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WASHINGTON (AP) – Challenging President Donald Trump’s persistent and baseless claims, Attorney General William Barr said on Tuesday that the US Department of Justice found no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the election result of 2020.
Barr’s comments, in an interview with The Associated Press, contradict the concerted efforts of his boss Trump to reverse last month’s vote results and prevent President-elect Joe Biden from taking his place in the White House.
Barr told the AP that US attorneys and FBI agents were working to follow up on the specific complaints and information they received, but “to date we have not seen fraud on a scale that would have may have had a different outcome in the election. “
The comments, which immediately drew criticism from Trump’s lawyers, were particularly noteworthy from Barr, who has been one of the president’s most ardent allies. Before the elections, he had repeatedly mentioned the notion that postal voting could be particularly vulnerable to fraud during the coronavirus pandemic, as Americans feared going to the polls and instead chose to vote by mail.
More to Trump’s liking, Barr revealed in the AP interview that in October he appointed US attorney John Durham as special advocate., giving the prosecutor the power to continue investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia inquiry after Biden took office and making it difficult for him to be fired. Biden has not said what he might do with the investigation and his transition team did not comment on Tuesday.
Trump has long denounced the investigation into his 2016 campaign coordination with Russia, but he and his Republican allies had hoped the results would be delivered before the 2020 election and help sway voters. So far, there has been only one criminal case, a guilty plea by a former FBI attorney to a single charge of misrepresentation.
Under federal regulations, a special advocate can only be dismissed by the Attorney General and for specific reasons such as misconduct, dereliction of duty or conflict of interest. An attorney general must document these reasons in writing.
Barr went to the White House on Tuesday for a pre-scheduled meeting that lasted about three hours.
Trump did not directly comment on the attorney general’s remarks on the election. But his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his political campaign issued a scathing statement claiming that, “with all due respect to the attorney general, there has been no semblance” of an investigation into the president’s complaints.
Other officials of the administration who came out forcefully against Trump’s claims evidence of electoral fraud has been returned. But it’s not clear if Barr could suffer the same fate. He maintains a high position with Trump, and despite their differences, the two agree.
Still, Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer joked, “I guess he’s the next one to be fired.”
Last month, Barr issued a directive to US lawyers across the country allowing them to prosecute any “substantial allegation” of voting irregularities. before the 2020 presidential election was certified, despite no evidence at the time of widespread fraud.
This memorandum gave prosecutors the opportunity to circumvent long-standing Justice Department policy that would normally prohibit such overt actions before the election is certified. Shortly after its publication, the department’s top electoral crime official announced he would be stepping down from the post due to the memo.
Trump campaign team led by Giuliani alleged widespread conspiracy by Democrats to pour millions of illegal votes into the system without any proof. They have filed several lawsuits in battlefield states, alleging that pro-ballot observers did not have a sufficiently clear view of voting sites in some locations and that as a result something illegal must have happened. . The complaints have been repeatedly dismissed, including by Republican judges who ruled that the prosecutions lacked evidence.
But local Republicans in some battlefield states have followed Trump in making unsubstantiated claims, raising serious concerns on the potential damage to American democracy.
Trump himself continues to denounce the election in tweets and interviews although his own administration has declared the 2020 election to be the safest ever.. He recently allowed his administration to begin the transition to Biden, but he still refuses to admit he lost.
The issues they reported are typical of every election: issues with signatures, secret envelopes, and postmarks on mail-in ballots, as well as the possibility of a small number of incorrect or incorrect ballots. lost.
But they went further. Lawyer Sidney Powell has gone fictional tales of voting reversing electoral systems, German servers storing American voting information, and electoral software created in Venezuela “under the leadership of Hugo Chavez”, the late Venezuelan president who died in 2013. Powell has since been removed from office. ‘legal team after an interview she gave where she threatened to “blow up” Georgia with a “biblical” court record.
Barr did not name Powell specifically, but said, “There was an assertion that would be systemic fraud and it would be the claim that the machines were programmed primarily to distort election results. And DHS and DOJ have looked into this, and so far we haven’t seen anything to corroborate that.
In the campaign statement, Giuliani said there was “a lot of evidence of illegal voting in at least six states, which they did not examine.”
“We have many witnesses who swear under oath that they have seen crimes committed in connection with electoral fraud. To our knowledge, not a single one has been interviewed by the DOJ. The justice ministry also did not check the voting machines or use its subpoena powers to determine the truth, ”he said.
However, Barr said earlier that people are confusing 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 US Department of Justice.
“There is a growing tendency to use the criminal justice system as a sort of default solution,” he said, but first there has to be a basis for believing that there is a crime out there. which one to investigate.
“Most fraud allegations are very specific to a particular set of circumstances, actors or behaviors. … and these were dilapidated; they’re run down, ”Barr said. “Some were broad and potentially cover a few thousand voices. They were followed up. ”
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Associated Press editors Lisa Mascaro and Eric Tucker contributed to this report.
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