Jan. 6 hearing shows Barr saying Trump 'detached from reality' in pushing 'big lie'

The committee played a video of Trump's former Attorney General Bill Barr recalling his December meeting with Trump after he told the Associated Press that there was no evidence of election fraud.

"The president was as mad as I've ever seen him, and he was trying to control himself," Barr recalled. Trump said, ""You didn't have to say this, you must've said this because you hate Trump.'"

I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has lost contact with — he's become detached from reality," Barr said, adding, "There was never any indication in interest in what the actual facts were."

"I felt that before the election, it was possible to talk sense to the president. And while you sometimes had to engage in, you know, a big wrestling match with him, that it was possible to keep things on track. But I was -- felt that after the election he didn't seem to be listening," Barr recalled. "And I didn’t think it was—you know, that I was inclined not to stay around if he wasn’t listening to advice from me or the Cabinet secretaries."

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D- Calif., teed up several clips of then-Attorney General Bill Barr describing his meeting with Trump in late November about election fraud, noting how "even after [Barr] told him his claims of election fraud were false, President Trump continued to promote these false claims."

"I said," Barr recalled, "the department doesn’t take sides in elections, and the department is not an extension of your legal team. And our role is to investigate fraud, and we’ll look at something if it’s specific, credible, and could’ve affected the outcome of the election. And we’re doing that, and it’s just not -- they’re just not meritorious. They’re not panning out."

After that meeting, Barr said Meadows told him Trump 'was becoming more realistic,' and Kushner said 'we're working on this."

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D- Calif., said Trump became "frustrated" when briefed on his slim chances to win the election and began to shake up his campaign's legal team.

Trump's former campaign manager Bill Stepien said Trump's unhappiness "paved the way" for Rudy Giuliani to become more influential in the post-election strategy to spread false claims of widespread fraud.

"There were two groups," Stepien said. "We called them my team and Rudy's team. I didn't mind being categorized as 'Team Normal' as reporters started to do at that point in time."

Trump's White House lawyer Eric Herschmann told the committee he thought the arguments being made by Giuliani, Sidney Powell and others were "nuts."

Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News political editor who was fired after defending his decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden, explained the 'red mirage' phenomenon to the committee: how a GOP lead on same-day voting was expected to shrink as Democrat-leaning absentee and mail-in votes were counted.

"Basically, in every election, Republicans win Election Day, and Democrats win the early vote," he explained. "So, every election, certainly in a national election, you expect to see the Republican with a lead, but it is not really a lead."

Stepien, in videotaped testimony, recalled briefing the president on the "red mirage" phenomenon, adding, "I always told the president of the truth."

"I told him it was going to be a process," he said. "We will have to wait and see how this turns out. Just like I did in 2016, I did the same thing in 2020."

Stepien also recalled a meeting with Trump and attended by House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy in the summer of 2020, where they tried to persuade Trump to encourage supporters to vote by mail, but, "The president's mind was made up," Stepien said.

-ABC News' Benjamin Siegel