Former attorney general William P. Barr said in an interview broadcast Friday that he believes that former president Donald Trump is “responsible in the broad sense of that word” for what transpired at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when a violent mob interrupted Congress’s count of electoral college votes.
“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 in an interview with NBC News. “I think the whole idea was to intimidate Congress, and I think that that was wrong.”
Barr’s comments were part of an interview with anchor Lester Holt that the network plans to air in full on Sunday. Excerpts were aired Thursday and Friday morning.
During Barr’s tenure at the Justice Department, he was widely viewed as an ally of Trump. But the two had a falling out over Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, according to Barr, who stepped down in December 2020 and is now promoting a new book.
Trump has repeatedly denied responsibility for the Jan. 6 insurrection, blaming congressional leaders, among others, for not adequately securing the Capitol complex.
“The reason for January 6th was that millions of people in our Country know the Election was Rigged and Stolen,” Trump said in a statement Thursday in response to a court filing by a House panel investigating the attack on the Capitol.
In its court filing, the House select committee asserted that...
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