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President Donald Trump will go ahead with legal challenges to last week’s election results after United States Attorney General William Barr told federal prosecutors to investigate any “substantial” allegations of wrongdoing in voting.
Barr’s directive to prosecutors caused the top attorney overseeing the voter fraud investigations to resign in protest. It came after days of attacks on the integrity of the election by Trump and his Republican allies, who have denounced widespread election fraud, without providing evidence.
Trump has not granted the election to Democrat Joe Biden, who on Saturday got more than the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency.
The Trump campaign has filed several lawsuits alleging that the election results were flawed. Justices have thrown out lawsuits in Michigan and Georgia, and experts say Trump’s legal efforts have little chance of changing the outcome of the election.
Barr told prosecutors yesterday that “fanciful or outlandish claims” should not be a basis for investigation and his letter does not indicate that the Justice Department has discovered voting irregularities that affect the outcome of the election.
But he said he was authorizing prosecutors to “pursue substantial allegations” of irregularities in voting and the counting of votes.
Richard Pilger, who for years has served as director of the Election Crimes Section, announced in an internal email that he was resigning after reading “the new policy and its ramifications.”
Biden’s campaign said Barr was fueling Trump’s unlikely fraud allegations.
“Those are the same claims that the president and his attorneys make unsuccessfully every day as their claims are mocked in court after court,” said Bob Bauer, senior adviser to Biden.
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Earlier yesterday, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit to prevent Pennsylvania officials from certifying Biden’s victory in the battlefield state.
He alleged that the state’s vote-by-mail system violated the United States Constitution by creating “an illegal two-tier voting system” in which voting in person was subject to more supervision than voting by mail.
He ran against Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and the boards of elections in Democratic-leaning counties including Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
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