Former Attorney General Bill Barr on Monday ripped President Joe Biden, saying he “lied” about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which includes a trove of emails about Hunter’s business dealings, as well as graphic photos.
“I was very disturbed during the debate when candidate Biden lied to the American people about the laptop. He’s squarely confronted with the laptop, and he suggested that it was Russian disinformation and pointed to the letter written by some intelligence people that was baseless – which he knew was a lie,” Barr said on Fox News. “And I was shocked by that.”
Barr has been on a whirlwind tour hawking his new book, “One Damn Thing After Another.” In his memoir, he writes that Trump asked about Hunter Biden’s laptop and he said he wasn’t going to go there.
“Mr. President, I can’t talk about that, and I am not going to,” Barr said he told Trump, according to the Daily Mail.
“Trump, in turn, was displeased with his tone. Barr said he asked Trump to consider if the laptop had belonged to one of his five kids,” the Mail reported.
“‘You know, if that was one of my kids …’ Trump began, according to the book. Barr then cut him off. ‘Dammit, Mr. President, I am not going to talk to you about Hunter Biden. Period,’ Barr said,” the U.K. paper added.
The existence of the laptop emerged in October 2020, just before the presidential election. The mainstream media quickly questioned its authenticity, and Biden did, too. Barr said that was interfering in an election.
“When you’re talking about interference in an election I can’t think of anything more,” Barr said about Biden trying to blame the Russians for reports of the laptop. Asked if Biden could face legal problems, Barr said he didn’t want to “venture an opinion.” But Barr said the false laptop narrative could be a problem politically for the White House.
“From a political standpoint now that this is in people’s consciousness, it had been suppressed up until now, obviously they have a hot potato and just to see how they handle it will be interesting,” Barr said.
The New York Times last week acknowledged the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s missing laptop first reported by The New York Post just before the 2020 election. Since then, the president and members of his administration have been pressured to address queries about allegations of corruption in the Biden family, according to The Daily Wire’s Cabot Phillips.
“They’re under growing pressure because for the last year and a half, they’ve mostly refused to talk about it, and when they have talked about it, they’ve mostly brushed it off as fake news or even Russian disinformation,” Phillips said. “Biden campaign advisor Simone Sanders for example, said anyone who shared the story was promoting ‘Russian misinformation’ while White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki implied the same on her Twitter account. President Biden himself even called the story ‘a bunch of garbage.’”
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent, and ran the Drudge Report from 2010 to 2015. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.