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Former Attorney General William Barr blames President Donald Trump's "spiteful conduct" for Republicans losing control of the Senate in the 2021 Georgia runoff elections, calling it "inexcusable and a sellout of his supporters and their interests."
Barr, who served as Trump's attorney general from 2019 to the end of 2020, wrote a memoir, titled "One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General," which went on sale on Tuesday. In it, he detailed his falling out with Trump over the former president's aggressive efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, including in Georgia.
Trump, by his own admission, did not put his full effort behind helping Republicans win two January 2021 runoff elections in Georgia after he lost the presidential race in the state, previously saying it was "because I was very angry with what happened there."
Barr, however, put things a bit more bluntly.
"He actively sabotaged Republican chances by provoking a civil war inside the state party and encouraging his supporters not to vote. He gave control of the Senate—you could almost say he deliberately gave control of the Senate—to the Democrats," Barr wrote. "A Republican Senate would have decisively limited the damage the Biden administration could do with its radical agenda."
Barr recalled a November 23, 2020 conversation in the Oval Office during which he attempted to talk Trump down from his fervent belief that the 2020 election had been stolen from him and tried coaxing him to campaign for former Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. Barr's efforts, however, were in vain.
"Well, our Republican senators haven't done much for me. Now they need me," Trump said, according to Barr.
"I disagree, Mr. President," Barr remembered saying. "The Republican senators have fought for you. They have fought for you on impeachment, on Russiagate, on your whole program."
"I really don't know these Georgia senators too well," Trump went on to say, Barr wrote, adding that the former president eventually agreed to hold a rally but seemed "disinterested."
Perdue and Loeffler ended up losing their races to Democratic Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, respectively, handing Democrats control of the Senate.
Perdue and Loeffler ended up losing their races to Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, respectively, creating an evenly-split Senate where Vice President Kamala Harris can cast a tiebreaking vote and give her party a slim majority.
Barr, who frequently invokes the classics, wrote that at the end of his presidency, Trump was "motivated by the same self-pitying egotism that led Achilles in the Iliad to pout in his tent while the Trojans slaughtered his comrades, including his best friend," adding that "any idea that Trump could rise above his self-indulgence was shattered."
"In the final months of his administration, Trump cared only about one thing: himself," Barr wrote. "Country and principle took second place."
Barr also decried Trump's continued revenge tour against his political enemies as "egoistic and fratricidal" and warned that Trump trying to "purge" the Republican Party of figures he views as disloyal is "suicide" for the GOP.
In Georgia alone, Trump has endorsed primary challengers to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Trump has also backed primary challengers to all but one of the Republican members of the House and Senate who voted to impeach or convict him for inciting the January 6 insurrection and are up for reelection in 2022.
Trump has also endorsed candidates for statewide office in key swing states who say they would have not certified the 2020 election. Perdue, for instance, is now running for governor in Georgia, and echoes Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was tainted by widespread voter fraud.
"That Trump, of all people, should consider himself an arbiter of ideological purity—a man whose political allegiances oscillated randomly over the decades—is comical," Barr wrote. "In reality, he has no concern with ideology or political principle. His motive is revenge, and is entirely personal."
Barr acknowledged that political parties face internal discord, but, he wrote, "great political leaders don't fan discord within their party or indulge petty personal grievances. Rather, they exercise discipline and patience with the aim of holding the party together and keeping it focused on the defeat of its political adversaries."
