Tierney Sneed at CNN:

Former Attorney General William Barr on Friday stood by his widely criticized comments before the 2020 election that mail voting was vulnerable to fraud, even as he condemned former President Donald Trump’s false post-election claims that the 2020 contest had been stolen from him.

“I stand by all of that,” Barr told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead.” “My view is that in such a closely divided country with so much at stake, we have to keep strong protections against fraud and protect the integrity of the election, and I think when they are diluted and reduced – which they were – then people are not going to have confidence in the election, whether or not fraud occurs.”…

Even as Barr has played down in other media interviews the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol as “a riot that got out of control,” he said on Friday that he had “no reason to disagree” with the Justice Department’s recent decision to bring the politically loaded charge of seditious conspiracy against a handful of defendants.

“I just know what I see, like everybody else, but it looked to me that there was this hardcore group there that sort of came dressed for battle … and they were definitely looking for a fight,” Barr said.

“If those people – whoever, those or anybody else – had a plan to use violence to stop the count, that would be a seditious conspiracy,” he continued.