Barr’s turn from Trump’s stolen-election enabler to star Jan. 6 witness

Today, he’s the guy reinforcing that he and others told Trump over and over that his claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election were, to use Barr’s oft-repeated term, “bullshit.” And that’s something that matters greatly in proving Trump acted corruptly in trying to overturn the election.

But there’s another way in which the turn is remarkable, which is that Barr was also once a chief enabler of Trump’s lie-filled voter fraud claims. Barr’s willingness to feed into Trump’s conspiratorial ideas wasn’t reserved just for the Russia investigation; he also leaned in on what Trump had said for years about the dangers of voter fraud. He used similarly dodgy evidence and rank speculation as Trump, and did so after Trump spent years making such far-fetched claims.

Indeed if Barr, of all people, couldn’t be brought along for this ride, that says something.

In June 2020, Barr echoed Trump’s concerns about widespread mail-in voting as states were expanding it because of the pandemic. Barr went so far as to say that elections conducted mainly via mail balloting couldn’t be secure — and even that foreign nations could exploit it.

“I have specific reason to believe that there are a number of foreign countries that do want to sow discord in the United States by undermining confidence in the results of the election,” Barr said. “And I think if we do adopt programs of mail-in, that will be an area which they will exploit. And I think you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out.”

And he kept saying this — even as he acknowledged that he didn’t really have evidence. He made the same claim to the New York Times, saying, “There are a number of foreign countries that could easily make counterfeit ballots, put names on them, send them in. And it’d be very hard to sort out what’s happening.” But he acknowledged, “I haven’t looked into that.”

He was at it again in September, saying that “logic” dictated that a foreign country could mail thousands of ballots, apparently undetected. But when pressed, he again admitted he had no evidence of this.

Despite the substantial expansion of mail-in balloting, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency declared shortly after the election that it had been “the most secure in American history.” What’s more, mail-in ballots must match registered voters, which Philip Bump noted at the time made such a plot significantly more difficult than Barr let on:

There is, in fact, essentially no way that a foreign country could submit thousands of ballots without detection. For one thing, any number of those ballots would conflict with existing submitted ballots and be rejected. For another, ballots meet particular design and production standards that would need to be matched. But most important, ballots submitted by mail are validated upon receipt, usually by matching the ballot’s signature to the recorded signature for the voter. As a forgery expert with whom we spoke in June made clear, this would be nearly impossible to fake.

Barr followed that up a few days later by claiming in an interview with a Chicago Tribune columnist that mail balloting eliminated secret votes and could, thus, lead to fraud.

“So now we’re back in the business of selling and buying votes,” Barr said. “Capricious distribution of ballots means harvesting, undue influence, outright coercion, paying off a postal worker — ‘Here’s a few hundred dollars, give me some of your ballots.’ ”

There are, in fact, many ways that states make mail ballots secret. And even setting that aside, Barr was postulating about a type of fraud that has very rarely been proven to happen.

(In clips played at Monday’s hearing, Barr said he debunked Trump’s theories about ballot harvesting, including in Detroit. He also utterly dismissed Dinesh D’Souza’s recent film, “2000 Mules,” on the same topic.)

Yet again in September, Barr took an even more Trumpian turn when he tried to cite actual evidence of voter fraud. He said the Justice Department had indicted a man in Texas alleged to have collected 1,700 mail ballots and filled them out as he saw fit. Except the case didn’t exist. A Justice Department spokeswoman said Barr had been “provided a memo prepared within the Department that contained an inaccurate summary about the case.” The case Barr was apparently trying to cite, from Dallas County, bore no resemblance to the version of events he laid out.

Shortly after the election, Barr caused another stir by seeming to go to bat for Trump again. He reversed long-standing Justice Department policy by telling federal prosecutors to investigate “vote tabulation irregularities.” These matters were previously left to state and local officials, who generally control elections. This raised the possibility that the Justice Department might feed into Trump’s effort to overturn the election, even by simply raising suspicions. (The head of the Justice Department’s Election Crimes Branch resigned over Barr’s memo.)

Ultimately, that investigation didn’t happen — but not for lack of trying by the Trump team. And by Dec. 1, Barr delivered the most significant rebuke by that point to Trump’s fraud claims; he said there was no evidence of anything that would have changed the election results.

Indeed, one could argue that the interest Barr showed in investigating these things shortly after the election ultimately made his rebuttal of Trump more significant — that perhaps going through those motions proved to be a good thing.

But you could make an even more compelling case that Barr’s history before then — both in taking extraordinary steps that benefited Trump and in raising thinly substantiated alarms about mail-in voter fraud — shows just how ridiculous Trump’s post-2020 claims were.

Barr doesn’t seem to have made a proactive decision to go after Trump — nor should he necessarily be celebrated for rebutting allegations of fraud belatedly and when forced to go under oath. But the fact remains that not even he can put a good spin on this cow manure.