Barr says Trump’s claims that election was stolen ‘precipitated the riots’ at Capitol

Ex-U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr said Tuesday that President Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen “precipitated the riots” at the Capitol.

In his first television interview since his ouster and break from Trump, Barr blamed the violent riots on the weeks-long effort to cast doubt on President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the November vote.

“That was the thing that precipitated the riots on the Hill’,” Barr told the British ITV network.

Barr stopped short of accusing his ex-boss of inciting the mob of supporters, but he didn’t refute it either.

“I’ll leave it to the people who are looking into the genesis of this to say whether incitement was involved,” Barr said.

Even though Barr parroted Trump’s right-wing lies for years, he claimed he had “zero tolerance” for extremism of any political stripe.

“The kind of violence we saw on Capitol Hill, I consider it despicable...regardless of which side of the political spectrum is involved,” he said.

He also suggested that leftists are just as responsible as right-wing extremists for fueling a climate of hatred in the country, an odd remark given the enormity of the crimes committed by the Capitol Hill rioters.

“You had the Proud Boys who were on the right, fighting the Antifa who were on the left,’ Barr said. “I was very worried about the emergence of violence and he had to have zero tolerance for it.”

Barr was once an unbending Trump acolyte but he broke with Trump when he publicly said there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the election that Trump lost.

He also angered Trump by not disclosing a federal tax probe into Biden’s son, Hunter, until after the election, in keeping with Justice Department policy.