Trump lawyer says official who defended voting machines should be shot; AG Barr also sees no manipulation
President Donald Trump and U.S. Attorney General William Barr. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
U.S. Attorney General William Barr told the Associated Press on Tuesday that the Department of Justice has uncovered no evidence of widespread election fraud and no evidence of bad voting machines.
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” Barr said in the AP interview.
The Washington Post and the New York Times have coverage.
One lawyer who filed election lawsuits independent of the campaign, Sidney Powell, has alleged that voting machines were programmed to manipulate votes. Without referencing Powell, Barr said the claim has not been substantiated by the Department of Homeland Security or the DOJ.
“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,” Barr told the AP. “And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.”
Barr’s statements echo that of Christopher Krebs, the chief of U.S. cybersecurity for the DHS, who was fired after he said there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or changed votes or was in any way compromised, according to prior reporting by CNN and the Washington Post. Krebs’ office had released a joint statement calling the election “the most secure in American history.”
A lawyer for Trump’s reelection efforts, Joe DiGenova, used strong language to condemn Krebs in an interview Monday with a podcast called The Howie Carr Show, Politico reports.
DiGenova called Krebs an “idiot” and “a class A moron.”
“He should be drawn and quartered,” DiGenova said. “Taken out at dawn and shot.”
Krebs hinted at legal action in an interview with NBC’s Today show, Politico reported in another story. Krebs referred to the “dangerous language” and said: “The way I look at it is that we’re a nation of laws, and I plan to take advantage of those laws.”
“I’ve got an exceptional team of lawyers that win in court, and I think they’re probably going to be busy,” Krebs said.
