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Current and former officials in the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) have reacted with anger and dismay to the latest move in support of Donald Trump by William Barr, the attorney general who has further stoked discord around the President’s refusal to admit electoral defeat by approving federal investigations. in electoral fraud, despite little evidence of irregularities.
Barr’s two-page memo, delivered to 93 United States prosecutors across the country on Monday, was immediately condemned by leading figures inside and outside the Justice Department.
In the most dramatic response, the top Justice Department official in charge of voter fraud investigations, Richard Pilger, resigned his post, telling colleagues he did so because of the “ramifications” of Barr’s move.
in a statementPilger noted that for the past 40 years the Justice Department has followed a clear policy of non-intervention in elections, and criminal investigations are only conducted after contests are certified and completed.
Barr’s memo breaks that rule by giving federal prosecutors the green light to investigate what he called “seemingly credible allegations of wrongdoing.” His action was specifically targeting highly contested presidential races in swing states with prolonged vote counts caused by the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Justice Department has received complaints about unfounded wrongdoing from three states: Nevada, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Outside of the Justice Department, there was widespread concern that Barr has once again mobilized the power of the Justice Department in a politicized direction. The memo was interpreted to cast doubt on the appropriateness of the election, which was called for Joe Biden on Saturday following his victory by a clear and growing margin in Pennsylvania.
Vanita Gupta, former director of the Justice Department’s civil rights division under Barack Obama, denounced Barr’s tactics as “alarming.”
“Let’s be clear, this is about disruption, misinformation and sowing chaos,” he said. said On twitter:
Gupta, now executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Barr’s goal was “to stoke division, polarization and lies”, to “undermine the confidence of Trump voters in the outcome and, ultimately from the Biden administration. “
Other former prosecutors, jurists and election experts debated how serious Barr’s decision might be. Steve Vladeck, a national security law specialist at the University of Texas, emphasized that the Justice Department has no power to prevent states from certifying election results; only judges can.
But Vladeck went on to describe Barr’s memo called it “ominous” in the sense that it “perpetuates the narrative of illegitimacy” that has been espoused by Trump and senior Republicans in hopes of tarnishing Biden’s victory.
Preet Bharara, whom Trump fired in 2017 as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, gave a similarly nuanced response. By now, he said, he was “more upset than scared” by Barr’s intervention.
“But stay tuned.”
Barr specifically refers in his memo to the 40-year-old policy of hands-off that he has now trampled on. He denigrates it as a “passive and delayed enforcement approach” and says it was never a “hard and fast rule”.
Later in the letter, he softens his advice to federal prosecutors, urging them to follow “appropriate caution” in line with the Justice Department’s commitment to “fairness, neutrality, and nonpartisanship.”
“Misleading, speculative, fanciful or implausible claims should not be a basis for initiating federal investigations,” he says.
Those rulings sparked some speculation that Barr was simply following motions to placate Trump. By all accounts, the president has been on a war footing since the election for Biden was called, and ordered his administration to take any action to pass on the lie that the election was stolen.
But such a theory of Barr’s behavior is countered by the fact that this is not the first time he has tried to pressure prosecutors to intervene in elections. Three weeks before Election Day, he made a similar tactic to lift the decades-long restriction on intervening in the middle of a race.
After being appointed by Trump to be the nation’s highest-ranking prosecutor in February 2019, Barr has been willing to openly side with the president in apparent violation of the time-honored independence of his office. One notable example was his handling of the release of the Mueller report on collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, which was criticized as a turnaround on behalf of the president.
More recently, Barr has mirrored Trump’s attempts to cast doubt on the election. In particular, the attorney general has stepped up the White House’s unfounded claims about rampant vote-by-mail fraud, a form of voter participation that some states have long practiced and was widely used this year.
Barr went as far as lying on live television about a Texas election crime indictment. Officials were forced to retract the statement, as the alleged incident never took place.
Doubts about Barr’s intentions increased after reported that a few hours before the letter was released to prosecutors, he met with Mitch McConnell, the Republican Majority Leader in the Senate.
McConnell has kept up with Trump, showing no signs that he is prepared to break with a president whose resistance to accept defeat breaks the norm of a peaceful transition of power that has been central to American democracy since 1800.
McConnell, who will likely continue to control the Senate for Republicans unless Democrats can win two runoff elections in Georgia in January, has declared his loyalty to Trump.
He said: “President Trump is 100% within his right to investigate allegations of wrongdoing and weigh his legal options.”
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