Welcome to The Daily 202 newsletter! Tell your friends to sign up here. On this day in 1613, London’s Globe theater, home for years to Shakespeare’s plays, burned down. The Associated Press informs me it caught fire from a cannon shot during a performance of “Henry VIII.” The latest revelations about former attorney general William P. Barr, much like the Mueller report, are not an exoneration, however much he might like that to be the case. ABC’s Jonathan Karl reported this weekend in the Atlantic on the series of events that led Barr, grudgingly, in between bites of salad, nearly a month after the 2020 election, to mumble his rejection of President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that voter fraud had cost him a second term. Drawing on material from his forthcoming book, “Betrayal”, Jon described Barr, at lunch with a reporter on Dec. 1, having to be prompted by a spokesperson to repeat the words Trump would come to see as an unpardonable betrayal. “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” Barr said. “My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr told Jon in an interview. “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all b------t.” But as Jon noted: “Barr and those close to him have a reason to tell his version of this story. He has been widely seen as a Trump lackey who politicized the Justice Department. But when the big moment came after the election, he defied the president who expected him to do his bidding.”  Attorney General William P. Barr appears with President Donald Trump during a coronavirus task force briefing in March 2020. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) |
Read that again: “When the big moment came after the election.” The timing matters. Barr ultimately denied Trump’s false claims, which eventually led to the deadly Jan. 6 riot by supporters of the outgoing president, angry Americans who believed he’d been robbed of a second term. But in the run-up to the election, when Trump was priming those same supporters to believe the falsehoods that he could only lose if cheated and mail-in voting was rife with fraud — setting the table for the post-election chaos — Barr wasn’t just silently letting those claims sail by, uncorrected. He was making them himself. Before getting started, let’s recall: There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the United States, and Trump’s special commission investigating the 2016 election disbanded after failing to turn up any evidence to the contrary. But in a June 2020 interview with NPR, Barr said elections conducted primarily with mail-in votes cannot be secure because “there's so many occasions for fraud there that cannot be policed” and suggested foreign countries might counterfeit ballots. Asked whether he had any evidence, Barr replied: “No, it’s obvious.” Election experts at the time doubted his claims, mail-in ballots come with security measures, and nothing has emerged to support his contention. In a September 2020 interview with CNN, Barr said much the same thing: States adopting vote-by-mail were “reckless and dangerous and people are playing with fire.” Barr told the network: “Elections that have been held with mail have found substantial fraud and coercion.” (That’s not true either.) “For example, we indicted someone in Texas, 1,700 ballots collected, he — from people who could vote, he made them out and voted for the person he wanted to. Okay?” Not okay, no. As my colleague Matt Zapotosky chronicled, there was no such federal indictment. A spokeswoman for Barr blamed “a memo prepared within the Department that contained an inaccurate summary about the case.” In a September 2020 interview with a Chicago Tribune columnist, Barr made the evidence-free claim that moving to mail-in ballots meant “we’re back in the business of selling and buying votes” and said fraudsters could simply pay off a mail carrier to steal ballots. “Someone will say the president just won Nevada. ‘Oh, wait a minute! We just discovered 100,000 ballots! Every vote will be counted!’ Yeah, but we don’t know where these freaking votes came from,” Barr told the columnist. Barely a week after the election, my colleagues Zapotosky and Devlin Barrett reported: “[Barr] gave federal prosecutors approval to pursue allegations of ‘vote tabulation irregularities’ in certain cases before results are certified and indicated he had already done so ‘in specific instances’ — a reversal of long-standing Justice Department policy that quickly drew internal and external criticism for fueling unfounded claims of massive election fraud pushed by President Trump and other conservatives.” Days later, Matt and Tom Hamburger reported assistant U.S. attorneys urged Barr to rescind that directive, saying they saw no evidence of substantial wrongdoing. Two weeks after that, Barr mumbled his rejection. | 
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