With a little over two months left in office, Attorney General Bill Barr decided to strengthen his legacy as perhaps the most partisan attorney general in U.S. history – worse even than John Mitchell, who went to jail for his role in the Watergate coverup. With Trump obviously defeated in the Nov. 3 election, Barr ordered U.S. attorneys around the country less than a week later to look for evidence of voting irregularities to support President Trump’s bogus accusations of voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Barr’s overt intervention in the 2020 election contradicted testimony that he gave to the Senate Judiciary Committee in January 2019 before his confirmation that the Justice Department was obliged to stay out of pending election-related investigations. Barr gave that answer to Texas’s Republican senator John Cornyn as Cornyn was pressing him to criticize the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s links to Russian agents before the 2016 election.
Taking the cue, Barr agreed that the Justice Department has policies against any intervention in pending campaigns and, in a follow-up answer to Cornyn, explained the rationale. It would be improper, Barr explained, for the incumbent administration to use “the levers of power” for its own benefit to the disadvantage of the opposing party.
.Producers for MSNBC’s All in with Chris Hayes found that clip in the video archive and aired it last week as evidence of Barr’s blatant hypocrisy in reversing prior DOJ policy. Barr disclosed the reversal in a memo acknowledging that he had already directed federal prosecutors in some “specific instances” to investigate “substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions in certain cases.”
Barr’s memo apparently hit Justice Department email boxes on Monday [Nov. 9] and produced what the Washington Post characterized in a headline as “shock and frustration” among DOJ careerists. Barr had proposed the new stance weeks earlier, the Post reported, but DOJ lawyers “pushed back vigorously” and “thought they had dissuaded him . . . .”
In fact, Barr’s memo resulted the very next day in the resignation of the Justice Department’s veteran election-crimes chief. Richard Pilger, head of the department’s election-crimes branch, announced the resignation in a letter to colleagues explaining that he was leaving after “having familiarized myself with the new policy and its ramifications.” Justice Department policy dating from 40 years earlier restricted any investigations of election issues until after officials had certified election results.
Barr, it must be remembered, was appointed for a second term as attorney general after President Trump fired his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for refusing to recuse himself from overseeing the special counsel’s investigation of Russia’s role in the 2016 election. Barr, a Republican partisan in his previous tenure at Main Justice, has exhibited no signs of discomfort in his Faustian bargain to do whatever Trump wanted in order to keep the job and stay in the president’s good graces.
Before this most recent homage to his boss, Barr’s two major sops to Trump included his attempt to scuttle the federal prosecution of his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, for lying to Congress and his intervention to reduce the prison sentence for Trump’s longtime political confidant, Roger Stone.
In the current election, Barr had been amplifying Trump’s warnings about likely voter fraud by warning, with scant evidence, that widespread mail balloting is inevitably “open to fraud and coercion.” He aired that view in an appearance on CNN in early September that included an exaggerated account of suspected fraud in a city council election in Texas three years ago. Barr was so far off base in the telling that the local prosecutor felt obliged to describe Barr’s summary of the case as consisting of “half-truths and alternative facts.”
Barr’s new policy on investigating possible irregularities disturbed lawyers at Main Justice and, eventually, prompted more than a dozen local U.S. attorneys to push back in a letter sent to Barr on Friday [Nov. 13]. The local prosecutors, sixteen in all, complained that Barr’s memo had been “developed and announced without consulting nonpartisan career professionals” and that it “thrust[ ] career prosecutors into partisan politics.”
Responding to the second round of bad PR for the department, a DOJ spokeswoman emphasized that Barr included a number of caveats in the memo. The memo, the spokeswoman noted, specified that prosecutors should “exercise appropriate caution and restraint and maintain the department’s absolute commitment to fairness, neutrality, and nonpartisanship.” Barr also cautioned against opening investigations based on “[s]pecious, speculative, fanciful, or far-fetched claims.”
That characterization well describes the Trump campaign’s claims of voting irregularities in state and federal courts to date. One newspaper headline noted that Trump’s claims had “fizzled” in court. More tellingly, the interagency election monitoring council within the administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a report last week [Nov. 12] that characterized the 2020 election as “the most secure in American history” and found “no evidence” that any voting systems had been compromised.
The report was issued by the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, which includes officials from the DHS agency, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and state election directors from around the country. Benjamin Hovland, chair of the Election Assistance Commission, buttressed the report’s findings by warning that “baseless accusations” of voting irregularities, including those from Trump, are “playing into the hands of our foreign adversaries who want to see us lose faith in our democracy.”
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