Attorney General William Barr got busted telling a made-up story about voter fraud. On Wednesday, Barr claimed on CNN that “we indicted someone in Texas, 1,700 ballots collected, he—from people who could vote, he made them out and voted for the person he wanted to. Okay?”
The problems with Barr’s claim involve most of the words in the sentence, starting with “we,” since he was referring not to a federal prosecution but to a local one, about which Andy Chatham, the former assistant district attorney who prosecuted the Dallas County case, said Barr’s claim was “not what happened at all.”
“Unfortunately, it speaks volumes to the credibility of Attorney General Barr when he submits half-truths and alternative facts as clear evidence of voter fraud without having so much as even contacted me or the district attorney’s office for an understanding of the events that actually occurred,” Chatham said.
What did really happen? Local authorities were never able to fully untangle what was going on, and did suspect a large-scale scheme of some kind, but in reality they were able to prosecute one person for returning one ballot illegally. And the ballots that appeared to have been collected by people involved in the suspicious activity turned out to have been cast for the voters’ actual choices of candidates—there was not a big effort to change votes to a single candidate. “We didn’t find any evidence of widespread voter fraud, and instead the ballots that were returned were consistent with the voter’s choice,” according to Chatham.
Another Dallas County prosecutor said at one point they had believed there were “potentially 1,700 fraudulent ballots, but we did not uncover that, at all,” and “We actually thought there was voter fraud initially, and we couldn’t find it except that little tiny case.”
That was not the case in North Carolina in the 2018 case that led to a U.S. House election being set aside and redone, when it turned out a local Republican operative had been conducting a long-running effort to turn in fraudulent absentee ballots. And the attention that went to that case shows how improbable Barr’s claim was from the beginning—the North Carolina case is the most consequential case of voter fraud in recent years and it got a ton of attention. What Barr was claiming was a much bigger fraud operation. If his story about it had been for real, this would have made headlines, not been something a partisan attorney general was pulling out as a gotcha a couple years later.
A Justice Department spokeswoman blamed Barr’s false claim on “a memo prepared within the Department that contained an inaccurate summary about the case.” Sure, sure. Even if this is exactly correct, what kind of pressure to produce a major voting fraud case was the person who wrote the memo under? And how did no one say “Uh, can this possibly be true and if so, why are we the first people noticing this massive case of fraud?” No, it’s obvious that Barr was demanding a voter fraud case that wasn’t that inconveniently a Republican operation in North Carolina, and under pressure, someone either screwed up or made stuff up or wrote something ambiguous enough for Barr to put his own dishonest spin on. Or Barr flat-out lied about what he read and his underlings are covering for him. There are a lot of ways, in other words, to get from the facts of the case to what Barr said, but they all involve Barr being motivated to produce a big-time fraud claim even if he couldn’t find a real instance of it.
