Trump doesn't care if his election fraud claims are true, he just doesn't want to be a loser, Bill Barr said

• Trump likely doesn't care if his election-fraud claims are true, Bill Barr told NBC News.
• Barr wrote in his book that Trump just cared about not being seen as a loser, per the outlet.

Former President Donald Trump is not interested in the truth of whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and just cares about not being considered a loser, according to his former Attorney General Bill Barr.

In an interview aired on Sunday night, Barr told NBC News that he didn't believe Trump was "fixated" on actually proving his false election-fraud claims.

"I think his attitude probably is: 'It either was stolen, or if it wasn't stolen I want people to believe it was stolen,'" Barr told the network.

There is no evidence that Trump's claims are right. A series of legal challenges to voting tallies around the US failed to make any headway in the courts.

"It's useful. I'm not sure he's, you know, really fixated on finding out what the truth is there."

The interview was the latest example of a Trump official turning on their former boss since leaving office. As with others, in prompted a furious response from Trump.

Barr described Trump's attitude to the fraud claims in response to a question about a claim he made in his recently-released book, "One Damn Thing After Another."

In the book, he wrote that Trump would never concede the election because in his world, "a loser was the lowest form of life," according to NBC News.

Barr, once a Trump loyalist, resigned over the false election-fraud claims in December 2020.

When Barr announced publicly that he had seen no evidence of fraud, Trump was "the maddest I'd ever seen him," Barr told the outlet in comments released last week ahead of the full interview.

Despite a recount in Arizona and multiple lawsuits, no evidence of widespread fraud has been found since the election. One of the lawyers Trump turned to to secure this evidence, former New York Mayor General Rudy Giuliani, was described as a "clown show" by Barr in his interview.

Giuliani is now embroiled in multi-billion-dollar defamation lawsuits with voting technology companies Dominion and Smartmatic.

Nonetheless, Trump continues to falsely claim the election was stolen, as he did in a pre-emptive rebuttal to the interview. The response, seemingly prepared long before the interview aired, was tweeted late Sunday by his spokesperson Liz Harrington.

In a three-page statement dated March 2 and address to Barr's interviewer Lester Holt, Trump blasted Barr as "weak" and said he "wouldn't know voter fraud if it was staring him in the face."

When contacted for comment, Harrington pointed Insider to the letter.