Trump claims booted
WASHINGTON: Donald Trump suffered another devastating blow to his increasingly bizarre bid to overturn his election defeat after his ally Attorney-General William Barr said the Department of Justice had found no evidence of the mass vote-tampering that the President claims took place.
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome,” Mr Barr said.
His comments confirmed the conclusions of the Department of Homeland Security, US intelligence and independent poll watchers that the election was, in the words of one senior official, the “most secure in American history”.
The setback came as president-elect Joe Biden was photographed wearing a medical boot on his right foot, after he suffered hairline fractures last week when he fell while playing with one of his dogs.
Mr Biden, 78, appeared upbeat and in no pain as he left an event in his home town of Wilmington, Delaware, where he confirmed the appointment of former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellon as America’s first female Treasury secretary.
Despite more senior Republicans, including Mr Barr, distancing themselves from Mr Trump in recent days, the President persisted in claiming, without a shred of evidence, that fraudulent voting practices had “robbed” him of a second term.
“People are coming forward like never before. Large truck carrying hundreds of thousands of fraudulent (FAKE) ballots to a voting center? TERRIBLE — SAVE AMERICA!” he wrote on Twitter.
In several legal filings — all of which have been rejected by the courts — the Trump campaign has sought to invalidate millions of votes for Mr Biden.
According to the official vote tallies, Mr Biden earned 6.2 million votes more than Mr Trump and captured 306 stateby-state Electoral College votes, well above the 270 needed to win the presidency.
On November 17, Mr Trump fired Chris Krebs, the respected head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was responsible for election security and had made the “most secure ever” claim about the November 3 election.
Mr Krebs has since been demonised by the White House, with Trump campaign lawyer Joe DiGenova sparking outrage by calling for him to be “taken out at dawn and shot”.
Mr Barr, an ally of Mr Trump, didn’t address specific claims, but dismissed the idea of any “systemic” fraud that would have changed the outcome of the vote.
There was no immediate reaction to Mr Barr’s comments from Mr Trump, but his lawyer Rudy Giuliani dismissed the Attorney-General’s remarks, claiming: “There hasn’t been a semblance of a Department of Justice investigation.”