For the second time in two days, former President Donald Trump lashed out at his former attorney general, William Barr, over conversations revealed in an unflattering new book.

       “I lost confidence in Bill Barr long before the 2020 Presidential Election Scam,” the former president said in a statement on Tuesday. “He was afraid, weak, and frankly, now that I see what he is saying, pathetic.”

       The book, Betrayal, by journalist Jonathan Karl, claims that in the final days of Mr Trump’s presidency, Senator Mitch McConnell asked Mr Barr to help pour cold water on the former president’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

       At the time, two runoff Senate races were being held in Georgia, and Mr McConnell worried Mr Trump’s insistence that American elections were “rigged” could discourage Republicans from voting. According to Betrayal, Mr McConnell asked the attorney general to publicly debunk the claims.

       “Look, we need the president in Georgia,” he reportedly told Mr Barr, “and so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now. But you’re in a better position to inject some reality into this situation. You are really the only one who can do it.”

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       In the end, the senator’s concerns turned out to be well-founded; the GOP lost both seats. Mr Trump’s takeaway, however, is that Mr McConnell and Mr Barr betrayed him.

       “Based on press reports,” the former president seethed in his Monday statement, Mr McConnell “convinced his buddy, Bill Barr, to get the corrupt (based on massive amounts of evidence that the Fake News refuses to mention!) election done, over with, and sealed for Biden, ASAP!”

       In reality, the 2020 election was neither corrupt nor stolen. Joe Biden won a majority of the country’s popular vote and Electoral College delegates, and Mr Trump’s campaign failed in dozens of court cases to prove the results were fraudulent.

       In December 2020, Mr Barr made the public statement Mr McConnell had asked for.

       “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” he told the Associated Press.

       Privately, according to Mr Karl’s book, the attorney general went even further.

       “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it,” Mr Barr told Mr Karl. “But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bulls***.”

       On both Monday and Tuesday, Mr Trump fumed over those comments.

       “We caught them but unfortunately didn’t have an Attorney General who was capable of acting and wouldn’t go against his friends in Washington, DC,” the former president wrote in his second statement. “Barr was a ‘swamp creature’ who was devastated when the Radical Left wanted to impeach him… Despite evidence of tremendous Election Fraud, he just didn’t want to go there.”

       Some journalists have wondered if, like his conspiracy theorizing, Mr Trump’s comments on the book could backfire.

       “For reasons unclear, the former president is intent on helping @jonkarl sell books,” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted.