In the insane weeks following his loss to President Joe Biden a desperate Donald Trump futilely attempted to recruit a federal attorney to investigate the 2020 presidential election and when that failed he turned against then-Attorney General Bill Barr, calling him a “phony,” according to a new book.

In the weeks after the election, Barr, one of Trump’s staunchest supporters, began publicly distancing himself from Trump’s bizarre claims of widespread voter fraud, The Daily Mail reports.

At the time, Trump was making personal calls to U.S. attorneys in swing districts, pressing them to open an investigation into President Joe Biden’s victory. That’s according to Landslide: The Final Days of The Trump Presidency, which was excerpted by the Daily Beast. The book, written by journalist Michael Wolff, promises to be a real bombshell.

When the investigations failed to materialize Trump turned his wrath against Barr, who was busily putting distance between himself and the president.

“If I had won, Barr would have licked the floor if I asked him to,” Trump said in a fit of anger, according to the book. “What a phony!”

This is Wolff’s third book on the Trump White House and it chronicles the tempestuous weeks as Trump frantically tried to cling to power, even as those within his universe became increasingly uneasy.

Barr resigned as Attorney General in December 2020, stepping down after Christmas in a clear departure from his former boss.

In the weeks that followed the election, Barr flatly told the Associated Press that the U.S. Intelligence Committee found no evidence of fraud  “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

He took that a step further in the months that followed, telling The Atlantic that Trump’s claims “were bullsh*t and that he expected “all the way along” that “there was nothing there.”

But even though he suspected this, Barr still launched an investigation into “substantial allegations” that could “potentially impact the outcome” of the election just days after Biden was declared president. That’s according to a memo from the Justice Department. Barr, however, changed his tune after being pressured by fellow DOJ colleagues and House Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, The Daily Mail reports.

In the months before the election, Barr had been parroting Trump’s baseless criticisms of mail-in voting and in lockstep fashion, Barr compared the situation to “playing with fire” during an interview with CNN.

Barr’s sudden and abrupt criticism of Trump was definitely a switch, especially after doing things like dismissing allegations that Trump’s 2016 campaign team sought help from Russia in order to jump-start a “bogus narrative” and even going so far as to appoint U.S. Attorney John Durham to investigate Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of the election. Which ultimately turned up no meaningful results, even though it’s now gone on longer than Mueller’s.

Barr isn’t the only person Trump is unhappy with at the moment. The former president also released a statement Friday excoriating “authors of the ridiculous number of books” written about him since leaving office.

“They write whatever they want to write anyway without sources, fact-checking or asking whether or not an event is true or false,” Trump said.

Wolff and other authors, according to Trump, are “bad people.” He added, “when reading the garbage that the Fake News Media puts out, please remember this and take everything with a ‘grain of salt.'”

This is too funny. Trump lied his way through his presidency, so who’s really the actual fake here?

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