Trump doesn't rule out firing Barr, calls his voter fraud debunking 'a disappointment'

Chris Sommerfeldt, New York Daily News
·3 min read

It might be time for Attorney General William Barr to start packing his bags.

President Donald Trump suggested Thursday that he may fire Barr over his affirmation that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

“Ask me that in a number of weeks from now,” Trump said in the Oval Office after a reporter asked if he still has confidence in the attorney general in light of his election statement.

The outgoing president, who’s refusing to admit that he lost the election to Joe Biden, claimed Barr’s Justice Department hasn’t found any evidence of widespread fraud because “he hasn’t looked.”

“He hasn’t done anything,” Trump said. “They haven’t looked very hard, which is a disappointment, to be honest with you.”

A spokeswoman for Barr did not return a request for comment.

Barr piqued Trump’s ire by telling The Associated Press in an interview on Tuesday that “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

The attorney general’s pronouncement ran directly counter to Trump’s baseless insistence that Biden’s victory was facilitated by a massive Democratic conspiracy to “rig” the election.

“They should be looking at all of this fraud,” Trump said during Thursday’s appearance in the Oval Office. “This is not civil, this is criminal stuff. This is very bad criminal stuff so I’ll just say this: It was a fixed election. It was a rigged election.”

Trump’s Barr-bashing aside, the attorney general said his department has investigated a number of complaints alleging election irregularities.

However, echoing the assessment of election security officials across the country, Barr said the complaints pertained to isolated incidents and did not suggest any existence of “systemic” fraud.

Despite a lack of evidence, Trump’s campaign has engaged in a long-shot legal battle to subvert Biden’s election, claiming millions of votes were cast illegally in battleground states won by the Democrat. Most of the lawsuits have been thrown out, with judges noting that there’s no evidence to justify the campaign’s demands for sweeping court action.

The latest legal defeat came Thursday as the Wisconsin Supreme Court refused to hear a Trump campaign lawsuit that called for more than 200,000 ballots to be invalidated. Biden won the state by about 20,000 votes.

Governors in most of the states targeted by Trump have already certified their election results, making his legal challenges all but moot. Meanwhile, Biden is barreling ahead with his transition process, having finally gotten the formal ascertainment as president-elect on Nov. 23.

Nonetheless, Trump continues to refuse to concede while vowing to push ahead with election challenges, potentially even beyond the Electoral College’s final certification of Biden’s victory on Dec. 14.

“This is probably the most fraudulent election anyone’s ever seen,” Trump said Thursday.

———

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