Former Attorney General Bill Barr met Thursday with the committee investigating the Capitol Riot, a source familiar with the meeting told CNN.
CNN’s source reportedly said the former attorney general met with the panel for more than two hours. A source familiar with the meeting also told USA Today that Barr answered questions about former President Donald Trump’s election fraud claims and his discussion of the topic in his book, “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General.”
According to USA Today, the meeting comes ahead of the committee’s hearings on the findings of its investigation into the Capitol riot, beginning June 9.
The former attorney general had also previously talked to the committee informally, CNN reported. According to the publication, one of these conversations took place at his home in the fall, where Republican Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the committee vice chairwoman, was reportedly present along with committee lawyers.
At the time, CNN reported, Barr was questioned on his interactions, both before and after the 2020 presidential election, with former President Donald Trump.
The committee also questioned Barr about his December 2020 assertion that the Department of Justice had not uncovered evidence of widespread election fraud monumental enough to challenge the election results.
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” Barr told the Associated Press.
Barr’s statement drew heavy criticism from MAGA enthusiasts at the time, including Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who issued a statement saying that “with all due respect to the Attorney General, there hasn’t been any semblance” of an investigation into Trump’s election claims.
The former attorney general, who left the Trump administration in December 2020 before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot took place, also appointed special counsel John Durham to investigate the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Russia probe.
“The nadir of this campaign was the effort to cripple, if not oust, your administration with frenzied and baseless accusations of collusions with Russia,” Barr said in his resignation letter. “Few could have weathered these attacks, much less forge ahead with a positive program for the country.”
#Barr AG Resignation Letter READ: paragraph #2 “The nadir of this campaign was the effort to cripple, if not oust, your Administration with frenzied + baseless accusations of collusion with Russia" #SpecialCounselDurham pic.twitter.com/muqYSO8b2u
— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) December 15, 2020
“I do think he was responsible in the broad sense of that word in that it appears that part of the plan was to send this group up to the Hill,” Barr said of Trump in March. “I think the whole idea was to intimidate Congress, and I think that that was wrong.”