PM steps back from Twitter row
Attorney-General’s repudiation of fraud claims a ‘betrayal’
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is stepping back from the ongoing China-Australia feud, saying New Zealand has not taken sides.
On Tuesday she said New Zealand had raised concerns with China over its use of a doctored image on Twitter, but yesterday she said the same thing would have happened if Australia had done it.
“We’ve made the point we’ve wanted to make and we’ll be leaving it at that.”
The doctored image, posted by an official Chinese Government account, shows an Australian soldier holding a bloodied knife to a Afghan child’s throat — a reference to the alleged unlawful killings by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.
Her comments follow criticism that New Zealand was bleating like an Australian sheep in the Global Times, a daily newspaper considered to be a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party.
And China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said she was “very surprised” that New Zealand had raised concerns.
“Does this matter have anything to do with New Zealand? We have pictures and other facts including the Australian Defence Department’s report on this matter. The truth and the merits of this matter are crystal clear.”
Ardern said she didn’t believe raising concerns had hurt China-NZ relations.
“This mature relationship we have with China, they expect New Zealand to raise concerns when we see them.”
Nor was raising concerns a sign that New Zealand was siding with Australia.
“We certainly don’t see it that way. If we saw a visual representation published by Australia that was incorrect, a doctored image for instance, we would raise concern also.
“It was a matter of principle.” Asked if she would condemn the Australian war crimes, she said: “We’re already seeing Australia taking action on that and responding to it.”
Attorney-General William Barr acknowledged yesterday that the Justice Department has uncovered no voting fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election”, a striking repudiation of President Donald Trump’s groundless claims that he was defrauded.
The statement from Barr affirming Joe Biden’s win served as a particularly harsh blow to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the election. Barr has advanced Trump’s political agenda perhaps more than any other Cabinet member, bringing the Justice Department as close to the White House as it has been since Watergate.
His comments came as other Republicans separated themselves from Trump’s charged complaints about the election. A Georgia elections official angrily denounced the violent threats and harassment directed at elections workers and urged the President to “stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence”.
“Someone’s going to get hurt,” the official, Gabriel Sterling, said at a news conference.
And Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, moved closer to overtly accepting that Biden would be in the White House next year as he discussed the prospects for more pandemic stimulus in 2021.
“After the first of the year, there is likely to be a discussion about some additional package of some size next year, depending upon what the new administration wants to pursue,” McConnell said on Capitol Hill.
Barr had been mostly silent since the election, but some Republicans privately pushed him to publicly rebut Trump, according to a person told of those conversations.
His comments may have been prompted by Trump’s increasingly specious election claims; the President suggested on Monday that the Justice Department and the FBI may have played a role in an election fraud.
Barr took particular aim at a widely discredited conspiracy theory promoted by Trump’s legal team involving machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems, a company that sells voting hardware.
“There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that,” Barr said, referring to the Department of Homeland Security and his own department.
Barr’s acknowledgment of the election results was an about-face from his posture during the campaign. But he spoke out only after the President spent weeks promoting baseless assertions about the election outcome and long after department lawyers told Barr there was no evidence of substantial irregularities.
And even as Barr distanced himself from Trump’s election claims, the Justice Department also announced a move certain to please Trump: Barr has given additional protections to John Durham, the federal prosecutor whose examination of the Russia investigation Trump had embraced.
The move makes it more difficult for the Biden administration to fire Durham without providing evidence of misconduct.
Trump’s allies immediately pushed back on Barr’s election assessment.
Rudy Giuliani claimed his team had gathered evidence of illegal voting in six states, backed up by sworn witness statements, and that the Justice Department had failed to investigate what the team had uncovered.
Barr had given prosecutors the authority to examine allegations by Trump’s allies of voter ineligibility in Nevada and improperly dated mailin ballots in Pennsylvania.
The results of those investigations have not been publicly disclosed, but Barr’s remarks suggest any impropriety was too insignificant to change the results.
Barr also suggested that lawsuits or audits by election officials served as remedies for suspicions of election irregularities, not criminal inquiries.
“There’s a growing tendency to use the criminal justice system as sort of
a default fix-all, and people don’t like something, they want the Department of Justice to come in and ‘investigate,’” Barr said.
Barr has placed himself in a precarious position with Trump, who recently fired Christopher Krebs, the senior cybersecurity official responsible for securing the presidential election, who prominently disputed Trump’s false claims that the presidency was stolen.
PBS White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor was told by sources the President’s team was furious Barr gave the interview.
“One source tells me Barr’s AP interview is a ‘complete betrayal’ and says Barr has been ‘a total failure’.”