Trump says he advised Bill Barr to get impeached in support of his bogus election claims because it would boost Barr's ratings

• Trump addressed Bill Barr's refusal to back his election fraud "Big Lie" in 2020. 
• He told Fox News he advised Barr to pursue them and get impeached as it'd boost his poll ratings.
• Barr in a recent book detailed Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election.  

Former President Donald Trump said that he urged Bill Barr to get impeached in pursuit of election-fraud conspiracy theories because it'd be good for the former attorney general's ratings. 

In an interview on Fox News host Sean Hannity's show Wednesday, Trump addressed Barr's refusal to pursue bogus claims whipped up by the former president and his allies that he had been deprived of victory in the 2020 presidential election as a result of a vast plot by Democrats. 

The former president said that his former attorney general had not pursued the claims because he was afraid of getting impeached, whereas Barr has said multiple times he didn't pursue them because they weren't true. 

"Look, we also had a chance, but Bill Barr, the attorney general, didn't want to be impeached," Trump said. 

Trump went on to criticize a "crummy" book Barr recently published, in which he said Trump "went off the rails" after the 2020 election in pursuit of the false election-fraud claims.  

"I said: 'Look, get impeached. I went up a lot in the polls when I got impeached. You have to get impeached, maybe.' But he was so afraid of being impeached that he refused to do his job," Trump said on Fox.

When he was attempting to get Barr to help in his bid to overturn the 2020 election, Trump had already been impeached once over his attempts to pressure Ukraine to help him smear Joe Biden. During the impeachment hearings, Trump's approval ratings increased from 34% to 42% among independents, according to a Gallup poll.

Attempts to overturn the election led Trump supporters to attack the Capitol and resulted in his second impeachment, and he left office with the lowest poll ratings on record.

Barr, who had been regarded as one of Trump's most loyal officials, told the Associated Press on December 1 that the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread election fraud.

He resigned from his position shortly afterward.