Defying Trump, Attorney General Barr says the DOJ and FBI didn't discover any evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election

• Attorney General Bill Barr said Tuesday that the DOJ and FBI have not uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. 
• "To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election," Barr told the Associated Press.
• Barr is the latest Republican official to break ranks with President Donald Trump over allegations that substantial voter fraud led to illegitimate election results.
• The attorney general's statements are particularly significant give that he spread baseless claims that foreign countries could tamper with mail ballots and contribute to a fraudulent election process.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Attorney General Bill Barr on Tuesday said the Justice Department and FBI have not uncovered voter fraud at a level that would alter the 2020 election results. 

"To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election," Barr told the Associated Press.

Barr is one of President Donald Trump's most stalwart defenders and his statements Tuesday could draw the president's ire in the waning days of his administration. Barr's comments are especially significant given that he spent months fanning the president's conspiracy theories about how an increase in mail-in voting this year would lead to a fraudulent election outcome.

In October, Barr drew backlash for authorizing federal prosecutors who suspect election-related offenses to take public investigative steps, even if those steps alter the outcome of the election. Barr's change to longstanding DOJ policy prompted the resignation of Richard Pilger, the head of the department's election crimes unit, last month.

The DOJ was also criticized for its handling of a case in September involving a small number of military absentee ballots in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. 

The department released two short and ambigious statements saying ballots had been "discarded" in Luzerne County, sparking confusion and fanning conspiracy theories about voter fraud. Former prosecutors and election experts said the DOJ's decision to release information about an ongoing investigation and mention who who the ballots were cast for was highly unusual and undermined voters' right to a secret ballot.

Shortly after, the DOJ and Luzerne County officials announced that the error was inadvertent and appeared to be the result of under-trained workers mistaking ballot envelopes for envelopes containing absentee ballot applications.

 Trump's lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, rebuked Barr in a statement after the AP story was published.

"With all due respect to the attorney general, there hasn't been a semblance of a Department of Justice investigation," they wrote. "We have gathered ample evidence of illegal voting in at least six states, which they have not examined."

Barr appeared to preempt that argument in his AP interview and said the court system, rather than the federal law enforcement apparatus, is the best venue for the Trump campaign to pursue its legal claims. 

"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,'" Barr said, adding that "most claims of fraud are very particularized to a particular set of circumstances or actors or conduct. They are not systemic allegations."

The Trump campaign and Republican officials have filed more than two dozen election lawsuits across the country and haven't won a single case. The six battleground states that decided the election — Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada — have also certified their election results, cementing President-elect Joe Biden's victory.

Meanwhile, Trump has publicly lashed out at administration officials and Republican lawmakers for refusing to side with his claims about a rigged election.

The Republican lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell have also claimed, without any credible evidence, that the election results were hacked or rigged with computers that erased or swapped votes.

Trump and his allies have gone after one election vendor, Dominion Voting Systems, with baseless claims that the company was responsible for "switching" votes from Trump to Biden and accused the company of having ties to nefarious communist actors in Venezuela and Cuba. The Colorado-based company has denied all the allegations. 

In 2020, more than 90% of US voters used either hand-marked paper ballots, ballot-marking devices that produce a paper ballot, or voting machines with voter-verifiable paper receipts. Election experts also told Business Insider that overall, the 2020 election was the safest and most secure in US history.

Barr similarly told AP that the federal government found no evidence that voting machines or voting systems were tampered with.

"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," he said.