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(CNN) – US Attorney General William Barr has just dealt the most credible blow to Donald Trump’s lies about the theft of the election, precisely because he used to sound more like the president’s personal attorney than a neutral arbiter of justice.
Trump has suffered repeated and shameful defeats in court. Republican governors and secretaries of state have certified results showing that he lost on November 3. And so far it has not managed to organize a coup in the Electoral College.
But Barr’s admission on Tuesday that his Justice Department has searched for significant electoral fraud but has found none to change the outcome will surely be treated as a betrayal by a president who demands sworn loyalty from his subordinates.
Barr’s comments to the Associated Press on the election – stating what every objective observer knows to be true – were of such magnitude because they reflect the extent to which Trump and his aides have broken through Washington’s democratic barriers.
By contradicting Trump’s feverish dream about voter fraud, Barr, in the end, resisted being the modern version of the president’s New York attorney Roy Cohn.
His decision represented a final failure in Trump’s often successful attempt to turn the Justice Department into a personal and potent political weapon. Try as he might, Trump has never found a fixer equal to his former New York attorney, Cohn, the notorious mob lawyer and McCarthy-era aide for whom loyalty to his clients meant a willingness to break any rule.
Barr’s political heresy came on a day when it was also clear that the president’s departure from the White House will be accompanied by the same clouds of scandal, constitutional gimmicks, and politicized legal tactics that shaped the most disruptive presidency of time. modern.
Barr offered the president a consolation prize by announcing that he had appointed prosecutor John Durham, who has been investigating the origins of the Russia investigation, as special counsel. This is not a mere title change: The designation means that Durham will continue his work during the Biden administration, becoming a political mine prepared by Barr for whoever the president-elect chooses to replace him.
The risks inherent in Trump’s continued denial of reality and claims that the election was corrupt – which his supporters eagerly accept – are becoming increasingly clear in the strain placed on Republican election officials.
Gabriel Sterling, voting systems implementation manager in the Georgia secretary of state’s office, made an emotional call Tuesday for the president to denounce the threats facing election officials.
“Everything has gone too far,” said Sterling, a Republican.
“Someone is going to be hurt, someone is going to be shot, someone is going to die and that’s not right.”
But at a White House Christmas party Tuesday night, which featured little social distancing on a day when more than 2,400 Americans died of COVID-19, Trump again falsely claimed he had won the election and reflected on “other four years’ in office, either now or after the 2024 elections.
LEEWARD: GOP Silence on Trump’s Election Falsehood Reminds McCarthy Era
Focus on last minute pardons
Several extraordinary stories also came to light Tuesday, related to the avalanche of selfish pardons the president is expected to grant before January 20, which personified the corruption that cloaked his White House.
Several Trump associates are appealing to the president in hopes of obtaining pretrial pardons before he leaves office, including his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, sources told CNN. The former New York mayor denied the claims that were first reported by The New York Times.
And in another wild occurrence, unclassified court records show that the Justice Department is investigating the possible funneling of money to the White House or the political committee in exchange for a presidential pardon.
Given the political immorality and grievance that has surrounded a White House plagued with blatant conflicts of interest from day one, these are unlikely to be the last such revelations before Trump leaves office in seven weeks.
‘We have not seen fraud …’
Barr, who in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer before the election endorsed Trump’s claims that voting by mail was not secure, gave the impression that he was looking for massive fraud but couldn’t find any.
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have had a different outcome in the election,” Barr told the AP in comments that directly contradicted Trump’s claims that the presidency was stolen.
An immediate ripple effect of the attorney general’s remarks will be to make Republican senators, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who refuses to refer to Joe Biden as president-elect, appear even more false.
Barr has taken repeated actions during his second term at the Justice Department that seem calculated to prioritize Trump’s political goals while promoting his own vision of expansive presidential power.
In his most egregious maneuver, Barr delivered a misleading summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report before the investigation into the Russia scandal was made public, prompting its author to protest. The attorney general echoed the president’s anger over the coronavirus lockdowns, calling them, in addition to slavery, “the greatest interference with civil liberties in the history of the United States.”
Barr also asked the Justice Department to take over the president’s defense in a defamation lawsuit brought against him by Jean E. Carroll, who accused him of sexual assault. And he ordered his prosecutors to dismiss charges against Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who has since been pardoned by the president.
LEEWARD: William Barr says there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the presidential elections
Despite offering that service to the president, there have been signs that Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with Barr. He attacked the attorney general before the election, complaining that he had not indicted Obama-era officials for their role in the Russia investigation.
The tension suggested that despite all of Barr’s apparent moves to placate Trump and his clear sympathy with the president for the Russia investigation in particular, he remained within the lines of evidence and legal procedure on the issue of interference. electoral.
In doing so, he became the latest member of the US national security and legal system to thwart the president’s takeover. Those numbers include former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who infuriated Trump by abstaining from the Russia probe and prompted the president to ask, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” According to a report by The New York Times.
The events of the post-election period show that Cohn’s role is being played by another New Yorker, who is not allowing evidence or facts to get in the way of his conspiratorial defense of the president: Giuliani.
A new special prosecutor
Barr’s decision to empower Durham with the powers of a special counsel to continue investigating whether intelligence officials and law enforcement violated the law while investigating the 2016 Trump campaign came as a surprise.
He said in an order that the measure was in the “public interest” and that Durham should submit a report to the attorney general when it is finished – presumably to the head of the Justice Department who will be appointed by Biden.
The decision raised concerns about further political interference, as the ongoing investigation will allow Republicans and conservative media commentators to create the impression of an alleged scandal from day one of the Biden administration. It will also allow Trump, who is showing all signs of continuing his political involvement when he leaves office, to maintain his conspiracy theories about Russia’s so-called “witch hunt.”
Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, accused Barr of using the special prosecutors law “to continue a politically motivated investigation long after Barr leaves office.”
“Having politicized the Justice Department from his early days in office, it is an appropriate coda that Barr would seek to do in his final days,” the California Democrat said in a statement.
But Trump’s ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina who, like Barr, has come under fierce pressure from the president to investigate the original Russia investigation, offered a preview of how he could leverage Durham’s role. during the Biden administration.
“To restore the credibility of the Department of Justice and the FBI after this disgraceful episode, people must be held accountable, whether through criminal prosecution or administrative action,” said Graham.
The Durham controversy was quickly overshadowed by revelations about presidential pardons.
A source familiar with the matter said Trump associates addressing the issue of preemptive pardons who would seek to protect them from prosecution include Giuliani, who has led the president’s legal battles to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in his role. of Trump’s personal attorney.
Giuliani denied having discussed a preventive pardon with the president, telling CNN that “The New York Times he is completely wrong. Additionally, he denied having spoken to anyone at the White House about a clemency for himself. Speculation also abounds that the president will offer blanket pardons to members of his family and even himself, in what would be a constitutionally dubious move.
CNN’s Katelyn Polantz, Jim Acosta, Katelyn Collins and Michael Warren contributed to this story.
