Regular readers might notice something vaguely familiar about today’s headline — namely, that it was just last week when our Thomas Gallatin published a piece titled “Barr Torches Trump.” Today, given that the former attorney general has had his say, we give the former president equal time for a counterpunch. And so, without further ado, Trump Torches Barr:

Former Attorney General Bill Barr wouldn’t know voter fraud if it was staring him in the face — and it was. The fact is, he was weak, ineffective, and totally scared of being impeached, which the Democrats were constantly threatening to do. ‘They broke’ him. He should have acted much faster on the Mueller Report, instead of allowing the fake Russia, Russia, Russia, Hoax to linger for so long, but it was the Election Fraud and Irregularities that he refused to act on because he wanted to save his own hide — and he did. He never got impeached, contempt charges never went forward, and the Democrats were very happy with him — but I wasn’t. The Unselect Committee of Political Hacks continues to spin its wheels in trying to fabricate a narrative that doesn’t exist. The only thing they refuse to look into is the massive Election Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election.

There’s a lot to unpack here. And it’s a shame, too, because Bill Barr was an infinitely better attorney general that the man he replaced, former Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, who made the catastrophic mistake of recusing himself at the very start of the Democrats’ phony, fake, fraudulent, criminal Russia collusion hoax. Indeed, had Sessions held firm instead of allowing himself to be bullied by the Left and its media lickspittles, Barr would’ve never had occasion to write a kiss-and-tell book about his tenure as Trump’s AG: One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General. (In fairness to Barr, the book also includes a look back at his time as George H.W. Bush’s attorney general, but let’s face it: No one is gonna buy a book to read about Barr’s research into the line-item veto during the elder Bush’s presidency.)

In any case, Trump was just getting warmed up. Having watched Barr kick off his book tour with a Sunday night appearance on NBC News with Lester Holt, Trump got to work on a rebuttal. The result was a three-page, single-spaced letter that — how shall we say this? — gently elaborated on the initial statement above, and thoughtfully critiqued the book he’d yet to read:

Bill Barr cares more about being accepted by the corrupt Washington Media and Elite than serving the American people. He was slow, lethargic, and I realized early on that he never had what it takes to make a great Attorney General. When the Radical Left Democrats threatened to hold him in contempt and even worse, to Impeach him, he became virtually worthless to Law and Order and Election Integrity. They broke him just like a trainer breaks a horse. …

I would imagine that if the book is anything like him, it will be long, slow, and very boring. I made many great appointments during my Administration, and we accomplished more than most Administrations could even dream of, but Bill Barr was not one of my better picks. He crumbled under the pressure, and bowed to the Radical Left — And that is not acceptable. Now he is groveling to the media, hoping to gain acceptance that he doesn’t deserve.

Without a doubt, the greatest area of dispute between Trump and Barr is whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Barr says it wasn’t; Trump says it was. And the evidence, which continues to trickle out of crucial swing states like Georgia and Wisconsin, seems increasingly to support Trump’s claims. But this shouldn’t surprise anyone, least of all Barr. All we need to do is go back to an interview that Barr gave to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on September 3, 2020, just two months before the election. The interview focused on electoral integrity, and specifically the issue of widespread mail-in balloting. Remarkably, but perhaps not surprisingly, CNN appears to have removed the interview from its archive. But you can watch it here:

As we covered it at the time:

“Wolf,” began Barr, “this is sort of cheap talk to get around the fundamental problem, which is the bipartisan commission chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker said back in 2009 that mail-in voting is fraught with the risk of fraud and coercion.”

Blitzer tried to interrupt, but Barr snapped, “Let me talk.”

He continued: “And since that time, there have been in the newspapers, in networks, [and] academic studies saying it is open to fraud and coercion. The only time the narrative changed is after this administration came in. But elections that have been held with mail have found substantial fraud and coercion. For example, we indicted someone in Texas — 1,700 ballots collected from people who could vote, he made them out and voted for the person he wanted to. That kind of thing happens with mail-in ballots, and everyone knows it.”

Blitzer then trotted out the most intellectually lazy talking point of the pro-fraud Left: “There are individual cases, but as far as widespread fraud, we haven’t seen that.”

To which Barr countered: “Well, we haven’t had the kind of widespread use of mail-in ballots as being proposed. We’ve had absentee ballots from people who request them from a specific address. Now what we’re talking about is mailing them to everyone on the voter list, when everyone knows those voter lists are inaccurate. People who should get them don’t get them, which has been one of the major complaints in states that have tried this in municipal elections. And people who get them are not the right people. They’re people who have replaced the previous occupant … and sometimes multiple ballots come to the same address with several generations of occupants. Do you think that’s a way to run a vote?”

Barr was absolutely spot-on. Two months before the election, he all but predicted what would happen — the uncharted territory of bulk-mail balloting and the “fraud and coercion” that would result. But then, for some reason, in the aftermath of an election in which basement-bound Joe Biden got more population-adjusted votes than rock-star Barack Obama did in 2008, Barr seemed to shrink away from this firmly held belief. Why? Surely his office didn’t have enough time in the days and weeks after the election to track down every lead and uncover every troubling irregularity. We’re just now learning about serious fraud in Georgia and Wisconsin — fraud made possible by bulk-mail balloting, and by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s infusion of nearly half a billion dollars into the race for the express purpose of bumping up Biden’s vote totals in the woefully unregulated urban areas of the key swing states.

It’s odd, to say the least, that the attorney general is now so utterly convinced that the election was fairly decided; that Donald Trump somehow lost the election despite handily winning a stunning 18 of 19 bellwether counties and despite the fact that the election was decided by just 43,000 votes spread across three states: Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. We wish Holt had seen fit to ask Barr about his change of heart, especially given that he’d warned of and predicted that this would happen.

Barr’s appearance with Holt, by the way, and in a subsequent interview on NBC with Savannah Guthrie, balanced occasional and measured criticism of Trump with an unflinching defense of the former president in other areas — especially Spygate, which Special Counsel John Durham continues to unravel and expose. And herein lies a major part of Trump’s frustration: the painfully slow pace of justice. The Obama administration and the Clinton campaign began spying on the Trump campaign — and later the Trump presidency — back in 2016. Today, nearly six years later, we’re still a long way from the conclusion of Durham’s investigation, still a long way from justice being served. It’s hard to imagine a president who wouldn’t be frustrated by such a glacial pace.

Perhaps most interestingly, after all this, is that Bill Barr is still a committed Republican and would still vote for Donald Trump in 2024 were he the nominee of the party. When asked point-blank by Guthrie, he put it this way: “Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party, it’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee.”

That admission should remind us not to become distracted — not to lose sight of the real threats to our liberty and the real threats to our nation.

Updated with additional information about 2020 electoral fraud.