In a blow to President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of ballot cheating, Attorney General William Barr said the U.S. Department of Justice has not found significant voter fraud that would change the outcome of the presidential election.
U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have followed up on specific complaints and information they received, Barr said in an interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday.
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” Barr said.
Before the election, Barr — one of Trump’s staunchest allies — repeatedly suggested that mail-in votes could be especially vulnerable to fraud during the coronavirus pandemic.
His AP interview signals his rejection of post-election claims by Trump and his supporters of massive fraud to deprive the president of re-election, Bloomberg reported.
Despite no evidence of widespread fraud, Barr in November gave prosecutors around the country authority to pursue any “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities before the 2020 election was certified. His memo allowed prosecutors to go around longstanding Justice Department policy that normally prohibits such overt actions before an election is certified.
Richard Pilger, director of the Election Crimes Branch of the Justice Department, resigned in protest over Barr’s memo letting federal prosecutors investigate voter fraud before the results of the presidential race are certified.
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Trump’s campaign and his allies have pointed issues that are typical in every election: Problems with signatures, secrecy envelopes and postal marks on mail-in ballots, and the potential for miscast or lost ballots, AP reported.
Attorney Sidney Powell reported election systems flipping votes, German servers storing U.S. voting information and election software created in Venezuela “at the direction of Hugo Chavez” — the late Venezuelan president who died in 2013. Powell has since been removed from the legal team after an interview she gave where she threatened to “blow up” Georgia with a “biblical” court filing.
Barr didn’t name Powell but said, “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.”
“Most claims of fraud are very particularized to a particular set of circumstances or actors or conduct,” Barr told AP. “They are not systemic allegations and. And those have been run down; they are being run down. Some have been broad and potentially cover a few thousand votes. They have been followed up on.”
