US Attorney General Bill Barr told AP that the Department of Justice has not seen evidence of fraud on a scale that could change the outcome of the election, but President Donald Trump’s attorneys replied he never even looked.
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” the agency quoted Barr as saying on Tuesday. He said both federal prosecutors and the FBI have been looking into specific complaints but found nothing that would change the media consensus that Democrat Joe Biden defeated Trump earlier this month.
Trump’s lawyers, led by Rudy Giuliani, have launched a series of legal challenges in places like Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, challenging large amounts of mail-in ballots they say weren’t properly verified. They’ve also claimed votes were cast by long-dead people, observers weren’t allowed to observe the counts, and other irregularities.
Without naming any names, Barr said there was only one claim of systemic fraud – that voting machines were programmed to shift millions of votes – “And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.” While he did not name any names, this was a claim made by Sidney Powell, an attorney not directly affiliated with the president’s legal team, in her lawsuit in Georgia.
“With all due respect to the Attorney General, there hasn’t been any semblance of a Department of Justice investigation,” Giuliani responded on Tuesday, accusing the DOJ of not interviewing any of their sworn witnesses and refusing to audit voting machines or subpoena officials.
Barr did tell AP that most of the complaints about the election ought to be handled by state and local officials conducting audits, rather than making a federal case out of everything.
“There’s a growing tendency to use the criminal justice system as sort of a default fix-all, and people don’t like something they want the Department of Justice to come in and ‘investigate,’” he said.
Within days of the election, Barr had authorized the DOJ to follow up on “substantial allegations” of irregularities with the vote, arguing it was “imperative that the American people can trust that our elections were conducted in such a way that the outcomes accurately reflect the will of the voters.”
