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Former Attorney General William Barr declared in his new memoir that he doesn't believe American democracy was threatened by the Capitol riot, even though he's condemned the attack as "outrageous and despicable."
Barr's new book, "One Damn Thing After Another," was released this week and has already prompted significant backlash from Trump.
"Do the events of January 6, 2021, prove that Trump really was the aspiring authoritarian dictator his enemies said he was?" Barr rhetorically asks the reader. "The answer is no."
Barr said that despite his condemnation of the riot that day, he did not believe the election results would be overturned.
"Without minimizing both the stupidity and shamefulness of what happened, at the time I did not think the republic was in genuine danger," he wrote. "The die was cast: the states had cast their electoral votes, and the idea that this could be circumvented by shunting the election into the House of Representatives was farcical."
Barr's position puts him at odds with not just Democrats, but even some Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently told reporters that the events of January 6 constituted a "violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election," while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at a press conference last week that the Capitol riot was "a threat to our democracy, our Constitution and the Capitol building and all that entails."
Barr resigned in December 2020, after he disagreed with Trump about whether the president had won re-election. He had otherwise been a relatively loyal member of Trump's cabinet, notably issuing a summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report that suggested Trump was exonerated from claims that his campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.
The former attorney general also declared in his book that Trump "went off the rails" after he lost the 2020 presidential election, surrounded himself with election fraud conspiracy theorists, and increasingly became prone to conspiratorial thinking.
"There is no question he changed after the election; he lost his grip—he stopped listening to his advisers, became manic and unreasonable, and went off the rails," Barr wrote. "He surrounded himself with sycophants, including many whack jobs from outside the government, who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories."
He then held Trump at least partly responsible for the attack on the Capitol that day.
"The absurd lengths to which he took his 'stolen election' claim led to the rioting on Capitol Hill. The forcible breach of the Capitol by rioters was reprehensible," he said.
Barr doesn't believe, however, that Trump technically incited the riot.
"I did not think, from what I heard, that Trump 'incited' violence in the legal sense," Barr wrote. "Incitement has a legal definition, and Trump's statements would not fit that definition in any American court. But it is wrong, all the same, for one branch of government in any way to encourage a mob to pressure another branch of government while it performs its constitutional duties."
