US Attorney General William Barr, a top ally of President Donald Trump, has said the Justice Department has not uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
Barr said US 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 effected a different outcome in the election,” Barr said.
His comments come despite President Trump’s repeated baseless claims that the election was stolen, Trump’s effort to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election and his refusal to concede his loss to President-Elect Joe Biden.
“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,” Barr said, referring to the assertion that ballot machines were hacked to give more votes to Biden.
Barr said that the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security have investigated that claim, “and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.”
“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 added. He also told the AP that he had appointed a veteran prosecutor to continue investigating the origins of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into alleged election meddling.
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.
Shortly after Barr’s statement was published, Trump tweeted out more baseless claims of voter fraud. His attorney Rudy Giuliani and his campaign issued a scathing statement claiming that, “with all due respect to the Attorney General, there hasn’t been any semblance” of an investigation.
Barr is not the first senior US official to declare the election free from tampering.
Chris Krebs, who headed the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, was fired last month after he disputed Trump’s fraud claims. The 2020 election “was the most secure in American history,” he had said.
Rita Osakwe/Agency Reports