Attorney General Barr thumps election voter fraud claims
WASHINGTON -- President Trump’s specious claim that Joe Biden won the presidency through massive voter fraud has been shot down in multiple federal courts across the country.
But the most devastating blow to Trump’s baseless, off-the-wall claim has come from a member of his Cabinet: Attorney General William Barr, who has been, by and large, one of his strongest allies and defenders.
In an interview with The Associated Press earlier this week, Barr bluntly said he has “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
That undercuts Trump’s claim -- in one court challenge after another -that Biden won more votes as a result of tampering with voter ballots.
In the interview with the AP, Barr said, “There’s been one assertion that would be systematic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results.”
“Barr said the FBI and the Justice Department had looked into the fraud claims, and suggested they had not done what the president and his allies have asserted,” the AP reported.
But Barr would not rule out any instances of fraud or election tampering. He said that most of the fraud claims that had come to the department were “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,” Barr said.
Making matters worse was the headline over The Washington Post’s lead, front-page story: “Barr breaks with Trump on fraud claims,” adding a subhead indicating that Barr was saying, “Election’s outcome wasn’t swayed.”
In the aftermath of Barr’s interview with AP, Trump was tweeting about “hundreds of thousands of fraudulent (FAKE) ballots.”
In a later statement, Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and Jenna Ellis, a legal adviser to the campaign, said, “With all due respect to the attorney general, there hasn’t been any semblance of a Department of Justice investigation.”
Trump has been speaking with Giuliani and Ellis in recent weeks to map out their next steps.
“Nonetheless, we will continue our pursuit of the truth through the judicial system and state legislatures, and continue toward the Constitution’s mandate and ensuring that every legal vote is counted and every illegal vote is not,” their statement read.
Needless to say, the whole story hasn’t gone down very well over at the White House.
In a Page 6 follow-up story in the Post, the headline stated “President said to want to fire Barr over election.”
When White House press secretary Kayleigh Mcenany was asked about Barr’s remarks on Wednesday, she replied, “The president, if he has any personnel announcements, you will be the first to know about it.”
A senior official reportedly said there was a chance that Trump would fire his attorney general, but other officials said that was unlikely.
Again, Barr has been one of the most loyal members of Trump’s administration and has been quick to defend him over the course of Trump’s time in office.
One noteworthy position that Trump may remember is that Barr and the president both opposed -- and criticized -- mass mail-in balloting.
(Donald Lambro has been covering Washington politics for more than 50 years as a reporter, editor and commentator.)
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