then you have the summer of 2020.
	So I'm not surprised that they countenance this kind of violence and attack on our institutions.
	You might remember during the Trump administration they would wring their hands whenever there was a criticism of the court.
	When someone criticized an opinion they said this was jeopardizing the independence of a court.
	Now that's not true because criticism is the only way to try to keep judges on the straight and narrow is to call attention to when they depart from their role.
	They were saying that was an attack on the independence of the court.
	And here you have actual intimidation and they're silent about it.
	I also wanted to ask you about the fact that the DOJ has now been taken over by Merrick Garland.
	Merrick Garland was supposed to be an impartial participant in the DOJ.
	It seems, quietly under the radar, he seems more like Eric Holder than he does like an impartial adjudicator of the DOJ.
	What's your opinion on how he's handled the DOJ so far?
	I've made a decision.
	I'm not going to comment on the success or the behavior of my successor.
	I think what I will say, though, is that I think this White House has been more aggressive Far more aggressive and active in trying to control the Department of Justice than what occurred under the Trump administration.
	I mean, that has been pretty amazing.
	President Trump, as I've said before many times, maybe written on his epitaph will be 45th President of the United States.
	He said a lot of stuff.
	that was sort of one of his typical characteristics is that when he'd have a thought, it would just end up on Twitter.
	But Democrats have a more typical way of effectuating their thoughts, which is they just go to people and make them do things.
	And it seems as though the DOJ, and you're not gonna see President Biden sounding off too much about the Border Patrol, but when there is some sort of hot story on Twitter, suddenly you will see a statement from the DOJ emerge about how they're investigating how maybe Border Patrol agents are maybe whipping migrants at the border.
	And that'll come out of the DOJ.
	It won't come out of the president's Twitter thread, given all of this, given the fact that the left always perceives Republican DOJ appointees to be, or attorney generals to be, you know.
	Political hacks.
	Republicans will always perceive Democratic AGs to be political hacks.
	One of the big issues, I think, going forward is obviously institutional trust in the United States at an all-time low.
	It seems almost impossible to restore trust in those institutions.
	If we're going to restore trust in those institutions, how do you think that happens?
	Well, I tell people that I think the first step is to win a decisive Reagan-esque type victory.
	I tell people, if you really believe in making America great again, you have to ask yourself, how do you do that?
	You don't do that with, you know, in one term.
	You don't do that by just sort of beating up and fighting the left at every turn.
	You do that by winning several terms and having a decisive victory that allows you to make the kind of significant changes and institutional changes that have to occur.
	Until that happens, I don't see any hope.
	of turning this around.
	But I do think the groundwork is being laid for that.
	I see what's happening today as similar to the 60s and 70s.
	And then the Democrats, where they took a sharp turn to the left, they tried to patch over their differences by bringing an empty vessel, Jimmy Carter.
	I think we see the same thing today.
	There's no question that the Democrats have taken a very sharp turn to the left, especially under Obama.
	They tried to patch it up by clearing the playing field and putting in Biden, who's overwhelmed by the issues we face.
	And that lays the groundwork for a Reagan-type victory.
	He won 40 states, then 49 states, and then as vice president won 40 states.
	That's where you can make some permanent and effective changes.
	I'll tell you now that when I went to the department after Ronald Reagan had been in office for two terms, it was a different department than when I went.
	And Obama had been in power for two terms.
	So that's the starting point.
	Then there's a lot to do.
	I think we need an administration that comes in with a game plan to get back to basics on certain critical issues.
	Federalism, education, a host of things to downsize the government, focus the government on the kinds of things it can do well.
	And accept diversity in this country, which is the essence of our federal system, and also an educational system that actually starts turning out people who are well-educated, competitive, love their country, understand our system.
	I do want to ask you a few final questions, Attorney General, starting with how we rein in big tech and big business, which both seem oriented against free speech and the right.
	Also, I want to ask you to compare and contrast your experiences under George H.W.
	Bush and Donald Trump.
	It's quite a contrast.
	If you'd like to hear the AG's answers, you have to be a Daily Wire member.
	Head on over to dailywire.com, click join.
	You can hear the rest of our conversation over there.
	Make sure to go out and get a copy of the AG's new book, One Damn Thing After Another, Memoirs of an Attorney General.
	The book is available for purchase right now.
	AG Barr, thanks so much for joining the show.
	Really appreciate it.
	Thank you, Ben.
	I appreciate it.
	Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.
	Production Manager Paweł Lajdowski.
	Associate Producer Justine Turley.
	Editing is by Jim Nickel.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
	Hair and Makeup is by Fabiola Cristina.
	Title Graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.
	Production Assistant Jessica Crand.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

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