UPDATE: Following a backlash against Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday over his claim that investigators have found insufficient evidence that would change the presidential election outcome, the Justice Department issued a statement last night. From the Epoch Times:
“Some media outlets have incorrectly reported that the DOJ has concluded its investigation of election fraud and announced an affirmative finding of no fraud in the election. That is not what the Associated Press reported nor what the Attorney General stated,” a DOJ spokesperson said, according to CBS News reporter Catherine Herridge.
“The Department will continue to receive and vigorously pursue all specific and credible allegations of fraud as expeditiously as possible.”
ORIGINAL ARTICLE: (Headline USA) Attorney General William Barr said Tuesday the Justice Department has not uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
His comments come despite President Donald Trump‘s repeated claims, accompanied with volumes of evidence, that the election was stolen.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Barr said U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they’ve received, but they’ve uncovered no evidence that would change the outcome of the election.
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” Barr told the AP.
The comments are especially direct coming from Barr, who has been one of the president’s most ardent allies. Before the election, he had repeatedly raised the notion that mail-in voter fraud could be especially vulnerable to fraud during the coronavirus pandemic as Americans feared going to polls and instead chose to vote by mail.
Last month, Barr issued a directive to U.S. attorneys across the country allowing them to pursue any “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities, if they existed, before the 2020 presidential election was certified.
The Trump campaign team led by Rudy Giuliani has been alleging a widespread conspiracy to dump thousands of illegal votes into the system, as votes mysteriously appeared by the tens of thousands on Election night in major cities of battleground states.
They have filed multiple lawsuits in battleground states alleging that partisan poll watchers didn’t have a view at polling sites and in some cases were aggressively kept away from tabulating. Some cities, like Milwaukee and Atlanta, feigned a shutdown of counting for the night, only to resume after observers left.
Trump’s allies have requested federal probes into the claims. Attorney Sidney Powell has alleged a scheme on the part of Dominion Voting Systems flipping votes, German servers storing U.S. voting information and election software created in Venezuela.
Barr didn’t name Powell specifically 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,” Barr said.
It has been reported in non-legacy media that a military raid on a server holding election data in Frankfurt, Germany excluded the FBI and DOJ because they are not trustworthy.
Barr said people were confusing the use of the federal criminal justice system with allegations that should be made in civil lawsuits. He said such a remedy for those complaints would be a top-down audit conducted by state or local officials, not the U.S. Justice Department.
“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.
He said first of all 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.”
Adapted from reporting by Associated Press.
