Barr Says Justice Department Finds No Evidence of Widespread Voter Fraud
WASHINGTON – Attorney General William Barr said Tuesday that the Justice Department has not uncovered voting fraud at a scale that could have affected the results of the presidential election.
Barr’s comments, made during an interview with the Associated Press, fly in the face of President Donald Trump’s repeated, baseless claims that the election was somehow stolen from him.
The statement also comes two days after Trump suggested during a Fox News interview that the FBI and the Justice Department may be involved in a conspiracy to prevent him from winning the election.
“This is total fraud, and how the FBI and Department of Justice — I don’t know maybe they’re involved. But how people are allowed to get away with this stuff is unbelievable,” the president told Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo.
“This election was rigged. This election was a total fraud and it continues to be as they hide,” Trump said. “And the problem we have, we go to judges and people don’t want to get involved.”
On Tuesday Barr told the Associated Press that to date, “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.”
The statement is particularly noteworthy in that it was Barr, shortly after the election, who issued a directive to U.S. attorneys across the country allowing them to pursue any “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities prior to the vote being certified, if they existed.
That memorandum gave prosecutors the ability to go around longstanding Justice Department policy that normally would prohibit such overt actions before the election was certified.
Since the election, the Trump campaign has raised about $170 million from donors to allegedly fund his fruitless attempt to get a court to overturn the election results or their certification.
However, The New York Times reported Tuesday that most of the money raised isn’t even going toward that effort.
The Times’s Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman report that the fine print in the often “hyped up” solicitations shows that the first 75% of every contribution currently goes to a new political action committee that Trump set up in mid-November, Save America, which can be used to fund his political activities going forward, including staff and travel.
Another sizable portion of each donation is directed to the Republican National Committee, they reported.
In fact, the Times said, a donor would have to give at least $5,000 to Trump’s new PAC before any funds went toward his legal efforts related to the election.
