Less than two months ahead of an election in which more Americans are expected to vote by mail than in any previous election, Attorney General William P. Barr has repeatedly made false or misleading statements about mail-in voting leading to widespread fraud.
New reporting from The Washington Post suggests that at least one of Barr’s repeated misleading claims about “spying” on Donald Trump’s campaign was made, in part, to defy “media talking heads.”
The Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia and Tom Hamburger report:
In the weeks after his bombshell appearance at the Senate committee hearing, Barr would toss aside his measured tone, flatly telling Fox News and the Wall Street Journal that spying had taken place. Barr thought the controversy was so “absurd” that he deliberately chose to use the word “spying” in defiance of media talking heads, according to a person familiar with his thinking.
Since Barr began his second tenure at the Justice Department in 2019, he has broadly defended even the most inflammatory rhetoric from President Trump. These defenses of debunked or misleading claims have become more frequent and conspicuous the lead-up to the 2020 campaign, according to a Fix review of Barr’s public statements. Meanwhile, reporting from the New York Times indicates that Barr may ask U.S. Attorney John Durham — who is investigating the Russia investigation — to issue an interim report weeks before the 2020 election.
Since April, Barr has made the following untrue or misleading statements:
- There was no basis for the Russia investigation.
- Former intelligence community inspector general Michael Atkinson did not first share the Ukraine whistleblower complaint with the executive branch.
- Foreign countries may interfere in the 2020 election by counterfeiting ballots.
- Pepper spray is not a chemical irritant.
- Former U.S. attorney Geoffrey Berman resigned from his post at the Southern District of New York.
- The federal government arrested 200 people during a two-week period in Kansas City.
- The federal government indicted a man for filling out 1,700 ballots.
All that follows Barr’s actions around the release of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s 2019 report. Before the report was released, he issued a letter summarizing the findings of the Russia probe that a federal judge later ruled was “misleading” and lacked candor.
Earlier this month, Barr was asked about one of Trump’s more explosive claims: That former president Barack Obama committed treason by “spying” on Trump’s campaign.
“ ‘Treason’ is a legal term,” Barr told CNN on Sept. 2. “I think he’s using it colloquially. To commit treason, you actually have to have a state of war with a foreign enemy, but I think he feels that they were involved in an injustice, and if he feels that, he can say it.”
After being pressed about Trump’s accusation, Barr acknowledged that neither Obama nor former vice president Joe Biden were under criminal investigation for treason.
