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US Attorney General William Barr says the Justice Department has uncovered no 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 acknowledge his defeat to President-elect Joe Biden.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Barr said that US prosecutors and FBI agents have been working to follow up on the specific complaints and information they have received, but have not uncovered any evidence that changes the outcome of the election. .
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” Barr told the AP.
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AP
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” says Attorney General William Barr.
The comments are especially direct and come from Barr, who has been one of the president’s most ardent allies.
Before the election, he had repeatedly raised the notion that voter fraud by mail could be especially vulnerable to fraud during the coronavirus pandemic, as Americans feared going to the polls and opted to vote by mail instead.
Last month, Barr issued a directive to US prosecutors across the country allowing them to pursue any “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities, if any, before the 2020 presidential election was certified, even though there was no evidence. at that time of widespread fraud.
That memorandum gave prosecutors the ability to circumvent long-standing Justice Department policy that would normally prohibit such overt actions before elections are certified.
Shortly after it was broadcast, the top election official in the crime department announced that he would be retiring from that post due to the memo.
The Trump campaign team led by Rudy Giuliani has been alleging a widespread conspiracy by Democrats to dump millions of illegal votes into the system without evidence.
They have filed multiple lawsuits in battlefield states claiming that partisan election watchers did not have a clear enough view on polling sites in some locations and therefore something illegal must have happened.
The allegations have been repeatedly dismissed, including by Republican judges who have ruled that the lawsuits lacked evidence.
Local Republicans in some battle states have followed Trump in making similar unsubstantiated claims.
Trump has criticized the election in tweets and interviews, although his own administration has said the 2020 election was the safest in history.
Susan Walsh / AP
President Donald Trump has continued to claim that his election was stolen through widespread fraud.
Trump recently allowed his administration to begin the transition to Biden, but he has still refused to admit he lost.
The issues that the Trump campaign and its allies have flagged are typical of every election: issues with signatures, secret envelopes, and postage marks on mailed ballots, as well as the possibility of a small number of ballots are incorrectly issued or lost.
But they have also requested federal investigations into the claims. Attorney Sidney Powell has told fictitious stories of electoral systems reversing votes, German servers storing US electoral information, and electoral software created in Venezuela “under the direction of Hugo Chávez,” the late Venezuelan president who died in 2013.
Powell has since been removed from the legal team after an interview he gave in which he threatened to “blow up” Georgia with a “biblical” court appearance.
Barr didn’t name Powell specifically, but said: “There has been a claim that it would be a systemic fraud and that would be the claim that the machines were essentially programmed to skew the election results. And DHS and DOJ have investigated that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to corroborate that, ”he said.
He said people were confusing the use of the federal criminal justice system with charges that should be made in civil trials. He said such a remedy for those complaints would be a top-down audit by state or local officials, not the US Department of Justice.
“There’s a growing trend to use the criminal justice system as a kind of default solution to everything, and people don’t like something that they want the Justice Department to go in and ‘investigate,'” Barr said.
He said that, in the first place, there must be a basis to believe that there is a crime to be investigated.
“Most fraud reports are highly individualized in a particular set of circumstances, actors, or conduct. They are not systemic accusations and. And those have been exhausted; they’re running out, ”Barr said. “Some have been broad and potentially cover a few thousand votes. They have been followed up. “
