Former US Attorney General William Barr, who served between February 2019 and December 2020 during the term of former President Donald Trump, described the accusations of the now ex-president that there was electoral fraud in the 2020 elections as "nonsense".

This is revealed in the book "Betrayal", written by the chief correspondent of ABC News in Washington DC, Jonathan Karl, which will be published in November and of which The Atlantic magazine published an excerpt this Sunday.

The text, which is based on a series of interviews with the former attorney general and his assistants, describes how William Barr broke with Donald Trump after the presidential election last November, which was won by Democrat Joe Biden.

Donald Trump did not acknowledge Biden's victory and claimed that electoral fraud had occurred without providing evidence.

William Barr told Karl that at the time he was faced with a "take it or leave it" dilemma in justifying his decision to approve investigations into these fraud allegations, which included unofficial inquiries he conducted .

"If there was evidence of fraud, I had no reason to contain it (the investigations), but my suspects all the time were that there was nothing. It was all bullshit," he said.

William Barr also claimed that accusations by Donald Trump and his associates that the vote counting machines had been rigged to alter the direction of the vote for Biden are not true.

"We realized from the beginning that it was all just nonsense," said William Barr, who last December decided to break definitively with Donald Trump by giving an interview to the AP News news agency to clarify that the Department he headed had not seen "fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome of the election."

After seeing the publication of the interview, Donald Trump and William Barr had a bitter meeting at the White House, where the president exploded against him and asked "How the hell are you doing this to me? Why are you saying it?" that the attorney general responded "because it is true."

The president then replied, "You must hate Trump, you must hate Trump," speaking of himself in the third person.

Donald Trump also rebuked William Barr for not having charged Biden's son, Hunter, for his business in Ukraine.

Two weeks later, William Barr submitted his resignation, while the president continued to insist on his unfounded allegations that there was electoral fraud.

The book also exposes the pressures of the then leader of the Republican majority in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, -now he is from the minority in that chamber- on Barr to raise his voice against these allegations by Trump.

According to the former US Attorney General, McConnell conveyed to him that those allegations were hurting the country and the Republican Party, as well as the conservatives' efforts to win in the January Georgia special election, which were crucial in deciding who took control of the Upper House.

McConnell later confirmed Barr's claims to the author of the book.