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Barr Says No Widespread Election Fraud 12/02 06:17
Disputing President Donald Trump's persistent, baseless claims, Attorney
General William Barr declared the U.S. Justice Department has uncovered no
evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020
election.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Disputing President Donald Trump's persistent, baseless
claims, Attorney General William Barr declared the U.S. Justice Department has
uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome
of the 2020 election.
Barr's comments, in an interview Tuesday with the The Associated Press,
contradict the concerted effort by Trump, his boss, to subvert the results of
last month's voting and block President-elect Joe Biden from taking his place
in the White House.
Barr told the AP that U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to
follow up specific complaints and information they've received, but "to date,
we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome
in the election."
The comments, which drew immediate criticism from Trump attorneys, were
especially notable coming from Barr, who has been one of the president's most
ardent allies. Before the election, he had repeatedly raised the notion that
mail-in voting could be especially vulnerable to fraud during the coronavirus
pandemic as Americans feared going to polls and instead chose to vote by mail.
More to Trump's liking, Barr revealed in the AP interview that in October he
had appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham as a special counsel, giving the
prosecutor the authority to continue to investigate the origins of the
Trump-Russia probe after Biden takes over and making it difficult to fire him.
Biden hasn't said what he might do with the investigation, and his transition
team didn't comment Tuesday.
Trump has long railed against the investigation into whether his 2016
campaign was coordinating with Russia, but he and Republican allies had hoped
the results would be delivered before the 2020 election and would help sway
voters. So far, there has been only one criminal case, a guilty plea from a
former FBI lawyer to a single false statement charge.
Under federal regulations, a special counsel can be fired only by the
attorney general and for specific reasons such as misconduct, dereliction of
duty or conflict of interest. An attorney general must document such reasons in
writing.
Barr went to the White House Tuesday for a previously scheduled meeting that
lasted about three hours.
Trump didn't directly comment on the attorney general's remarks on the
election. But his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and his political campaign
issued a scathing statement claiming that, "with all due respect to the
Attorney General, there hasn't been any semblance" of an investigation into the
president's complaints.
Other administration officials who have come out forcefully against Trump's
allegations of voter-fraud evidence have been fired. But it's not clear whether
Barr might suffer the same fate. He maintains a lofty position with Trump, and
despite their differences the two see eye-to-eye on quite a lot.
Still, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer quipped: "I guess he's the
next one to be fired."
Last month, Barr issued a directive to U.S. attorneys across the country
allowing them to pursue any "substantial allegations" of voting irregularities
before the 2020 presidential election was certified, despite no evidence at
that time of widespread fraud.
That memorandum gave prosecutors the ability to go around longstanding
Justice Department policy that normally would prohibit such overt actions
before the election was certified. Soon after it was issued, the department's
top elections crime official announced he would step aside from that position
because of the memo.
The Trump campaign team led by Giuliani has been alleging a widespread
conspiracy by Democrats to dump millions of illegal votes into the system with
no evidence. They have filed multiple lawsuits in battleground states alleging
that partisan poll watchers didn't have a clear enough view at polling sites in
some locations and therefore something illegal must have happened. The claims
have been repeatedly dismissed including by Republican judges who have ruled
the suits lacked evidence.
But local Republicans in some battleground states have followed Trump in
making unsupported claims, prompting grave concerns over potential damage to
American democracy.
Trump himself continues to rail against the election in tweets and in
interviews though his own administration has said the 2020 election was the
most secure ever. He recently allowed his administration to begin the
transition over to Biden, but he still refuses to admit he lost.
The issues they've have pointed to are typical in every election: Problems
with signatures, secrecy envelopes and postal marks on mail-in ballots, as well
as the potential for a small number of ballots miscast or lost.
But they've gone further. Attorney Sidney Powell has spun fictional tales of
election systems flipping votes, German servers storing U.S. voting information
and election software created in Venezuela "at the direction of Hugo Chavez,"
-- the late Venezuelan president who died in 2013. Powell has since been
removed from the legal team after an interview she gave where she threatened to
"blow up" Georgia with a "biblical" court filing.
Barr didn't name Powell specifically but said: "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."
In the campaign statement, Giuliani claimed there was "ample evidence of
illegal voting in at least six states, which they have not examined."
"We have many witnesses swearing under oath they saw crimes being committed
in connection with voter fraud. As far as we know, not a single one has been
interviewed by the DOJ. The Justice Department also hasn't audited any voting
machines or used their subpoena powers to determine the truth," he said.
However, Barr said earlier that people were confusing the use of the federal
criminal justice system with allegations that should be made in civil lawsuits.
He said a remedy for many complaints would be a top-down audit by state or
local officials, not the U.S. Justice Department.
"There's a growing tendency to use the criminal justice system as sort of a
default fix-all," he said, but first there must be a basis to believe there is
a crime to investigate.
"Most claims of fraud are very particularized to a particular set of
circumstances or actors or conduct. ... And those have been run down; they are
being run down," Barr said. "Some have been broad and potentially cover a few
thousand votes. They have been followed up on."
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