Joining Chase Geiser on his “One America Podcast,” Tony Shaffer, a former military intelligence officer turned right-wing pundit and conspiracy theorist, claimed former Attorney General Bill Barr called him and told him to stop investigating alleged 2020 election fraud.
Shaffer, who appears on right-wing media including One America News, Newsmax, and Fox News, is now the president of the London Center for Policy Research, a right-wing foreign policy think tank that gained influence during the Trump administration. He also served as an adviser to the 2020 Trump campaign, and his LCPR bio claims he is a security adviser to law enforcement in Virginia as well.
“I believe there was hacking, I believe Dominion is dishonest, I believe that mass ballot fraud occurred,” Shaffer told Geiser in a video of the show posted to YouTube last Friday. “Look, I investigated this. I found one guy who moved a vehicle of 162,000 curated ballots from Bethpage, New York, to central Pennsylvania. By the way, a guy named Bill Barr called me and said, ‘You need to give the investigation up, you turn it over to the FBI.’ Once the FBI got it, we never heard anything again. Just saying.”
“Sounds familiar. Sounds like most of your career,” Geiser said.
“When was the last time you ever had Bill Barr, the attorney general, calling a private citizen, saying, ‘Oh, you need to stop’? Think about that for a second. I talked to Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia, about that. I said, ‘Ken’—just two weeks ago—‘have you ever heard of the former attorney general of the United States calling a private citizen and saying, ‘You need to give this up’? Think about that! The attorney general—”
“Did you feel threatened?” Geiser interjected.
“Yeah,” Shaffer replied. “Not a staff member, not a FBI agent, the attorney general himself.”
William Barr, one of Trump’s most loyal defenders, faced the ire of right-wing activists after declaring in December that the Justice Department found no evidence of fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020 election. Barr, of course, was willing to go along with Trump’s stolen-election plan in November despite no evidence of widespread fraud at the time, but the fury directed his way is indicative of the blind loyalty required among Trump loyalists and the consequences of not playing along with even the most absurd conspiracy theories.
LCPR is also where Shaffer further interacted with former national security adviser and stolen-election conspiracy theorist Michael Flynn. Like his friend Flynn, Shaffer has also shown support for the far-right QAnon conspiracy movement, Media Matters reported last summer. More recently, Instagram posts place him at the Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C., at which rallygoers listened to election fraud conspiracy theories before heading to the U.S. Capitol at Trump’s behest.
Shaffer has peddled conspiracy theories about the FBI before, claiming that most of the FBI’s foreign counterintelligence budget was diverted into efforts to absolve Hillary Clinton and convict Trump in 2016 and 2017, Right Wing Watch reported in 2018. He also promoted Benghazi conspiracy theories and, after a raid on former Trump chairman Paul Manafort’s home, compared the FBI to the Gestapo.
The video, which Geiser posted to his Twitter and YouTube page, has racked up more than 96,000 views.
