DOJ lawyer resigns in protest after Barr encourages investigation of 'voter fraud'
The attorney general is once again bending to Donald Trump’s whims — this time to help try to steal the 2020 election.
A top lawyer overseeing the Department of Justice’s Election Crimes Branch resigned in protest Monday, after Attorney General William Barr announced he would allow investigations into “substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities.”
There has been no evidence of any voting tabulation irregularities in the 2020 presidential election.
In a memo to U.S. attorneys in the criminal, civil, and national security divisions, Barr granted authority to conduct investigation into claims of voter fraud, which, as the New York Times notes, ignores the department’s policies to guard against such investigations until after votes are certified.
“Having familiarized myself with the new policy and its ramifications, I must regretfully resign from my role as director of the Election Crimes Branch,” the lawyer, Richard Pilger, wrote in an email to fellow DOJ colleagues, the New York Times reported. He said he would remain at the department in a nonsupervisory role.
Barr’s announcement came as Donald Trump and the Republican Party continue to make baseless allegations of fraud to excuse the fact that Trump overwhelmingly lost reelection to now President-elect Joe Biden.
Trump and his supporters have provided no evidence to their claims because there is none. A handful of lawsuits the Trump campaign has filed that allege fraud have already been dismissed by judges in multiple states due to lack of evidence.
Yet Barr on Monday tried to legitimize the baseless allegations by announcing an investigation into the voter fraud allegations.
It’s part of Barr’s pattern of propping up Trump’s conspiracy theories.
In April 2019, Barr announced an investigation into the debunked allegation that former President Barack Obama “spied” on Trump’s 2016 campaign. That investigation ended in October after finding no evidence of wrongdoing.
Barr also ordered an investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation, which has yet to be completed. Of course, another investigation by the Justice Department watchdog on the origins of the Russia probe has already been conducted and completed, and found there was no evidence of bias against Trump.
Trump and the GOP’s baseless assertions of fraud are already having real-world implications, leading to threats violence as well as poisoning the minds of Trump voters who now believe the election was stolen when it was not.
Trump lost — and lost big.
He currently trails Biden nationally by nearly 5 million votes — with millions more votes in Democratic states to count. And Biden is on track to win 306 Electoral College votes, the same number Trump won in 2016 that he called a “landslide.”
Legal experts say none of the lawsuits Trump and his campaign are filing will change the results of the election. Almost every lawsuit the campaign has filed has been tossed out, and others are either likely to be thrown out, or not broad enough to actually change the vote tallies.
The Trump campaign is also contemplating recounts in states he lost. However, the margins in those states — like Wisconsin and Georgia — are big enough that a recount would not change the outcome.
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
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