Attorney General Bill Barr told the Associated Press on Tuesday that the Justice Department has not unearthed evidence of fraud that would have changed the outcome of the presidential election, contradicting claims from President Trump and his team.
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” Barr told AP.
Last month, Barr gave a directive to U.S. attorneys throughout the country allowing them to pursue any “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities if they existed, before the results of the 2020 presidential race were certified.
On Tuesday, however, the attorney general alluded to and shot down claims about the Dominion Voting software, which the president’s team has said was manipulated to give Joe Biden enough fraudulent votes to pull ahead in the election.
“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,” Barr said.
He also said people have confused the use of the federal justice system with allegations that should be made in civil lawsuits, asserting that a remedy for those complaints would be a top-down audit by state or local officials — not the DOJ.
“There’s a growing tendency to use the criminal justice system as sort of a default fix-all, and if people don’t like something they want the Department of Justice to come in and ‘investigate,’” Barr told the outlet, going on to say that there must be a basis to believe there is a crime to 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,” Barr said. “Some have been broad and potentially cover a few thousand votes. They have been followed up on.”
Barr’s AP interview comes two days after President Trump told Fox News that that the DOJ has been “missing in action” on election fraud. The president complained to Sunday Morning Futures’ Maria Bartiromo that he has “not seen anything” from the DOJ or FBI regarding the 2020 election.
“You would think if you’re in the FBI or Department of Justice, this is the biggest thing you could be looking at. Where are they? I’ve not seen anything,” he said, adding that the agencies “just keep moving along and they go on to the next president.”
Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s attorney and a key member of the legal team leading the charge against the voter fraud, fired back at Barr.
“With all due respect to the Attorney General, there hasn’t been any semblance of a Department of Justice investigation,” he and Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis said in a statement. “We have gathered ample evidence of illegal voting in at least six states, which they have not examined. We have many witnesses swearing under oath they saw crimes being committed in connection with voter fraud.”
They added: “As far as we know, not a single one has been interviewed by the DOJ. The Justice Department also hasn’t audited any voting machines or used their subpoena powers to determine the truth.”
The president’s attorneys affirmed that the campaign will “continue our pursuit of the truth through the judicial system and state legislatures, and continue toward the Constitution’s mandate and ensuring that every legal vote is counted and every illegal vote is not.”
“Again, with the greatest respect to the Attorney General, his opinion appears to be without any knowledge or investigation of the substantial irregularities and evidence of systemic fraud,” they said.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) reacted to Barr’s comments by telling reporters: “I guess he is the next one to be fired because he now, too, says there is no fraud.”
“Trump seems to fire anyone who says that in that regard,” he added.
Also on Tuesday, Barr sent a letter to Congress saying he had named U.S. Attorney John Durham a special counsel, giving him extra protection that would allow him to continue his probe of the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe even if Joe Biden enters the Oval Office. This comes after the Sunday Fox interview in which President Trump asked, “And what happened to [U.S. Attorney John] Durham? Where’s Durham?”
