(The Hill) – The House committee examining last year’s attack on the Capitol accused former President Trump on Monday of lying purposely to the public in order to stay in power and raise money from sympathetic supporters — an orchestrated effort the panel said led directly to the deadly insurrection of Jan. 6.
Gathered on Capitol Hill for the second in a series of public hearings into its investigation, the select committee leaned heavily on the testimony of some of the leading figures in Trump’s political orbit to hammer home the notion that, not only were Trump’s claims of rampant voter fraud false, but also that he knew them to be so.
Leading the charge was former Attorney General Bill Barr, who delivered a damning portrait of the former president as someone increasingly “detached from reality” following the election.
Barr said his Justice Department was forced to play “whack-a-mole” with the flood of false fraud allegations pouring in from Trump supporters around the country. One by one, the department investigated the claims but found no wrongdoing. The accusation that Dominion Voting Systems, a voting machine company, had installed software to flip votes from Trump to Joe Biden was “idiotic,” Barr said, while another claim — that more people voted in Philadelphia than there are voters in the city — was “absolute rubbish.”
“And I told him that the stuff that his people were shoveling out to the public was bull—-, I mean, that the claims of fraud were bull—-,” Barr...
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