Donald Trump was told repeatedly by advisers that he had lost the 2020 US election but continued making false claims of voter fraud, leading Bill Barr, his former attorney-general, to question whether the president had “become detached from reality”.
Barr’s comments came in testimony in front of the bipartisan committee investigating last year’s attack on the US Congress during the panel’s second in a series of public hearings.
Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chair, said that “numerous credible sources from the president’s inner circle” had told Trump in the months after the election that there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to overturn the result.