BARR: JUSTICE DEPT. HAS FOUND NO WIDESPREAD VOTER FRAUD
Attorney general contradicts Trump’s conspiracy claims
WASHINGTON
Attorney General William Barr said Tuesday that the Justice Department has uncovered no voting fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” a repudiation of President Donald Trump’s claims that he was defrauded.
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 suggestion on Sunday 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 the president’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.
A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on whether Barr discussed his findings on voter fraud with the White House before he made his public comments Tuesday.
The president’s allies pushed back on Barr’s election assessment. Trump campaign lawyers complained that the Justice Department investigations had been anemic.
Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for Trump who has been at the forefront of promoting his election conspiracy theories, said that 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.
“As far as we know, not a single one has been interviewed by the DOJ,” Giuliani said in a statement. “The Justice Department also hasn’t audited any voting machines or used their subpoena powers to determine the truth.”
Barr had given prosecutors the authority to examine allegations by Trump’s allies of voter ineligibility in Nevada and improperly dated mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. The results of those investigations have not been publicly disclosed, but Barr’s remarks suggested that any impropriety was too insignificant to change the results.
“Most claims of fraud are very particularized to a particular set of circumstances or actors or conduct. They are not systemic allegations, and those have been run down; they are being run down,” he said. “Some have been broad and potentially cover a few thousand votes.
They have been followed up on.”
The Trump campaign and its surrogates have filed dozens of lawsuits in battleground states that have offered an array of attacks on the results: arguing that mail-in ballots were illegally used, that absentee ballots were improperly counted and that poll challengers were denied proper access to monitor vote counts.
Some of the lawsuits have echoed Giuliani’s talk of conspiracies that foreign powers like Venezuela worked with corrupt American officials to manipulate voting machines. Others made much smaller claims, contesting the validity of small batches of as few as 60 ballots.
But none, at least so far, have won Trump anything more significant than the ability to move his poll observers from 10 feet to 6 feet away from workers counting votes in Pennsylvania. The campaign and its allies have lost nearly 40 cases across the country as judge after judge — including some appointed by Trump — discredited the efforts as lacking both legal merit and convincing proof.
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 in the interview with the Associated Press.
Barr has potentially 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 claims that the presidency was stolen.
The attorney general traveled to the White House on Tuesday afternoon, prompting speculation about his future, but he was there to attend a previously scheduled meeting, a spokeswoman said.
Before the election, Barr warned repeatedly and forcefully about fraud that might come with mass mail-in voting, echoing the president’s attacks on the practice. Afterward, he reversed longstanding Justice Department policy and authorized prosecutors to take overt steps to pursue allegations of “vote tabulation irregularities” before results were certified. To date, none have done so.