Senior Trump DOJ officials issued multiple statements weeks before the 2020 election suggesting anti-Trump election fraud in a critical swing state, knowing all the while that no crime had likely been committed and that the main suspect faced a severe mental disability, a DOJ Inspector General report found.
You may recall the widely covered story of nine ballots cast by overseas military voters found in the garbage in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. On its face, the initial reporting seemed to affirm the most intense, right-wing fever dreams of widespread voter fraud.
Then-Attorney General Bill Barr directed DOJ officials to take the virtually unheard of step of releasing details about the investigation – including that several of the ballots contained votes for Trump – even though the case “would likely not be criminally charged,” the report found.
The episode came at the same time that Trump himself was fanning the flames with claims of supposed voter fraud in the 2020 election. In late September 2020, at the time of the Luzerne County reports and the DOJ response, Trump repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, citing bogus claims of voter frad.
It was in that environment that Barr and other senior DOJ officials acted. Per the report, Barr pumped Trump up with the juiciest details from the Luzerne County incident on Sept. 23, 2020. Several ballots had been found in the garbage, Barr told the President. They were military and, in a remark that was like waving red before a bull, they were pro-Trump. That same day, Trump refused to commit to the transfer of power. The next day, Trump went on a radio station and used the details Barr provided him about the investigation to rile up the public and reinforce Barr’s incorrect conclusions: mail-in ballots were a “horror show,” Trump said, and the DOJ would investigate.
The next day, senior DOJ officials – including U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania David Freed – released a statement falsely saying that nine pro-Trump ballots had been found discarded in the garbage, while adopting Trump’s language attributing the situation to “potential issues with mail-in ballots.” Freed was later forced to issue a follow-up statement clarifying that only seven ballots were for Trump; two remained sealed.
The report notes a key point: The DOJ’s public statements, and Barr’s private remarks to Trump, only mentioned the presidential race. But the discarded ballots included votes for all of the other races taking place in that region of Pennsylvania at the federal, state, and local levels, including auditor general and state treasurer. Barr, the report said, did not address questions from the inspector general about why he wanted Freed to include that the discarded ballots were cast for Trump. Freed, when asked about downballot races, told the IG “my concern was—the discussion around voter fraud had centered so much around the Presidential election.”
For more than a day, the report found, Freed and other senior officials had been aware of a key fact: The suspect accused of discarding the ballots had a mental disability, and, per one DOJ official interviewed by the IG, was working at the ballot processing station as part of a program for the disabled. FBI agents had interviewed the subject two days before the DOJ began to issue public statements; per the IG report, the agents found the subject “‘100% disabled’ due to a ‘vehicle accident’” and that the person was “not capable of following simple instructions.”
The IG report criticized Freed and other senior DOJ officials for issuing public statements about the case while knowing all this information, finding that he violated DOJ policy around commenting on criminal investigations before a charging decision is made and around consulting with the DOJ’s Public Integrity Unit before making a statement involving an election case.
But the IG found that Barr’s actions remained within the line, if by a hair, largely because of expansive regulations that empower the Attorney General to inform the public about investigations if the official believes it to be in the interests of justice to do so. The IG similarly found that Barr did not violate policy by telling Trump about the Luzerne County case because such briefings remain at the attorney general’s discretion.
The report found, however, that even if Barr did not violate any DOJ policy by the letter, his conduct was “unusual.” Barr did not cooperate with the investigation, responding to the IG in the form of two letters while declining to sit for an interview.
According to the report, Barr scheduled a call with Freed on Sept. 22, four days after Luzerne County officials first discovered the discarded ballots. In the intervening days, local law enforcement had contacted the FBI to investigate. Before the call, Freed emphasized to another U.S. attorney traveling with Barr at the time that the suspect in the case had been “working through some sort of program for, you know, mentally disabled people,” per the report.
The IG report is unclear on whether Freed told Barr the same thing on the call, but did say that the call seemed “fairly limited” in scope.
The next day, the report says, Barr met with Trump for a pre-scheduled event at the White House. There, he told Trump about the Luzerne County investigation and, per a letter Barr later sent to the IG, urged him to keep the information quiet.
The next morning, Trump did not do that. On the morning of Sept. 24, he told a radio host that “they found six in an office yesterday in a garbage can. They were Trump ballots—eight ballots in an office yesterday in—but in a certain state and they were—they had Trump written on it, and they were thrown in a garbage can. This is what’s going to happen. This is what’s going to happen, and we’re investigating that.”
Several hours later, Barr and Freed spoke again. This time, Barr directed Freed to issue a public statement about the investigation, emphasizing that all of the ballots had been cast for Trump and that they were all ballots submitted by overseas military voters. After the conversation, Freed agreed to issue the statement. It went through DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs, before going out to the public.
The statement, which erred in saying that all nine ballots identified were cast for Trump, when only seven were identifiable, caused an immediate outcry, both within DOJ and without. The head of the Election Crimes Branch of the Public Integrity Unit, the report says, told the IG that he was “appalled,” and that the language in the statement made it appear as if the DOJ was “taking sides” for Trump.
“I mean, if you had to make any statement at all, it didn’t have to be so partisan,” the report quotes the official as saying.
This is the second DOJ Inspector General report released in the past two days addressing longstanding allegations that Barr politicized the Justice Department while serving as Trump’s attorney general. It has been more than three and a half years since Barr stepped down as attorney general.
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