Mitch McConnell & AG Bill Barr are trying to delegitimize the Biden presidency

Little surprise, perhaps, that the Republican establishment is deciding to side with Donald Trump’s conspiratorial lunacy. Perhaps they see it as the path of least resistance. After all, they reason, what harm could it do, to undermine the American public’s faith in the integrity of free and fair elections? Yesterday afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke for the first time about the election. His speech was disgusting, reprehensible and a mockery of democracy. He basically cosigned Donald Trump’s election conspiracies and castigated Democrats for, like, understanding that Joe Biden won the election.

What all of these MAGA ratf–kers refuse to say is that there is literally no evidence of ballot tampering or voter fraud. If there was ANY evidence, sure, even I might side with Republicans and say that there should be some investigations. What Moscow Mitch is trying to do is delegitimize the election results *just* in the minds of Trump voters. McConnell knows, long term, that he’ll be dealing with President Biden. He just wants to kneecap the Biden administration before they even come in. And Moscow Mitch wants to make the transition as difficult as possible too. I hope the Biden team was watching all of this, and I hope they understand that McConnell will always undermine them. There will be no unity or common ground with McConnell.

Additionally, Attorney General of the United States William Barr continues to act as Donald Trump’s personal mob lawyer.

William Barr, the nation’s attorney general and a Trump ally, on Monday wrote a memo authorizing federal prosecutors to pursue any “substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities.” He specified that such reviews can be conducted only if there are “clear and apparently-credible allegations of irregularities that, if true, could potential impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State.”

Investigations into more minor claims that, if true, would not affect the outcome of a state’s results, Barr wrote, should be deferred until after the election certification process is completed in mid-December.

In his memo, Barr cautioned that the authorization should not be taken as an indication that the Justice Department has found any voting irregularities that would impact the outcome of the election, but instead had been put in place to ensure that all Americans could have “full confidence in the results of our elections.”

But despite the caveats, the memo marked a step into President Trump’s disinformation campaign about voting. Former DOJ officials criticized the memo as partisan and as validating Trump’s claims that there are substantial voter irregularities. Republican and Democratic election officials agree there has been no evidence of widespread, even low-level, voting irregularities.

Shortly after the memo was released, Richard Pilger, head of the DOJ’s election crimes branch, stepped down from that role in protest over Barr’s memo. He announced the departure to colleagues this evening.

[From NPR]

I was actually somewhat surprised that AG Barr didn’t insert himself into the election weeks ago. Which we’ll probably hear more about in the post-mortems of the Trump administration, because you know Trump probably ordered Barr to have a lot of Democrats arrested. The fact that Barr is trying to insert the DOJ and FBI into the election results after everything is over… well, it’s just sad. And it’s just a play for time. Once again, these people are just trying to f–k over the Biden-Harris transition and kneecap the Biden presidency from the word go.

— Vanita Gupta (@vanitaguptaCR) November 10, 2020

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

Source: Read Full Article