WASHINGTON -- Disputing President Donald Trump's persistent claims, Attorney General William Barr declared Tuesday that the U.S. Justice Department has uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020 election.
Barr's comments, in an interview with The Associated Press, contradict efforts by Trump, his boss, to contest the results of last month's voting and block President-elect Joe Biden from taking his place in the White House.
Barr told the AP that U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they've received, but "to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election."
The comments, which drew immediate criticism from Trump attorneys, were especially notable 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 voting could be especially vulnerable to fraud during the coronavirus pandemic as Americans feared going to polls and instead chose to vote by mail.
Barr went to the White House on Tuesday for a previously scheduled meeting that lasted about three hours.
Trump didn't directly comment on the attorney general's remarks about the election. But his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and his political campaign issued a scathing statement claiming that, "with all due respect to the Attorney General, there hasn't been any semblance" of an investigation into the president's complaints.
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Other administration officials who have come out against Trump's allegations of voter-fraud have been fired. It's not clear if Barr will suffer the same fate. He maintains a lofty position with Trump, and despite their differences the two see eye-to-eye on quite a lot.
Still, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., quipped: "I guess he's the next one to be fired."
Last month, Barr issued a directive to U.S. attorneys across the country allowing them to pursue any "substantial allegations" of voting irregularities before the 2020 presidential election was certified, despite no evidence at that time of widespread fraud.
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. Soon after it was issued, the department's top elections crime official announced that he would step aside from that position because of the memo.
The Trump campaign team led by Giuliani has filed multiple lawsuits in battleground states alleging that partisan poll watchers didn't have a clear enough view at polling sites in some locations, and therefore something illegal must have happened. The claims have been repeatedly dismissed including by Republican judges who have ruled that the suits lacked evidence.
But local Republicans in some battleground states have followed Trump in making claims, prompting concerns over potential damage to American democracy.
Trump continues to rail against the election in tweets and in interviews, though his own administration has said the 2020 election was the most secure ever. He recently allowed his administration to begin the transition over to Biden, but Trump still refuses to admit he lost.
The issues they have pointed to are typical in every election: Problems with signatures, secrecy envelopes and postal marks on mail-in ballots, as well as the potential for a small number of ballots miscast or lost.
But Trump's legal team has gone further. Attorney Sidney Powell has made claims of election systems flipping votes, German servers storing U.S. voting information and election software created in Venezuela "at the direction of Hugo Chavez," -- the late Venezuelan president who died in 2013. Powell has since been removed from the legal team after an interview she gave where she threatened to "blow up" Georgia with a "biblical" court filing.
Barr didn't name Powell specifically but said: "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."
In the campaign statement, Giuliani claimed that there was "ample evidence of illegal voting in at least six states, which they have not examined."
"We have many witnesses swearing under oath they saw crimes being committed in connection with voter fraud. As far as we know, not a single one has been interviewed by the DOJ. The Justice Department also hasn't audited any voting machines or used their subpoena powers to determine the truth," he said.
However, Barr said earlier that people were confusing the use of the federal criminal justice system with allegations that should be made in civil lawsuits. He said a remedy for many complaints would be a top-down audit by state or local officials, not the U.S. Justice Department.
"There's a growing tendency to use the criminal justice system as sort of a default fix-all," he said, but first there must be a basis to believe there is a crime to investigate.
"Most claims of fraud are very particularized to a particular set of circumstances or actors or conduct. ... And those have been run down; they are being run down," Barr said. "Some have been broad and potentially cover a few thousand votes. They have been followed up on."
221,000 BALLOTS
The Trump campaign team filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Wisconsin seeking to disqualify more than 221,000 ballots in the state's two most Democratic counties, a long-shot attempt to overturn Biden's win in a battleground state he lost by nearly 20,700 votes.
The Trump team filed the day after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and the chairwoman of the Wisconsin Elections Commission certified Biden as the winner of the state's 10 Electoral College votes. Trump asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to take the case directly, rather than have it start in a lower court, and order Evers to withdraw the certification.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court gave Evers until 8:30 p.m. Tuesday to respond to the lawsuit, an unusually tight deadline that speaks to how quickly the court is likely to decide the case.
The state's highest court, controlled 4-3 by conservatives, also is considering whether to hear two other lawsuits filed by conservatives seeking to invalidate ballots cast during the presidential election. Separately, two Wisconsin Republicans filed a new federal lawsuit Tuesday that mirrors some of Trump's claims and asks a judge to declare him the winner in Wisconsin.
Trump's lawsuit repeats many claims that he made during a recount of votes in Milwaukee and Dane counties that large swaths of absentee votes were illegally cast. Local officials rejected his claims during the recount, and Trump is challenging procedures that have been in place for years and never been found to be illegal.
Trump's legal team is not challenging any ballots cast in conservative counties where he won.
Biden campaign spokesman Nate Evans called the lawsuit "completely baseless and not rooted in facts on the ground." Evers said it was "without merit."
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, noted that the lawsuit doesn't allege that anyone was ineligible to vote, but instead seeks to create a two-tiered election system where voters in Dane and Milwaukee counties are disenfranchised "under much stricter rules than citizens in the rest of the state."
Trump's Wisconsin attorney, Jim Troupis, said in a statement that voters "deserve election processes with uniform enforcement of the law, plain and simple."
Also Tuesday, Republicans on the Wisconsin Elections Commission asked the Democratic chairwoman to resign after she finalized election results Monday. They argued that the commission should have been involved with that process, while Chairwoman Ann Jacobs, who refused to resign, said she was following state law and precedent.
PENNSYLVANIA SUIT
A group of Pennsylvania Republicans said Tuesday that they have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block a decision by the state's highest court dismissing a challenge of the state's mail-in voting system.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Saturday said the lawsuit's "extraordinary" request to throw out millions of ballots came too late.
The Republican lawsuit challenged Act 77, the 2019 statute in Pennsylvania that allows voters to cast mail ballots for any reason. Their argument is that the law, passed by the Republican-led Legislature and signed by the state's Democratic governor, violated the state constitution's requirements on who could receive mail-in ballots.
Trump's allies asked the state court to invalidate all votes cast by mail in the general election -- more than 2.5 million in total -- or direct the state Legislature to appoint its own slate of presidential electors.
The state Supreme Court dismissed the case Saturday, ruling that petitioners waited more than a year to sue, and only then after the results of the election were clear.
The filing aimed at the U.S. Supreme Court asks the justices to stop any further certification of the Pennsylvania vote. It is directed to Justice Samuel Alito, who is the justice responsible for receiving emergency requests from the region.
Generally, the U.S. Supreme Court does not second-guess state courts when they are interpreting their own constitutions.
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Additionally, a judge in Phoenix has scheduled a Thursday trial in Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward's lawsuit that seeks to annul Biden's victory in the state.
A judge is letting Ward's lawyers and experts compare the signatures on 100 mail-in ballot envelopes with signatures on file to determine whether there were any irregularities.
Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs' office, which certified Arizona's election results on Monday, said there was no factual basis for conducting such a review.
Information for this article was contributed by Michael Balsamo, Lisa Mascaro, Eric Tucker and Scott Bauer of The Associated Press; and by Robert Barnes and Elise Viebeck of The Washington Post.
