Is it still election fraud if it’s legal? That seems to be the real disagreement about the 2020 election — not just between Democrats and Republicans but among Republicans.

Former Attorney General William Barr illustrated this struggle in his pre-recorded testimony played before the Democrats’ January 6 Committee hearing on Monday. Barr told the committee that in the weeks after the election he told Donald Trump “how crazy some of these [voter fraud] allegations were,” but that “there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.” He said, “I was somewhat demoralized because I thought, ‘Boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has become detached from reality.’”

Barr is right. Trump had spent months warning that Democrats were rigging the election, though he evidently truly thought he’d still win. When he lost, he grasped for any and every explanation for fraud, some of which were pretty outlandish. Barr likened it to a game of “Whac-a-Mole” and said, “All the early claims that I understood were completely bogus and silly and usually based on complete misinformation.”

Even Trump’s legal team couldn’t prove his allegations. Trump undermined his own case with his post-election tantrum and — let’s face it — his disgraceful behavior on January 6, which included his unconscionable treatment of his most loyal lieutenant, Mike Pence.

Barr is also wrong. Before the election, he had warned of exactly the kind of fraud that took place. In September 2020, Barr laid it all out for CNN’s disbelieving Wolf Blitzer:

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?

This is playing with fire. We’re a very closely divided country here, and people have to have confidence in results of the election and the legitimacy of the government. And people trying to change the rules to this methodology — which as a matter of logic is very open to fraud and coercion — is reckless and dangerous. And people are playing with fire.

That’s right in line with what our own Mark Alexander laid out about the Democrats’ “voter rights” bulk-mail ballot fraud strategy. Ironically, he wrote that essay on January 6, 2021.

Again, much of what we call fraud stemmed from legal election practice. That’s why Democrats and their army of Leftmedia “fact-checkers” can censor anyone talking about the 2020 election in the “wrong” way — because bulk-mail ballots, ballot harvesting, and other suspect practices were perfectly legal in numerous states. That means, they scream at us, there was “NO FRAUD” in 2020.

Rubbish.

Indeed, much of the fraud and rigging in 2020 was done by the Leftmedia and Big Tech. Remember that Hunter Biden story? Millions of voters don’t because the Leftmedia never told them and Big Tech suppressed it, even canceling the New York Post’s social media account so the inconvenient truth about Biden family corruption wouldn’t spread.

That’s just one example of the lies from the media and the censorship from Silicon Valley. Our own social media reach was cut by roughly 80% leading up to the election, as Big Tech made a clear and targeted effort to silence conservatives and help Joe Biden stumble across the finish line.

Willfully misinforming voters is practically the definition of rigging the election. Journalistic malpractice may be legal, but suppressing the First Amendment rights of Americans on a public platform isn’t.

So what happened to Bill Barr? Why did the guy who so clearly saw the problem in September 2020 tuck tail and run by December? Barr has clearly checked out regarding the 2020 election. He no longer wants to talk about bulk-mail ballot fraud. He doesn’t want to address the plausibility of old, gaffe-prone, Basement Joe Biden getting more population-adjusted votes than cool, young, electric Barack Obama. Nor the fact that Trump won 18 of 19 bellwether counties.

It seems evident to us that Barr, one of Trump’s best hires and most loyal and effective officials, has Trump fatigue. He doesn’t want Trump to run again and has said as much. So he just dismisses Trump’s claims of fraud as “bulls**t” and says Trump is “detached from reality.”

To be fair, though, Barr’s attitude gets to the reality Trump and his most ardent supporters will never admit. Millions of Americans — maybe not 81 million, but reasonably close — hate Donald Trump, and they’d do anything to get him out of office. In 2020, they succeeded. He may be outpolling Joe Biden and Kamala Harris right now, but we’d argue that says a lot more about the economic devastation they’ve wrought than it does about people wanting Trump’s chaos back in the White House.

Finally, let’s be abundantly clear: None of this lends a shred of legitimacy to the Democrats’ sham committee. Democrats and their media allies rigged the 2020 election in their favor. Unfortunately, when Trump went off the rails and a few hundred of his followers became criminally violent at the Capitol, it enabled Democrats to then rig the investigation of the whole thing in order to score more political points and perhaps stave off defeat this November.

Yet while Democrats scheme to make Trump the perpetual villain and Republicans nothing more than the “Ultra-MAGA” mob, most Americans are paying more attention to how much they’re paying for everything. And that’s thanks to Biden and the Democrats.