Much ado has been made about William Barr’s comments a few days ago that the DOJ had “not found evidence to suggest widespread voter fraud during the 2020 election”. Keys words there are “evidence”, “fraud” and the easily-spun term “widespread”, allowing the home-gamer all sorts of wiggle room to attack Barr, if one is so disposed. Or to defend him.
A third key term to consider would be “politics” in that the AG is not supposed to engage in “politics” but remain aloof, just as appointed members of the judiciary are supposed to remain aloof. After you’ve taken a moment to step back and have a good laugh at that last comment, or maybe even thrown up in a barf bag you stole on your last Delta flight, every AG is indeed very political on a high percent of cases that cross his/her desks that are bathed in the Left-Right zeitgeist of the age. Any age. But I doubt Barr would knowingly be part of a felony such as covering up a crime. Even a murder. But we know such things have occurred in the past, and in using the same mathematical probabilities we’ve all been using to be able to make the very easy case that election fraud likely was widespread all over the country, we could just as easily come to the conclusion that of known crimes since 1963 principal agents of covering those crimes up have been Democrat AG’s, John Mitchell the only Republican exception in my memory. Oh, and yes, he was actually tried and convicted. No Democrat ever is.
But AG’s will “conspire” with a president to flush out crime, and it has been the opinion of several people, including me, that is exactly what William Barr has been doing since he took the appointment of Attorney General in February, 2019. AG’s are not obliged to send a dreadnought of agents out to arrest and indict they learn of a crime if they have reason to believe those crimes may be linked to even larger crimes, and decide to hold his fire. It’s hard to believe that he’s only been there less than two years… a period so crammed full of history, much of which we don’t know, and may never know, that it seems much longer. I know I’ve aged considerably. But I follow at least 50 people on Twitter who are outraged that Barr did not consult them first about his contingency plans.
My view, as well as others less impatient, was that the enormity of the Russia collusion investigation was so expansive that they (including the President) had to develop both a short term and long term plan for dealing with it, most of it political, of the bloody nose variety, which required coordination with the AG. And the naked manner in which this recent election was carried out may also suggest that the 2018 mid-term elections, which I predicted was about to happen in August, 2018, also stolen, may have been a part of Barr’s thinking in this broader view. I know it was in the President’s thinking, and I doubt he intentionally stonewalled and compartmentalized Barr, for there would be a time, coming soon, when William Barr & Company would become the No 1 agency responsible for rounding up an awful lot of people in a variety of walks of life, and trying to send them off to jail.
As I said often, if I’m wrong about Barr’s role in this affair, when the time comes I’ll verbally strip myself to the waist and use a cat-o-nine tails as public penance.
Back to facts, as I stated in the title, Fraud is Not Required to Invalidate the 2020 Election In Any State
Fraud is the sort of crime that requires a named defendant. A person. Average people naturally think, well yes, CNN or Twitter commit fraud every day. Comcast commits fraud. Actually, they commit something similar, but heavy fines are not normally the way “fraud” is handled. For one, the stock holders of Disney, or Twitter, TimeWarner (who owns CNN) can sue their own companies for wasting stockholders’ investment to cover the fines of individual officers. That’s called “fiduciary duty”, and has become rather quaint in recent years as there are myriad ways to pay such fines with stiockholders’ money that stockholders would never know. Honesty and honor died with Gordon Gekko 30 years ago. But the bottom line is that if a criminal investigation can show to a grand jury that Jeff Zucker of CNN, or the Governor of Arizona, or the Secretary of State of Georgia, or the Mayor of Detroit, engaged in “fraud” to cheat the voters of their states out of the constitutionally protected right to a fair election, they can be indicted.
What we have been seeing, televised live in the past few days, in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Arizona have been scores of people, representing hundreds more who did not appear, who witnessed first hand activities at voting centers and the tally-and-counting areas. These witnesses ranged from ordinary volunteers to IT specialists to expert witnesses in various areas of the technology, to testify to the manner in which the ballots were counted, the actions of the the supervisory staff in overseeing the tally-counters, or certifications, to the mathematical improbabilities-to-virtual impossibilities of some of the talleys. Michigan legislators even allowed a Detroit election employee (country or hired, I don’t recall) to testify that all these people were lying…to which one replied, “We all signed affidavits under penalty of perjury.” Toots!
WHAT WE KNOW
If you were paying attention and know a little law, you should know that “Fraud” was not proved in these hearings.
But what was presented was “Evidence that suggests fraud” which would be enough for a grand jury to bind the case over for criminal investigation or trial. Some of those investigations and trials could take a year or more. But it was “evidence” and “proof” in the legal sense. In other words, a trial judge would allow it to be presented to jury, marked as prosecution’s witness testimony or prosecution Exhibit A, B, C, etc. It is evidence, news media.
But what was overwhelmingly proved in these hearings, which in a civil case might even lead to a directed verdict, is that the voting systems (and there were more than one) were so flawed and irregular as to be unable to present election results that were in any way representative of the intent of the voters who (allegedly) cast them.
This may have been due to improperly or poorly trained employees, enough so that their inadequate training might have been purposeful. It was also proved the technology and software were easily hackable from outside and manipulatable from inside to provide any number of results that were not the original voters’ intents….which is the only purpose of an election, “to measure the voters’ intentions”. A system that fails more then 1%, (a 99% success rate) is considered failed, usually mandating a recount or re-vote. But when that is not feasible, or of such a very large scale, it is within the court’s right to invalidate all the votes cast in that precinct, or counting area, or even statewide if it can be shown that the technology/software are deemed to be the culprit, and not the actions of a few human agents.
This is where we are now, and very close to calling in Barr’s Legions.
Bottom line, @AndrewCMcCarthy of “National Review” has made a big deal about “fraud” and to this extent he is legally correct. But fraud is not necessary to overturn an election at any level. Proof that the election count or process was unreliable is all that is required.
