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WASHINGTON (AP) – Attorney General William Barr said on Tuesday the Justice Department had not uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
His comments come despite repeated claims by President Donald Trump that the election was stolen and his refusal to concede his loss to President-elect Joe Biden.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Barr said U.S. attorneys and FBI agents were working to follow up on the specific complaints and information they received, but found no evidence that would change the election result.
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome of the election,” Barr told the AP.
The comments are particularly blunt from Barr, who has been one of the president’s most ardent allies. Before the elections, he had repeatedly mentioned the notion This electoral fraud by mail could be particularly vulnerable to fraud during the coronavirus pandemic, as Americans feared going to the polls and instead chose to vote by mail.
Last month, Barr issued a directive to US lawyers across the country allowing them to prosecute any “substantial allegation” of voting irregularities., if they existed, 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 Rudy 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. Local Republicans in some battlefield states have followed Trump in making similar, unsubstantiated claims.
Trump has insulted the election in tweets and in interviews despite his own administration saying the 2020 election is the safest ever.. Trump recently allowed his administration to begin the transition to Biden, but has always refused to admit he lost.
The problems reported by the Trump campaign and his allies are typical of every election: problems with signatures, secret envelopes and postmarks on ballots in the mail, as well as the possibility of a small number of ballots. incorrect or lost votes.
But they also called for federal inquiries into the claims. 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 looked into that, and so far we haven’t seen anything to prove it, ”Barr said.
He said people were confusing the use of the federal criminal justice system with allegations that should be made in civil proceedings. He said such a recourse for these complaints would be a top-down audit conducted by state or local officials, not the US Department of Justice.
“There is a growing trend to use the criminal justice system as a sort of default solution, and people don’t like something that they want the Department of Justice to step in and ‘investigate’,” said Barr.
He said first of all that there must be some basis to believe that there is a crime to be investigated.
“Most fraud allegations are very specific to a particular set of circumstances, actors or behaviors. These are not systemic allegations and. 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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