Former Attorney General William Barr laughed out loud during testimony played before the 6 January insurrection hearings on Monday at the mentioned of 2000 Mules, a debunked election conspiracy documentary embraced by his former boss Donald Trump.
"My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud," Mr Barr said. "And I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that, including the 2000 Mules movie."
The former Trump official called the movie, by conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, “singularly unimpressive” and accused it of making “indefensible” claims.
The film, which has been repeatedly debunked by fact-checkers, claims that numerous people were illegally paid in highly contested states like Georgia and Arizona to collect and fraudulently deposit Democratic votes.
The documentary does not have any concrete proof that this actually occurred, beside a single unnamed whistleblower from Arizona claiming she saw what she “assumed” were payoffs taking place.
The film also makes specious use of cellphone geolocation data, which it claims shows ballot “mules” returning again and again to ballot drop locations.
Experts say such cell tower data is imprecise, and that there are many reasons why someone in a dense metro area like Atlanta or Philadelphia might pass by a ballot drop location for reasons totally unrelated to an election.
“You could use cellular evidence to say this person was in that area, but to say they were at the ballot box, you’re stretching it a lot,” Aaron Striegel, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame, told The Associated Press. “There’s always a pretty healthy amount of uncertainty that comes with this.”
The documentarian defended his film on Monday on Twitter.
“Anyone who knows anything about geotracking—I don’t mean you—can see what an ignoramus Barr is on the topic,” Mr D’Souza, who himself pleaded guilty to illegal election contributions in 2014 before being pardoned by Trump, said after Mr Barr’s testimony. “A fat guy laughing doesn’t quite substitute for expertise on this topic!”
Mr Barr has been one of the few high-level members of the Trump administration to criticise the former president and affirm that the 2020 presidential election was conducted legitimately.
In December of that year, Mr Barr told the AP, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Following the 6 January riots at the Capitol, the former attorney general argued, “the President’s conduct yesterday was a betrayal of his office and supporters," adding that Mr Trump was “orchestrating a mob to pressure Congress.”
In his March 2022 memoir, One Damn Thing After Another, Mr Barr was even more pointed.
“The fact is, we have looked at the major claims your people are making, and they are bulls***,” he recalls of one exchange, adding that he once told Mr Trump, “I’ve told you that the fraud claims are not supported. … But your legal team continues to shovel this s*** out to the American people. And it is wrong.”
Beyond just featuring sharp testimony from Trump former associates, the 6 January hearings could be a prelude to unprecedented criminal charges against President Trump, the first for a former president in US history.
"Our entire investigation is a referral of crimes both to the Department of Justice and to the American people because this is a massive assault on our — on the machinery of American democracy," Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin told CNN on Sunday.
