Attorney General Bill Barr told the Associated Press on Tuesday the Department of Justice has found no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the presidential election.
In an interview … 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 said in the interview.
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.
Barr’s comments come as Donald Trump refuses to concede the election saying it was “stolen” from him.
Trump and his team of lawyers, led by Rudy Giuliani, have spent the past month filing lawsuits and alleging a widespread voting conspiracy. The lawsuits have been dismissed and the conspiracy theory has proven to be bogus. But true to form, team Giuliani is now attacking the Attorney General.
Also on Tuesday, another key Trump ally — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “signaled he was ready to move on after a surreal month of lawsuits, conspiracy theories and denials by the president of a loss that has proven durable and decisive,” reported the New York Times.
McConnell has thus far refused to recognize Mr. Trump’s election loss. But on Tuesday he moved closer to “accepting the reality that Mr. Biden would be in the White House next year,” while discussing the prospects for more pandemic stimulus in 2021, the Times says.
“After the first of the year, there is likely to be a discussion about some additional package of some size next year, depending upon what the new administration wants to pursue,” Mr. McConnell said at a news conference.
“Taken together, Mr. Barr’s direct declaration and Mr. McConnell’s indirect reference to Mr. Biden’s new administration represent a major, if not unexpected, blow to the president’s post-election effort to change the results from two men who he has often relied on for political cover,” the Times says.
In the same AP interview Tuesday, Barr revealed he has given “extra protection” to U.S. Attorney John Durham, who Barr appointed to investigate the origins of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.
Barr said that in October, he appointed Durham as a special counsel under the same federal statute that governed Mueller in the Russia investigation, which will help shield Durham from being fired.
Federal regulations say a special counsel can be dismissed only by the attorney general — in this case, Barr — and only for certain reasons: misconduct, dereliction of duty or conflict of interest.
