Note from the Editors: The following is an excerpt from Lee Smith’s “Disappearing the President: Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic“, published by Encounter Books. (Published with permission.)
How William Barr Facilitated Election Fraud in 2020
The Democrats were right. Through Rosa Brooks’ Transition Integrity Project, party bosses messaged to the media and other operatives to prepare in advance of November 3, 2020, that there was no such thing as Election Day anymore. And, on the night of November 3, voters — especially Trump voters — learned this was true.
The ballot count lasted several days, with most media organizations declaring victory for Biden on Saturday after results from Pennsylvania put him ahead of Trump by more than 30,000 votes. The delay showed that the “Red-Mirage Blue-Shift” was real. What looked like a Trump victory in the late afternoon of Election Day 2020 melted into the autumn evening. And in short time, something like poison filled the American air.
What happened? Some Trump deputies and GOP influencers said it was the voting machines, but the main problem had been publicized by the Democrats themselves for more than half a year — it was the new Covid voting procedures. That is why DHS’ cyberunit CISA was censoring social media posts questioning the integrity of mail-in voting, drop-off boxes, and other new procedures that facilitated ballot fraud. And it is why Brooks and TIP warned it might take days, maybe weeks, or even months before a winner would be declared. If the source of the problem was just the voting machines, there would be little if any delay, since presumably votes could be altered instantly. There was no more Election Day because of how long it takes for Democrats to assemble enough mail-in ballots to make their candidate the winner.
Only seventeen percent of Biden voters voted in person on Election Day, compared to thirty-seven percent of Trump supporters. A whopping fifty-eight percent of Biden’s votes came by absentee or mail-in ballot, which means forty-seven million of Biden’s eighty-one million votes were harvested before the election. Presumably most, or at least many, of those votes were genuine and lawful, but there was, and is, no way to know. The new voting system was designed to make it hard, if not impossible, to prove fraud.
Before Covid, states required voters to file a request for a mail-in ballot and sign it. That signature was the baseline against which to check the signature on the final ballot. It was hardly a foolproof method, but it was something. The new voting procedures eliminated even that. Rather than requiring voters to submit their signed requests, state election officials just mailed out ballots to everyone registered to vote, which meant there was no baseline signature for comparison. And then, depending on the state, party operatives harvested the ballots, which could be added into the mix when needed.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said he had warned Trump in May that he could lose the Lone Star State. Having won Texas by nine points in 2016, the president did not believe him. Paxton told him that if his office lost any of its twelve legal cases involving voting procedures, harvested ballots from any one of several large counties could give Texas to the Democrats.
In the end, Paxton won his cases, and Trump won Texas, but on election night Paxton saw how close his state had come to going blue by fraud. “For the first time in my life election counting stopped in numerous states,” he said. “I knew immediately what they were doing, they were figuring out how many real votes they had, just like they would have done in Texas and they were just going to count as many mail-in ballots [as they needed], because you don’t know where those mail-in ballots came from, there’s no way to prove that they came from the person that supposedly signed it.”
The nationwide 2020 iteration of the oldest dirty trick in the election playbook, ballot stuffing, was all done under the color of law. True, no one voted to compromise the integrity of presidential elections by eliminating signature verification, but state party officials across the country did it by fiat, sending out bushels of ballots indiscriminately. No one stopped them, and leftwing judges winked at it. The judges, as Paxton put it, “basically ignore our state law and say ‘no, because of covid we’re not going to follow state law.’” When there’s no ballot security, Paxton said, “I can tell you what’s going to happen — you’re going to lose.”
And that is how it happened, just as the Democrats had been telegraphing for months. The one thing they got entirely wrong, however, was William Barr. It is true that he had said before the election that the new voting procedures were dangerous. “We’re a very closely divided country,” Barr told the media. “People trying to change the rules to this, to this methodology — which, as a matter of logic, is very open to fraud and coercion — is reckless and dangerous and people are playing with fire.”
Maybe Barr feared he would be stoking the fire by investigating the many claims of ballot fraud, or he was scared of being impeached, or he was just protecting what he had built. Or it was all those reasons together. In any case, he ultimately refused to investigate the most controversial election in U.S. history.
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On November 9, the White House’s liaison to the Justice Department, Heidi Stirrup, spoke with a Barr deputy to ask what efforts were being made to investigate potential election fraud. She was given two contradictory messages.
First, she was told that the DOJ was drafting a memo to give U.S. Attorneys authority to investigate election fraud. Barr’s memo, drafted that same day, stressed the importance of maintaining public faith in the voting system’s integrity. The memo authorized prosecutors “to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions in certain cases, as I have already done in specific instances. Such inquiries and reviews may be conducted if there are clear and apparently credible allegations of irregularities that, if true, could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State.”
And second, Stirrup was told that the DOJ “looked into every allegation that was brought forward and found no evidence of fraud.” There is little chance that less than a week after the election the DOJ had already investigated every voting fraud allegation. But if it had, what was the point of issuing a directive clearing the way for prosecutors to investigate what the DOJ said it had already investigated? Barr further confused matters when he told her that even if prosecutors found evidence of fraud, no investigation would take less than two years and the election would not be overturned. Stirrup said she was not interested in overturning the election but wanted to know what was being done to investigate the fraud allegations.
The point is that without investigations, without anyone held accountable for stuffing ballot boxes, the Shadow Network would keep using the new voting procedures to defraud the American electorate. But Barr was not budging. It seems the November 9 memo was generated to get Trump off his back and placate Trump voters while doing nothing to investigate fraud.
“Barr was afraid,” President Trump tells me at Mar-a-Lago. “As soon as he heard he was going to get impeached, he became afraid.”
The impeachment threats against Barr had begun earlier in the summer, growing more intense by mid-October. A report filed by progressive groups claimed that Barr merited impeachment for, among other reasons, shutting down the Mueller investigation and intervening in the cases against Roger Stone and Michael Flynn. Running point on the anti-Barr campaign was Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), co-founded by former Obama official Norm Eisen and funded by leading Shadow Network donor George Soros.
“Barr was so afraid of being impeached,” says Trump. “And how do you not get impeached? You don’t investigate the election.”
Some federal prosecutors did want to investigate, like the U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia William M. McSwain. He said it “was a partisan disgrace” how Pennsylvania Democrats ran the 2020 election. “The Governor, the Secretary of the Commonwealth, and the partisan State Supreme Court made up their own rules and did not follow the law,” said McSwain. The State official responsible for enforcing election law, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, now Pennsylvania governor, said days before the election that Trump could not win the election. “It would be hard to imagine a more irresponsible statement by a law enforcement officer,” said McSwain, “especially during a hotly contested election.”
The DOJ could have investigated those rule changes, civilly or criminally, and at the very least filed amicus briefs or statements of interest in election contests in federal or state courts in Pennsylvania indicating the new rules were unconstitutional, suspicious, and one-sided in their impact. But the Justice Department never did.
According to McSwain, his “office received various allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities.” He said he wanted to be transparent with the public, but Barr told him not to make any public statements or put out any press releases regarding possible election irregularities. He said the DOJ told him to pass along serious allegations to the same State Attorney General who said Trump could not win. That is, he was told it was useless to investigate.
In a December 1 interview, Barr declared, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.” He told his secretary he would probably be fired for saying it. In a meeting in Trump’s office, Barr offered his resignation, and the president accepted it.
Barr later rationalized his decision to ignore the president’s concerns. “There’s always some fraud in an election that large,” Barr wrote in his memoirs. “But the Justice Department had been looking into the claims made by the president’s team, and we had yet to see evidence of fraud on the scale necessary to change the outcome of the election.” But of course, the Department did not need to investigate the entire election, just irregularities in key cities in battleground states that turned the election in Biden’s favor, like Atlanta, where ballot counting was stopped at 10:30 on election night.
“Barr was a bad guy,” says Trump. “He came in, recommended by people that I respected at the time. He did nothing on the investigation of the election and he should have. And we learned that because numerous U.S. attorneys, like McSwain from Pennsylvania, said that Barr told them not to do anything. Bill Barr was a coward.”
Barr defended his unwillingness, or inability, to hold anyone accountable for the election interference operations of 2016 and 2020. He said, “There’s a growing tendency to use the criminal justice system as sort of a default fix-all, and people don’t like something, they want the Department of Justice to come in and ‘investigate.’”
But this explanation was flatly dishonest. The problem was not that the public expected too much or that the opposition wanted federal law enforcement weaponized against those who had been hunting them. Rather, Americans had seen the corruption of Barr’s own institution eat away at the republic even while he was in charge of it. All Americans wanted from the DOJ and FBI was impartiality and accountability for their interference in the 2016 election. By failing to do that, aside from the single conviction netted by the Durham probe, Barr incentivized the coup plotters to make another run at the 2020 race. It was on his watch that U.S. law enforcement agencies participated in the largest election interference operation in American history.
Barr’s reverence for the systems he helped build over decades of government service, in tandem with his contempt for the president he served, had blinded him to an essential fact: the resources deployed to build an apparatus designed to interfere with elections, censor and spy on Americans, and prosecute political opponents, show that the Shadow Network’s true goal was not to push out Trump, but to replace the republic. By legitimizing blue vote fraud, Barr held open the gates of hell.
Lee Smith is an American journalist and bestselling author. He writes on leesmith.locals.com and can be followed @LeeSmithDC.
