New York Daily News

Barr’s on thin ice as Don fumes at thumbs-up on elex

- BY CHRIS SOMMERFELD­T

It might be time for Attorney General William Barr to start packing his bags.

President Trump suggested Thursday that he may fire Barr over his affirmatio­n that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

“Ask me that in a number of weeks from now,” Trump said in the Oval Office after a reporter asked if he still has confidence in the attorney general in light of his election statement.

The outgoing president, who’s refusing to admit that he lost the election to Joe Biden, claimed Barr’s Justice Department hasn’t found any evidence of widespread fraud because “he hasn’t looked.”

“He hasn’t done anything,” Trump said. “They haven’t looked very hard, which is a disappoint­ment, to be honest with you.”

A spokeswoma­n for Barr did not return a request for comment.

Barr piqued Trump’s ire by telling the Associated Press in an interview on Tuesday that “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

The attorney general’s pronouncem­ent ran directly counter to Trump’s baseless insistence that Biden’s victory was facilitate­d by a massive Democratic conspiracy to “rig” the election.

“They should be looking at all of this fraud,” Trump said during Thursday’s appearance in the Oval Office. “This is not civil, this is criminal stuff. This is very bad criminal stuff so I’ll just say this: It was a fixed election. It was a rigged election.”

Trump’s Barr-bashing aside, the attorney general said his department has investigat­ed a number of complaints alleging election irregulari­ties.

However, echoing the assessment of election security officials across the country, Barr said the complaints pertained to isolated incidents and did not suggest any existence of “systemic” fraud.

Despite a lack of evidence, Trump’s campaign has engaged in a long-shot legal battle to subvert Biden’s election, claiming millions of votes were cast illegally in battlegrou­nd states won by the Democrat. Most of the lawsuits have been thrown out, with judges noting that there’s no evidence to justify the campaign’s demands for sweeping court action.

The latest legal defeat came Thursday as the Wisconsin Supreme Court refused to hear a Trump campaign lawsuit that called for more than 200,000 ballots to be invalidate­d. Biden won the state by about 20,000 votes.

Governors in most of the states targeted by Trump have already certified their election results, making his legal challenges all but moot. Nonetheles­s, Trump continues to refuse to concede while vowing to push ahead with election challenges, potentiall­y even beyond the Electoral College’s final certificat­ion of Biden’s victory on Dec. 14.

“This is probably the most fraudulent election anyone’s ever seen,” Trump said Thursday.

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