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The two had recently clashed over Barr saying the Justice Department has not found the widespread voter fraud that the outgoing president says is to blame for his loss to President-elect Joe Biden.
Assistant Attorney General Jeff Rosen will become attorney general once Barr has officially left the department on December 23.
Barr’s fall from the president’s good graces underscored how quickly a trusting hand could get nothing but praise from the boss one day and be on his naughty list only a few days or weeks later.
Barr’s latest misstep came when he admitted that the Justice Department had not found any credible allegations of widespread voter fraud.
“There has been a claim that it would be a systemic fraud and it would be the claim that the machines were essentially programmed to skew the election results. And DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to corroborate it, “Barr told the Associated Press, also referring to the Department of Homeland Security.
Justice officials have received complaints about some shenanigans, as they do in all cycles.
“The allegations of voter fraud that had been made to the country’s top law enforcement department were” highly individualized in a particular set of circumstances, actors or conduct, “Barr told the cable service.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany failed to give the attorney general a vote of confidence a day after Barr noted that Justice Department officials do not plan to press criminal charges over the president’s allegations of a conspiracy. Democrat to tip the scales by a handful. states he lost to Biden.
Always a showman obsessed with cable television, Trump announced the departure of the attorney general about 10 minutes after California’s presidential voters assigned Biden’s 55 electoral college votes. That put him well above the 270-vote threshold required to formally become president-elect.
Trump’s tweet represented his latest attempts to counter-schedule Biden’s transition period.
“I just had a very nice meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr at the White House. Our relationship has been very good, he has done an excellent job! According to the letter, Bill will leave just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family … ”, he wrote. “… Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen, a prominent person, will become Acting Attorney General. The highly respected Richard Donoghue will take over as Deputy Attorney General. Thank you all!”
With Barr’s Justice Department taking no action, the president’s legal team was busy filing lawsuits without evidence that federal judges, including some appointed by Trump, have dismissed or ruled against him.
“With all due respect to the attorney general, there has been no such thing as a Justice Department investigation,” Trump’s attorneys Rudolph Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said in a joint statement.
“Again, with the utmost respect for the attorney general, his opinion appears to be without knowledge or investigation of the substantial wrongdoing and evidence of systemic fraud,” they added.
The president himself criticized Barr’s department in a December 11 tweet: “Why didn’t the fake news media, the FBI and the Justice Department report the Biden affair BEFORE the election?”
Recently, he told reporters in the Oval Office to wait a few weeks to see Barr’s fate, and said he wanted to see what the attorney general did about the alleged election fraud.
For most of his tenure as attorney general, Barr appeared to be one of Trump’s favorites.
They shared a view that the Office of the President had broad powers, and they seemed to have some kind of agreement to help each other codify as much of the “unitary executive” theory as they could.
But Barr sometimes felt compelled to reject the president.
For example, he told a television interviewer that it was difficult to do his job when his boss constantly tweeted about Justice Department matters and cases.
Trump said he would not stop.
But Barr also often defended Trump, such as when he said the president never pressured him to drop a case against one of his associates or to try to put his finger on Justice Department affairs. He also noted that he had not launched any investigation into Trump’s enemies, a statement made even as it has now become clear that the FBI was investigating Hunter Biden, the president-elect’s sometimes troublesome son.
