William P. Barr - One Damn Thing After Another - Memoirs of an Attorney General

To my wife, Christine

For forty years, successive Attorneys General have heard the story. After President Ronald Reagan nominated him in late 1980 to serve as Attorney General of the United States, William French Smith, preparing for his new duties, talked to Ed Levi, who, four years earlier, had served as Attorney General under President Gerald Ford and, before that, had been Dean of the University of Chicago Law School, and then president of that university. With his pipe-smoking, bow ties, and intellectual demeanor, Levi seemed the quintessential academic. When Smith asked Levi to describe the job of Attorney General, he was expecting him to launch into a philosophical discourse about the Founding Fathers, the rule of law, and the principles of democracy. Levi, taking a leisurely puff on his pipe, paused a moment, and said: Its just one damn thing after another.

Having held the post twice, I can sayand I know all my fellow former Attorneys General will agreethat description perfectly captures the essence of the job.

T he first day of December 2020, almost a month after the presidential election, was gray and rainy. That afternoon, the President, struggling to come to terms with the election result, had heard I was at the White House for another meeting and sent word that I was to come see him immediately. I knew what was coming. I soon found myself standing in the Presidents small dining room off of the Oval Office. The President was as angry as I had ever seen him.

More than two hours earlier, when I had left the Justice Department for the White House, I told my personal assistant, Theresa Watson, that there was a good chance the President would fire me. If he does, I said, he will probably direct me not to return to the office, so she might have to pack up for me. Oh, POTUS always says that, Theresa responded, using the government acronym referring to the President of the United States. But everyone ignores it, and if it happens, you just come back, she said. As I walked out the door, Theresa called after me, But anyway, hes not going to fire you.

My chief of staff, Will Levi, was with me. You know, Will said with a worried look, he just might.

I know, I said. As the President likes to say, Well see.

Over the preceding weeks, I had been increasingly concerned about claims by the President and the team of outside lawyers advising him that the election had been stolen through widespread voting fraud. I had no doubt there was some fraud in the 2020 presidential elections. Theres always some fraud in an election that large. There may have been more than usual in 2020. But the department had been looking into the claims of fraud made by the Presidents team, and we had yet to see evidence of it on the scale necessary to change the outcome of the election.

The data suggested to me that the Democrats had taken advantage of rule changesespecially extended voting periods and voting by mailto marshal the turnout they needed in their strongholds in key states. I had been a vocal critic of these rule changes precisely because they would increase the opportunity for fraud and thus undercut public confidence in the election results. There was also no question that, in some areas, state rules meant to guard against fraudfor example, the requirement that voters file applications for mail-in ballotswere not followed. This also increased the opportunity for fraud.

Still, the opportunity for fraud isnt evidence of fraud.

Under our system, the states have responsibility for running elections. Claims that the election rules are not being followed fall under the states jurisdiction, and the burden is on the complaining party to raise the matter with state officials and courts to have it addressed. This often requires pressing the states to conduct in-depth audits of relevant districts needed to resolve alleged irregularities. The Justice Department does not have the authority or the tools to perform that function. Instead, its role is to investigate specific and credible allegations of voting fraud for the purpose of criminal prosecution. A complaint just saying the rules were not followed is not enough. There must be some indication of actual fraud.

When I looked at the voting patterns, it also appeared to me that President Trump had underperformed among certain Republican and independent voters in some key suburban areas in the swing states. He ran weaker in these areas than he had in 2016. It seemed this shortfall could explain the outcome. The fact that, in many key areas, Trump ran behind Republican candidates below him on the ballot suggested this conclusion and appeared inconsistent with the fraud narrative.

As I had said in my confirmation hearing two years earlier, our country is deeply divided, but our saving grace is the ability to carry out the peaceful transfer of power through elections. If the American people lose confidence in the integrity of their elections, and the legitimacy of an elected administration, we are headed toward a very dark place. That is why I was so disgusted by efforts in 2016 to delegitimize President Trump and resist his duly elected administration. But now the situation was completely reversed. It is one thing to say that the rules were unfairly skewed; it is another to say that the elections outcome was the result of fraud. President Trumps legal team was feeding his supporters a steady diet of sensational fraud claims, without anything resembling substantiation. But if election results are going to be set aside on the grounds of fraud, it must be based on clear evidence, and it should be fraud of such magnitude as to be material to the outcome of the election. Proving fraud after the fact is exceptionally difficult, which makes it all the more important to have safeguards in place that prevent it from happening in the first instance.

In the weeks after the election, accusations of major fraud centered on several claims: allegations that counting machines from the Dominion Voting Systems Corporation had been rigged; that video footage from Fulton County, Georgia, showed a box of bogus ballots being insinuated into the vote count while poll watchers were absent; that massive numbers of ballots for Joe Biden had been inexplicitly dumped in the early morning hours in Detroit and Milwaukee; that thousands of votes in Nevada had been cast by nonresidents; that more absentee ballots than had been requested were cast in Pennsylvania; and that a truck driver had delivered many thousands of filled-out ballots from Bethpage, Long Island, to Pennsylvania. I had asked all the Department of Justice (DOJ) office heads around the country, working with the FBI, to look into these and a number of similar claims. Some turned out to be patently frivolous; others just were not supported by the available evidence.

I had repeatedly informed the President through his staff that the department was looking at substantial claims of fraud but so far hadnt found them to have merit. For more than a week, I had been getting calls from Republican senators and members of Congress deeply concerned about the direction of things, especially the Presidents expanding his challenge from the courts to the state legislatures. They were concerned that, if President Trump continued claiming he won the election, without hard evidence, the country could be headed for a constitutional crisis. They wanted to know my thoughts on the fraud claims and asked if I could do something to inject more caution into the Presidents rhetoric about a stolen election. It was not lost on me that, with two Georgia runoff elections for senator coming up the first week in January, Republican senators still hoped for the Presidents help and could ill afford picking a public fight with him. On the other hand, as Attorney General, I uniquely had the ability to counteract the speculation and misinformation by arming myself with the facts from the relevant US attorneys.