A Thursday report from The Daily Beast claims that Donald Trump is angry with Attorney General William Barr for not sufficiently using the Department of Justice to help him as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden continues to draw closer to victory.
According to the report, Trump and his team believe that Barr’s DOJ is “insufficiently subservient.”
“Why isn’t [DOJ] on this?” the president allegedly asked.
John Dowd, an informal legal adviser for Trump who represented him during the Mueller probe, reportedly said that he hopes Barr’s Justice Department intervenes in the election.
The Daily Beast report comes amid the Trump campaign’s legal battle to stop vote counting in Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania amid close races and accusations of fraud in each region. Although Barr has yet to swoop in, the publication suggested that it’s still a possibility.
“Some Justice Department officials, particularly those who consider Barr little more than a Trumpist enforcer, have long predicted that senior Justice Department leadership would not sit on the sidelines while the Trump campaign contests election counts in court.”
A current federal prosecutor who spoke anonymously suggested that Barr’s absence from the spotlight doesn’t mean he is sitting on the sidelines.
“The fact we haven’t seen it yet is not a comfort. Contorted constitutional-legal theories are Barr’s preferred modus operandi,” they said.
Barr has not been entirely hands-off amid the election. Per The New York Times , his DOJ on Wednesday told prosecutors that the law allows for armed federal officers to be sent to ballot-counting locations to look for possible voter fraud. Although the law prohibits such officers from being present at polls on Election Day, a top Justice Department official claimed that this presence was legal any time after this date.
Kristy Parker, an official in the department’s Civil Rights Division during Barack Obama’s administration, suggested that the presence could cause issues with the electoral process.
“The very strong, longstanding norm is that the federal government does not seek to do anything to interfere with a state’s ability to count votes and certify elections.”
Although The Daily Beast noted there has been “no credible evidence of voter fraud” thus far, Trump’s campaign continues to suggest misconduct and declare the election is being stolen from him. As The Inquisitr reported, Donald Trump Jr. on Thursday called for a war over the election results, which he claimed is rife with cheating. The tweet was quickly flagged by Twitter for intervening in civil processes.