'His abuses have escalated': Barr's kinship with Trump fuels election fears

(Guardian UK) Donald Trump’s astonishing suggestion at a campaign rally last weekend that the US president will deploy government lawyers to try to hit the brakes on the counting of ballots on election night relies on the complicity of one federal official more than any other.

That official is attorney general William Barr, who, as leader of the justice department, directs the army of government lawyers who would sue to halt the counting of votes.

Conveniently for Trump’s stated plan, Barr appears not only ready to acquiesce, he seems eager to bring the lawsuits, having laid groundwork for challenging the election with weeks of misleading statements about the integrity of mail-in voting.

To some observers, the attorney general appears to have also laid the groundwork for a further alarming step, one that would answer the question of what action the Trump administration is prepared to take if a contested election in November gives rise to large new protests. .....(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/25/bill-barr-donald-trump-election-steal-fears

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3 replies	Author	Time	Post
'His abuses have escalated': Barr's kinship with Trump fuels election fears (Original post)	marmar	Sep 2020	OP
How do they get to use government money to challenge election results?	The Velveteen Ocelot	Sep 2020	#1
Apparently he believes he's fighting a religious battle not a legal one.	hedda_foil	Sep 2020	#2
Thing is elections are STATE run the US DOJ has no say	Thekaspervote	Sep 2020	#3

Response to marmar (Original post)

Fri Sep 25, 2020, 09:54 AM

The Velveteen Ocelot (91,521 posts)

1. How do they get to use government money to challenge election results?

That should be on the campaign's dime, not ours. But this is Trump, so....

I assume Biden's campaign's pack of lawyers will be ready with an application for an injunction to stop that.

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Response to marmar (Original post)

Fri Sep 25, 2020, 10:21 AM

hedda_foil (15,070 posts)

2. Apparently he believes he's fighting a religious battle not a legal one.

Barr appears to see himself locked in a historic struggle against literal evil, and he appears to regard the upcoming election as the climactic battle. A Trump loss, Barr recently told a Chicago Tribune columnist, would mean the United States was “irrevocably committed to the socialist path.” He called the election “a clear fork in the road”.

“The attorney general sees himself clearly as fighting culture wars that are to him moral and religious,” Kinkopf said. “And those are deeper I think commitments for him than the commitment to federalism. And so to the extent that the balance of federal and state power gets in the way of achieving what he wants to achieve in the culture wars, he’s willing to cast that aside.

How many of the right wing Catholic justices (including Amy The Handmaid) will agree?

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Response to marmar (Original post)

Fri Sep 25, 2020, 10:29 AM

Thekaspervote (17,063 posts)

3. Thing is elections are STATE run the US DOJ has no say

I love the guardian, but they aren’t doing their American allies any good by publishing an article that is misleading and only partially true.

As far as challenging mail in ballots, they’ve already tried in the courts, multiple times and have yet to win one case

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