The attorney general’s comments were a rebuke of the president’s increasingly spurious claims about election fraud.
Attorney General William P. Barr acknowledged on Tuesday that the Justice Department has uncovered no voting fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” a striking repudiation of President Trump’s groundless claims that he was defrauded. The statement from Mr. Barr affirming Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s win served as a particularly harsh blow to Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the election. Mr. Barr has advanced Mr. Trump’s political agenda perhaps more than any other cabinet member, bringing the Justice Department as close to the White House as it has been since Watergate. His comments came as other Republicans separated themselves on Tuesday from Mr. Trump’s charged complaints about the election. A Georgia elections official angrily denounced the violent threats and harassment directed at elections workers and urged the president to “stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence.” “Someone’s going to get hurt,” the official, Gabriel Sterling, said at a news conference. “Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed.” And Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, who has refused to recognize Mr. Trump’s election loss, moved closer to overtly accepting the reality that Mr. Biden would be in the White House next year as he discussed the prospects for more pandemic stimulus in 2021. “After the first of the year, there is likely to be a discussion about some additional package of some size next year, depending upon what the new administration wants to pursue,” Mr. McConnell said on Capitol Hill. Mr. Barr had been mostly silent since the election, but some Republicans privately pushed him to publicly rebut Mr. Trump, according to a person told of those conversations. His comments may have been prompted by Mr. Trump’s increasingly specious election claims; the president suggested on Sunday that the Justice Department and the F.B.I. may have played a role in an election fraud. Mr. Barr took particular aim at a widely discredited conspiracy theory promoted by the president’s legal team involving machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems, a company that sells voting hardware. “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. And the D.H.S. and D.O.J. have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that,” Mr. Barr said, referring to the Department of Homeland Security and his own department. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on whether Mr.
