From this morning’s New York Times (“William Barr’s State of Emergency”), an interview with the Attorney General of the United States:
Mail-in ballots are another domain where Trump had been staking out turf. He called the distribution of ballot applications in Michigan “illegal” and warned that voting by mail “doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” In a second interview on May 20, when I asked who was going to referee the 2020 election, Barr replied, “The voters.” He said his department’s role would be limited, as the power belongs to the states and their electors. But when I brought up Trump’s tweet about Michigan, which he posted that same morning, Barr quickly seized the opportunity to float a new theory: that foreign governments might conspire to mail in fake ballots.
“I haven’t looked into that,” he cautioned, offering no evidence to substantiate that this was a real possibility. But he called it “one of the issues that I’m real worried about,” and added: “We’ve been talking about how, in terms of foreign influence, there are a number of foreign countries that could easily make counterfeit ballots, put names on them, send them in. And it’d be very hard to sort out what’s happening.”
Let’s be clear: Bill Barr is neither “an imbecile,” nor “an idiot” (Steve Schmidt’s assessment of Donald Trump). He is an astute political operative who knows precisely what he is doing. From the moment he succeeded Jeff Sessions, he has been all-in with Trump. All-in with Fox News Channel, Limbaugh, Breitbart, and every other star in the conservative media universe. He is (as Jay Rosen aptly characterized the White House strategy to dodge accountability at all costs) “flooding the zone with shit.”