Former U.S. Attorney Bill Barr said on the record that Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo called him and yelled at him to do something about the allegations of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
The claim from Barr is documented in a new book by ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl. Barr said the altercation happened in mid-November after the 2020 election when then-candidate Joe Biden had been officially declared the victor over former President Donald Trump.
“She called me up and she was screaming,” Barr said to Karl on the record. “I yelled back at her. She’s lost it.”
Karl said Bartiromo did not directly respond to his request for a comment on the story, but that a Fox News spokesperson contacted him to deny some of Barr’s account.
According to the spokesperson, Barr was the person who was aggressive and cursing during the call.
Karl criticized Bartiromo, saying, “It’s highly inappropriate for a journalist to call the attorney general and demand he do something related to a criminal investigation.”
Barr had authorized investigators to look into “substantial allegations” of voter fraud in the 2020 election on Nov. 9, but he cautioned them to avoid “specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims.”
Later in December, Barr announced that substantial enough evidence of voter fraud had been found to overturn the official results of the election.
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” Barr said at the time.
Barr specifically addressed one conspiracy theory that certain voting machines had been programmed to change the results of voter ballots in order to favor Biden.
“There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that,” Barr said at the time.
Here’s Karl talking about his new book:
Jon Karl talks new book, ‘Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show’ l GMA
www.youtube.com