Barr pushed false claims of voter fraud and mocked concerns that Trump would refuse to leave office
Karl wrote about Barr’s informal review of various claims of voter fraud in the weeks following Election Day because he “knew that at some point, Trump was going to confront him about the allegations.” As Barr told Karl, “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 bullshit.”
However, Trump would have had every reasonable expectation that Barr would help him out — because throughout 2020, Barr mounted his own propaganda operation against the security of the upcoming election. Far from treating it like “bullshit,” at this stage, the attorney general pushed multiple false claims that the Trump campaign would use to try and overturn the election from Election Day through January 6 — and which are even still in circulation today.
In the spring of 2020, Barr floated a conspiracy theory in an interview with The New York Times that “there are a number of foreign countries that could easily make counterfeit ballots, put names on them, send them in.” He then dug in on this idea again in September, telling CNN that he was “basing it on logic.”
Election experts would explain all the ways such fraud was impossible, because real mail-in ballots have individual identifiers such as barcodes and signatures for tracking and processing, and they must be correctly printed on the right kind of paper to be scanned by each local ballot machine. However, Barr’s claim still lives on today, with the QAnon-linked ballot “audit” in Arizona looking for such things as rumored bamboo fibers as evidence of fake ballots being flown in or secret watermarks that were placed as part of an elaborate sting operation for false ballots.
In September, Barr also asserted that mail-in voting would destroy the protections of the secret ballot: “There’s no more secret vote. … Your name is associated with a particular ballot. The government and the people involved can find out and know how you voted. And it opens up the door to coercion.” (This, too, was false, as there are safeguards in place to prevent a specific person’s vote from being identified at the counting stage.)
Notably, in one interview with Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass, Barr also sought to discredit the counting of mail-in votes as he painted a picture of the exact scenario that Trump and his allies would later seek to take advantage of — a “red mirage” followed by a “blue shift,” in which Trump would appear to be ahead on Election night before the counting of mail-in votes that were disproportionately cast by Democrats. “Someone will say the president just won Nevada,” Barr offered hypothetically. “‘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.”
In the same interview, Barr also dismissed the idea that Trump would attempt to subvert the election result. “You know liberals project,” Barr said. “All this bulls--- about how the president is going to stay in office and seize power? I’ve never heard of any of that crap. I mean, I’m the attorney general. I would think I would have heard about it.” (Later, in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, Barr said in a statement that Trump’s conduct that day was a “betrayal of his office and supporters.”)
Nowhere in his Atlantic piece did Karl grapple with any of these statements. Instead, he simply left the reader with the impression that Barr knew after the election that claims of widespread voter fraud were “all bullshit.”
