June 15, 2020, US Attorney General Bill Barr speaks during a
roundtable meeting on seniors with US President Donald Trump in the
Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, DC. SAUL LOEB /
AFP
US Attorney General Bill Barr said Tuesday that the
Justice Department has found no evidence of voter fraud significant
enough to reverse Democrat Joe Biden’s defeat of President Donald
Trump in the November 3 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 in an interview.
Barr made the comments as Trump’s campaign persists in trying to
prove there was fraud in key states Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania
and elsewhere, hoping to prevent Biden’s win from being made
official in the Electoral College on December 14.
“With all due respect to the Attorney General, there hasn’t been
any semblance of a Department of Justice investigation,” Trump
lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said in a statement reacting
to Barr’s announcement.
“We will continue our pursuit of the truth through the judicial
system and state legislatures,” they said.
Attorneys for Trump have claimed everything from ballot-box
stuffing and fake ballot printing, to thousands of dead people
having voted, to vote-counting machines being programmed to favor
Biden.
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In several legal filings — all rejected by the courts — the
Trump campaign has sought to invalidate millions of votes for Biden
based on claims that lacked any evidence.
Barr didn’t address specific claims.
However, he told the news agency, “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, referring to
the departments of Homeland Security and Justice.
Barr, long seen as a political loyalist to the president, said
the only potentially justifiable claims of fraud “are very
particularized to a particular set of circumstances or actors or
conduct.”
“They are not systemic allegations,” he said.
“Some have been broad and potentially cover a few thousand
votes. They have been followed up on.”
Barr’s comments were reported about the same time he arrived
Tuesday at the White House for unspecified meetings.
Around the time of the election, media reports said Trump was
unhappy with the Justice Department Chief for not making efforts to
support his reelection, and that Barr could be fired.