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Ex-Attorney General William Barr believed all along that former President Donald Trump’s claims about widespread election fraud lacked merit — although he worded it more colorfully than that in a forthcoming book about the final days of the Trump administration.

“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr is quoted telling ABC News’ Jonathan Karl in the book “Betrayal.”

“If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it,” Barr continued. “But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bulls***.”

Barr, however, gave federal prosecutors the green light to investigate substantial allegations of vote irregularities that could have potentially impacted the outcome — bucking a long-standing Justice Department policy of only investigating fraud after an election is certified — and he says he personally examined Trump’s major claims.

Barr told Karl the inquiries were launched because he wanted to tell Trump that the Justice Department had taken the allegations seriously when he was inevitably confronted by the president about them.

The then-attorney general found nothing to support Trump’s claims that there was election fraud on a scale that could have changed the outcome. Barr revealed his conclusions in a Dec. 1 interview with The Associated Press, a move that, Karl wrote, infuriated Trump, who was in the midst of trying to overturn the election results in swing states he lost.

“How the f*** could you do this to me? Why did you say it?” Trump told Barr at the White House shortly after the interview was published, according to Karl.

“Because it’s true,” Barr answered.

“You must hate Trump,” the president replied. “You must hate Trump.”

Barr left the meeting unsure of whether he still had a job, according to the book.

The excerpt from “Betrayal” was published Sunday by The Atlantic. The book is not scheduled to be released until November, but Karl told CNN on Monday morning that it was important to share the Barr story with the public now.

“Because Trump is ramping up these repeated lies and misinformation about election fraud,” Karl said. “And here you have somebody who was perhaps the most popular member of his Cabinet among the Trump base, among those people who now believe that the election was stolen, and … even Bill Barr, who stood behind him on all of this stuff, even Bill Barr, who attacked the Mueller investigation, even Bill Barr has come out and said this was all B.S. And I think that’s significant.”

Karl says he interviewed Barr several times over the spring for the book, as well as other senior officials in the Trump White House and Justice Department, who shared details about the former president’s heated exchanged with Barr after the AP interview.

In an angry statement released in response to the book excerpt, Trump said, “Bill Barr was a disappointment in every sense of the word.”

Trump repeated several of his false election fraud claims in the statements and accused Barr of not investigating them. 

“It’s people in authority like Bill Barr that allow the crazed Radical Left to succeed,” Trump said. “He and other RINOs (Republicans in name only) in the Republican Party are being used in order to try to convince people that the election was legitimate.”

Karl also wrote that Barr told him Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell privately urged the former attorney general to speak out against Trump’s claims beginning in mid-November, even as McConnell himself stayed quiet publicly. 

According to Barr, McConnell believed Trump’s efforts would hurt Republicans in Georgia’s two Senate runoffs in January, which Democrats ended up sweeping. The former attorney general said he told McConnell he would address the issue “at the appropriate time.”