So far. Thank God:
The Justice Department has met President Trump’s fantastical claims of widespread voter fraud with two weeks of skeptical silence, not taking any overt moves to investigate what Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, claims is a globe-spanning conspiracy to steal the election.
Such deafening silence from one of the government’s main enforcers of election law indicates just how little evidence there is to support the wild, wide-ranging claims made by Trump and his supporters, most notably Giuliani in a Thursday news conference held inside the Republican National Committee headquarters.
Privately, Justice Department officials have said they are willing to investigate legitimate claims of vote fraud; Attorney General William P. Barr even loosened some restrictions that might otherwise have discouraged prosecutors from doing so before results are certified.
But current and former officials said they thought Giuliani’s accusations sounded “crazy,” and they have not seen or heard of any evidence suggesting large-scale fraud, let alone the kind of intercontinental conspiracy described by the president’s lawyer. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a politically sensitive matter.
The Justice Department’s silence is “a tiny sliver of normalcy, and frankly a positive sign that we are on our way back to a better place,” said Justin Levitt, a former Justice Department voting rights official in the Obama administration who is now a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
“In a way, that’s hard to say because it feels like lowering the bar to below the floor, to say we should all be pretty pleased that the institution of law enforcement for the United States didn’t go either full-on partisan talking-point machine or full-on conspiracy theorist. In normal times, that wouldn’t be something to celebrate, that would just be a given. . . .
The Justice Department also hasn’t come out and said the world is round, because they don’t need to.”
Actually:
Donie O’Sullivan is a CNN correspondent who covers the right wing disinformation stream.
The truth is that Barractually gave them special permission to look into illegal activity during this counting period which is outside the normal purview of the DOJ. (They generally wait until the election is settled before investigating so as not to influence the election results.)
So, this isn’t really evidence of restraint because it’s Trump who is trying to influence GOP officials, possibly bribing or blackmailing them, into changing the results of the election on his behalf. A Justice Department that was following Barr’s directive would be looking into all the shenanigans from the Trump campaign.
But really, they should stay out of this altogether and Barr should have kept his mouth shut. The feds don’t need to be involved at all at this stage. But if they choose to take a look later at the massive amount of pressure being put on GOP officials to throw out legal votes once this thing is over, they would well within their purview. In fact, they should. This is outrageous.