Former Attorney General Bill Barr has been giving interviews in which he details his efforts to thwart former President Donald Trump's schemes to overturn the 2020 election results -- but CNN legal analyst Elie Honig is warning Americans to not be fooled.
In a new piece posted on CNN, Honig documents how Barr for months was a chief enabler of false claims about widespread fraud being conducted via mail-in ballots.
"In a June 2020 interview... Barr offered up a familiar-sounding rant about the looming threat of massive voter fraud in the 2020 election," writes Honig. "Barr opined that mail-in ballots present 'so many occasions for fraud there that cannot be policed. I think it would be very bad.' He also raised 'the possibility of counterfeiting.' But when pressed on whether he had evidence to support this claim, he responded, 'No, it's obvious.'"
Honig then shows how Barr repeated his false assertions about mail-in ballots just one month later during congressional testimony, and again failed to back up his claims with any proof.
In fact, Honig combed through Department of Justice records during Barr's tenure and found that no one in the DOJ could apparently find evidence for this supposedly vast mail-in voting conspiracy.
"Indeed, DOJ's stats don't even list voter fraud or election fraud as a recognized category of offenses -- though the statistics do list categories as narrow as 'Corruption, Pension Benefit,' with a grand total of three cases charged during the year," he writes. "Yet, in the accounting by Barr's Justice Department of its own caseload, voter fraud doesn't even rate its own line item, or even a mention."
The bottom line, says Honig, is that no one should buy Barr's attempted rehabilitation of his reputation.
"He debased himself, and the Justice Department as an institution, in service of a false and politically motivated agenda that ultimately resulted in one of the darkest days in our nation's history," he writes.
