WASHINGTON (AP) — In a significant turn of events for Trump, Attorney General William Barr declared Tuesday the U.S. Justice Department has uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020 election.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Barr’s comments contradict the concerted effort by Trump to reverse the elections’ results and avoid Joe Biden from taking his place in the White House.
Barr told the AP that U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they’ve received, but “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
The comments, drawn immediate criticism from Trump attorneys, were especially notable coming from Barr, one of the president’s most ardent allies. Before the election, he had repeatedly raised the notion that mail-in voting could be especially vulnerable to fraud during the coronavirus pandemic as Americans feared going to the polls and instead chose to vote by mail.
More to Trump’s liking, Barr revealed in the AP interview that in October, he had appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham as a special counsel, giving the prosecutor the authority to continue to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia probe after Biden takes over and making it difficult to fire him. Biden hasn’t said what he might do with the investigation, and his transition team didn’t comment Tuesday.
Trump has long railed against the investigation into whether his 2016 campaign was coordinating with Russia. Still, he and Republican allies had hoped the results would be delivered before the 2020 election and would help sway voters. So far, there has been only one criminal case, a guilty plea from a former FBI lawyer to a single false statement charge.
Under federal regulations, a special counsel can be fired only by the attorney general and for specific reasons such as misconduct, dereliction of duty, or conflict of interest. An attorney general must document such reasons in writing.
Barr went to the White House Tuesday for a previously scheduled meeting that lasted about three hours. Trump didn’t directly comment on the attorney general’s remarks on the election. But his attorney Rudy Giuliani and his political campaign issued a scathing statement claiming that “with all due respect to the Attorney General, there hasn’t been any semblance” of an investigation into the president’s complaints.
Other administration officials who have come out forcefully against Trump’s allegations of voter-fraud evidence have been fired. But it’s not clear whether Barr might suffer the same fate. He maintains a lofty position with Trump, and despite their differences, the two see eye-to-eye on quite a lot.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said: “I guess he’s the next one to be fired.”
Last month, Barr issued a directive to U.S. attorneys across the country allowing them to pursue any “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities before the 2020 presidential election was certified, despite no evidence at that time of widespread fraud.
That memorandum gave prosecutors the ability to go around longstanding Justice Department policy that normally would prohibit such overt actions before the election was certified. Soon after it was issued, the department’s top elections crime official announced he would step aside from that position because of the memo.
Giuliani’s Trump campaign team has been alleging a widespread conspiracy by Democrats to dump millions of illegal votes into the system with no evidence. They have filed multiple lawsuits in battleground states alleging that partisan poll watchers didn’t have a clear enough view at polling sites in some locations, and therefore something illegal must have happened. The claims have been repeatedly dismissed, including by Republican judges who have ruled the suits lacked evidence.
But local Republicans in some battleground states have followed Trump in making unsupported claims, prompting grave concerns over potential damage to American democracy.
Trump continues to rail against the election in tweets and in interviews though his administration has said the 2020 election was the most secure ever. He recently allowed his administration to begin the transition over to Biden, but he still refuses to admit he lost. The issues they have pointed to are typical in every election:
- Problems with signatures
- Secrecy envelopes and postal marks on mail-in ballots
- The potential for a small number of ballots miscast or lost
But they’ve gone further. Attorney Sidney Powell has spun fictional tales of election systems flipping votes, German servers storing U.S. voting information, and election software created in Venezuela “at the direction of Hugo Chavez,” – the late Venezuelan president who died in 2013. After an interview, Powell has since been removed from the legal team where she threatened to “blow up” Georgia with a “biblical” court filing.
