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On Tuesday, Attorney General William Barr said the US Department of Justice hasn’t discovered evidence of alleged widespread voter fraud to change the result of the 2020 presidential election. He delivered his words in spite of President Trump’s repeated claims that the election was stolen and his refusal to concede his loss to President-elect Joe Biden. Barr said in a press interview that the US attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up on specific complaints and information they’ve received. But, they haven’t discovered any evidence that would change the result of the 2020 election. Barr also said, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election”. It is important that these comments directly came from Barr, who has been one of the president’s most ardent allies.

Barr had repeatedly raised the notion before the 2020 election 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. Point to be noted that he issued a directive last month, to US attorneys across the country allowing them to pursue any substantial allegations of voting irregularities if they existed. The memorandum provided prosecutors the ability to go around the longstanding policy of the US Department of Justice that normally would prohibit such overt actions before the election was certified. The top elections crime official of the department announced just after it was issued. He said he would step aside from that position because of the memo. The Trump campaign team has been alleging a widespread conspiracy by Democrats to dump millions of illegal votes into the system.

Trump campaign team also 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. It is noteworthy that the claims have been repeatedly dismissed including by Republican judges who have ruled the suits lacked evidence. Local Republicans in some battleground states have followed Trump in making similar unsupported claims. President Trump recently allowed his administration to start the transition over to Biden but has still refused to admit Biden’s victory. 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”.