Attorney General Bill Barr has poured some metaphorical cold water on allegations of widespread fraud from President Donald Trump, who originally appointed Barr and who the Attorney General has stuck close by during his time in his current position. Trump has repeatedly claimed that Democratic fraudsters rigged the election against him, but there’s no meaningfully conclusive evidence for this claim whatsoever — and on Tuesday, Barr confirmed to the Associated Press that no evidence has emerged that would change the outcome of the election. Barr said that U.S. Attorneys and FBI agents have been following up on fraud claims around the country, but nowhere in these investigations has any confirmation of the president’s main claims emerged.
As Barr bluntly put it, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.” In other words, there’s no indication of a systematic issue that could have fraudulently swung the election to Biden when Trump earned a legitimate victory. Barr is, for most meaningful intents and purposes, a Trump administration loyalist, and even he is now admitting the truth. Considering the frenzy with which the president and his allies have presented their fraud claims, who knows — maybe Trump will now start to suspect that Bill Barr is in on the imaginary plot against him as well.
While speaking with the Associated Press, Barr also seemed to address recent Trump team claims that Trump votes were fraudulently switched to Biden votes. Sidney Powell, who was (seemingly) on the Trump legal team for a time, even recently claimed that fraudulent election software had been created “at the direction of Hugo Chavez,” the Venezuelan dictator who died about 7 years ago. As should go without saying, there’s no meaningful evidence whatsoever that Hugo Chavez orchestrated some kind of plot to overthrow American elections… or something.
Barr commented, in part, as follows:
‘There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that… There’s a growing tendency to use the criminal justice system as sort of a default fix-all; [when] people don’t like something they want the Department of Justice to come in and “investigate”… Most claims of fraud are very particularized to a particular set of circumstances or actors or conduct. They are not systemic allegations, and those have been run down; they are being run down.’
Trump himself has peddled the idea that his votes were “deleted” by Dominion Voting Systems equipment. There is zero meaningful evidence for this claim whatsoever.
Barr’s new comments to the Associated Press emerged weeks after Barr issued a memo authorizing the investigation of “substantial allegations” of fraud and related issues throughout the nation, although at the time, no meaningful evidence pointed to systematic fraud. As the Associated Press explains, Barr’s memo “gave prosecutors the ability to go around longstanding Justice Department policy that normally would prohibit such overt” investigative efforts prior to the certification of the election results.
