Attorney General William Barr confirmed that the Justice Department did not find any evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election. This remark does not coincide with President Donald Trump's dubious claims that the vote was rigged and that the Democrats stole the election from him.
Barr made this statement during an interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday. Barr, who has been a supporter of Trump during his presidency, has contradicted the president's claims of widespread fraud, joining other Republicans who have denied his baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud.
Barr went on to say that they have not witnessed voter fraud on a scale that could have potentially resulted in a different outcome in the election. Barr, who backed Trump's mail-in voting claims being unsafe before the election, said that the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security have investigated those claims and come up empty.
There's been one claim, Barr noted, that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were rigged to change the election results. He went on to say that both the DHS and DOJ have investigated that but did not find anything to prove that.
Besides making this remark, Barr publicly revealed that he had appointed Connecticut US Attorney John Durham as special counsel that will look into whether law enforcement and intelligence commit a breach of law while investigating the Trump presidential campaign in 2016. In other words, the investigation into the president's 2016 campaign will be kept alive even in the Biden administration, CNN reported.
Trump and his attorneys have continued their desperate legal challenges to the presidential election results in some key states. Still, much to their chagrin, a number of them have already certified their results. Governor of Arizona Doug Ducey said Monday that his state's elections were secure, drawing criticism from Trump.
It can be recalled that Barr had said that mail-in voting opens the floodgates to fraud, echoing Trump's claims of the dangers of this type of voting. However, election security experts denied those claims, with one of the Trump administration's own security experts touting the 2020 vote as the most secure in American history.
As if that weren't enough, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released a statement in Nov., confirming that there is no evidence showing any voting system either deleted, changed, or lost votes or was in any way compromised. Trump responded to the statement by firing the CISA director, Christopher Krebs.