https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/barr-code-lloyd-billingsley/
“I had been increasingly concerned about claims by the President and the team of outside lawyers advising him that the election had been ‘stolen’ through voting ‘fraud,’” writes William Barr on the first page of One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, just released by William Morrow.
“There’s always some fraud in an election that large,” Barr explains, and “there may have been more than usual in 2020,” but Barr’s Department of Justice didn’t see it changing the outcome.
On page 558, Barr enumerates President Trump’s many successes: tax reform, deregulation, the strongest and most resilient economy in American history, unprecedented progress to many marginalized Americans. As Barr recalls, President Trump restored US military strength, identified the threat from China, brokered peace deals in Middle East, pulled out of ill-advised agreements with Russia and Iran, and moved the US. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
Barr notes that Trump curbed illegal immigration, enhanced border security, and “kept his promise of advancing the rule of law by appointing a record number of judges committed to constitutional principles.” President Trump “exposed media and cultural elites as the outright partisans they have long been – mere extensions of the Democratic Party.” Trump did it all “in the face of bitter, implacable attacks,” but it wasn’t enough.
“Trump, through his self-indulgence and lack of self-control, had blown the election.” If Trump had just exercised “a modicum of self-restraint, moderating even a little of his pettiness,” he would have won. As the two-time Attorney General has it, “the election was not ‘stolen.’ Trump lost it.”
By implication, cellar-dweller Joe Biden won it fair and square. Barr’s case is not particularly convincing, but readers may learn something new about the author.