Former Attorney General Bill Barr has toasted his onetime boss, former President Donald Trump, in a new book in which he also blames him for the Capitol riot.
Barr’s new memoir, “One Damn Thing After Another,” appears to go all-in to assail Trump over his alleged “erratic personal behavior.”
“The 600-page book is due out March 8, and according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Barr uses it to attack Trump’s credibility, leadership, and temperament — framing his own service in the Trump Administration as a ‘personal sacrifice,'” The Daily Wire reports.
The WSJ notes:
Former Attorney General William Barr writes in a new book that former President Donald Trump has “shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed,” and that it is time for Republicans to focus on rising new leaders in the party.
Barr is also clear on where he stands regarding Trump’s oft-repeated claims that the 2020 election was “stolen.”
“The election was not ‘stolen.’ Trump lost it,” Barr reportedly wrote.
The Daily Wire adds:
That loss, according to Barr, might have been avoided if Trump had behaved differently in the weeks and months leading up to the election. He argued that Trump could potentially have changed the outcome of the election if he had “just exercised a modicum of self-restraint, moderating even a little of his pettiness.”
Among other anecdotes, Barr recalled a December Oval Office meeting during which Trump angrily scolded him for saying in public that there was no evidence the election had been stolen.
The Wall Street Journal’s preview of the memoir wrapped up with Barr’s comments about the January 6th riot on Capitol Hill, which he said was entirely Trump’s fault. “The absurd lengths to which he took his ‘stolen election’ claim led to the rioting on Capitol Hill,” he said.
Critics, however, attacked Barr for waiting to write a book instead of trying to do something to shift Trump’s behavior or negate its impact if he only had come forward sooner.
“That Barr feels himself free to write a book describing Trump’s excesses, framing his own service to Trump as a ‘personal sacrifice,’ & purporting to ‘advise’ the Republican Party, is a damning reflection of our profession’s failure to hold its standards,” Sherrilyn Ifill .
“How on character that Barr waited until he could make money off of it with a book to say Trump was totally unsuited for the presidency, instead of doing something about it when he had the power to,” Joyce White Vance .
And Politico’s Kyle Cheney went on to compare Barr to former National Security Advisor John Bolton, , “Bill Barr 2022 = John Bolton 2019. Both had visibility into actions by Donald Trump that caused them great alarm and would have been useful to impeachment investigators. Both withheld that knowledge and saved it for tell-all books.”