WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump’s attorney general testified that he believed the president had grown delusional as he insisted on pushing false claims of widespread election fraud that he was told repeatedly were groundless, according to a videotaped interview played on Monday by the special committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
“He’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” William P. Barr, the former attorney general, told the panel, adding, “There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”
In a hearing focused on the origins and spread of Mr. Trump’s lie of a stolen election, the panel played excerpts from Mr. Barr’s testimony, as well as that of a chorus of campaign aides and administration officials who recounted, one after the other, how his claims of election irregularities were bogus.
The session began with the testimony of Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, Bill Stepien, who testified on video that he had told his boss on election night that he had no basis for declaring victory, but Mr. Trump insisted on doing so anyway.
Mr. Trump “thought I was wrong. He told me so,” Mr. Stepien said in his interview.
Then the panel laid out how Mr. Trump’s initial lie gave way to more falsehoods of election fraud, which grew more outlandish as time wore on. It made extensive use of the recorded testimony from Mr. Barr, who said he had told Mr. Trump repeatedly that his claims of fraud were “bullshit.”
At one...
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