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Attorney General William Barr said Tuesday that the Justice Department has uncovered no evidence of widespread electoral 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 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.
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” said US 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.
They came even as Trump continued Tuesday to call the election ‘rigged’ and released clips of a series of unverified claims of voter fraud.
It also came on a day when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) Made reference to the “new administration” when President-elect Joe Biden introduced his economic team.
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 issued, the department’s top election crimes official announced that he would be retiring from that position 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 battle states claiming that partisan election observers did not have a clear enough view at polling sites in some places and therefore something illegal must have happened.
Giuliani and Trump’s attorney Jenna Ellis criticized Barr’s comments in a statement.
Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, continues the effort to reverse the vote in the states that Trump lost
Barr said DHS has investigated claims that voting machines deliver votes to Joe Biden. Attorney Sidney Powell raised the accusation, which also linked Venezuela, Cuba and China, at a press conference with other Trump attorneys.
Trump has tweeted 24 times about Dominion Voting Systems, claiming election was ‘rigged’
Trump has said the rigged elections fueled a conspiracy theory about voting machines
Trump wrote last month that he will ‘never budge’
“With all due respect to the Attorney General, there has been nothing resembling a Justice Department investigation,” they wrote. “We have gathered extensive evidence of illegal voting in at least six states, which they have not examined. We have many witnesses who swore under oath who saw crimes being committed in connection with voter fraud. To our knowledge, the Justice Department has not interviewed any. The Justice Department has also not audited any voting machine or used its subpoena powers to determine the truth, ”they continued.
Nonetheless, we will continue our search for the truth through the judicial system and state legislatures, and we will continue toward the mandate of the Constitution and ensuring that every legal vote is counted and every illegal vote is not. Once again, with the utmost respect for the Attorney General, his opinion appears to be without knowledge or investigation of the substantial irregularities and evidence of systemic fraud, ”they concluded.
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. Trump recently allowed his administration to begin the transition to Biden, but he has still refused to admit he lost.
The problems that the Trump campaign and its allies have pointed to are typical of all elections: problems with signatures, secret envelopes, and postage marks on mailed ballots, as well as the possibility of a small number of ballots being cast incorrectly. or get 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. Since then, Powell has 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 did not 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 looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate it, ”Barr 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 is a growing tendency 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 into 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. ‘
Giuliani and Trump last week discussed a possible presidential pardon for Giuliani, the New York Times reported, a possible indication that Giuliani is betting on the end of Trump’s term. Giuliani denied the report.
