In the run up to the Jan. 6 committee’s hearings, Republicans such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy dismissed the investigation as “partisan.” In a way, that’s proving to be true — just not in the way McCarthy intended.

Over the course of the first two hearings, Americans have heard testimony from a great many witnesses, either in person or by way of pre-recorded testimony, and nearly all of them have been Republicans. On this point, as Mike Luckovich joked, it’s been a one-sided affair: The bipartisan select panel has introduced us to a great many key players who’ve shed light on important truths — and they’ve come from one party.

But watching the proceedings, it was hard not to wonder why we hadn’t heard from them before.

Former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, for example, referenced members of “Team Normal“ — insiders who tried to tell Trump the truth about his election defeat — which included several top members of the Republican’s team.

To be sure, it’s a good thing that they testified and advanced investigators’ understanding of what happened. But each of these members of “Team Normal” also had other opportunities to push back against Trump’s dangerous nonsense — possibly even alerting the public to the behind-the-scenes efforts to undermine our democracy — and they chose to say very little.

And then, of course, there’s former Attorney General Bill Barr — described by The Washington Post as yesterday’s “star witness“ — whose highly damaging testimony no doubt enraged his former boss.

But there was a larger context to the testimony. A Talking Points Memo piece noted yesterday:

Barr narrated the period of time from Nov. 3, Election Day, until he departed on Dec. 23. Over those seven weeks, Barr recounted how Trump began to reach for wilder and wilder claims that might explain why he was not the loser in the election, but rather, the victim of mass electoral fraud. To do that, Barr also described how he himself became enmeshed in voter fraud investigations, not only pursuing claims that he admitted that he knew were bogus, but also apparently taking a personal role in investigations normally conducted by line prosecutors.

Before Election Day 2020, the then-attorney general’s conduct was even tougher to defend. Circling back to our earlier coverage, it was in June 2020 when Barr peddled nonsensical theories to The New York Times about “foreign countries that could easily make counterfeit ballots.” None of this was true.

The same month, Barr said in an interview with NPR, “There’s so many occasions for fraud there that cannot be policed. I think it would be very bad. But one of the things I mentioned was the possibility of counterfeiting” of ballots. He had no evidence, but said it was “obvious“ that his ridiculous claims could be true. (They were false.)

Similarly, in a CNN interview in September 2020, the then-attorney general went further, arguing, “Elections that have been held with mail have found substantial fraud and coercion.” (That wasn’t true.) Barr added that “logic” told him that foreign actors could interfere with vote-by-mail systems through fraudulent ballots. (That was absurd, too.)

He went on to say at the time that the Justice Department had “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. OK?” (The Justice Department soon after conceded that Barr’s claim wasn’t true.)

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A week later, as Election Day approached, Barr sat down with The Chicago Tribune’s John Kass and issued baseless warnings intended to undermine public confidence in the electoral system. “[Democrats] are creating an incendiary situation where there’s going to be loss of confidence in the vote, it’ll be a close vote,” he argued. “People will say, ‘The President won Nevada — oh, wait a minute! We just discovered a hundred thousand ballots, every vote must be counted!’”

In the immediate aftermath of the election, Barr’s actions were hardly more defensible. According to the Justice Department’s guidelines, possible investigations into election irregularities are supposed to wait until after the voting tabulations are complete and the results have been certified. Last November, however, Barr decided to ignore his own department’s policies and issue a provocative memo.

Specifically, the then-attorney general issued a directive authorizing prosecutors “to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections.” Soon after, Richard Pilger, who led the Justice Department’s Election Crimes Branch, felt the need to resign in the wake of Barr’s memo.

Barr eventually conceded that there was no meaningful evidence of fraud, but he waited until Dec. 1 to tell the public the truth — at which point millions of Americans had already been convinced to believe Trump’s election-related lies.

Behind the scenes, meanwhile, Barr permitted prosecutors to examine ridiculous fraud claims, not for any legitimate reasons, but apparently to appease Trump.

In other words, the then-attorney general played along with Trump’s campaign against democracy for far too long. He may have ended up joining “Team Normal,” but his allegiance was suspect throughout 2020.

Barr may be a “star witness” now, and he’s helped make a devastating case against his former boss, but his record is still chasing after him like cans tied to a bumper.