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US Department of Justice Director of Electoral Crimes Richard Pilger stepped down this Monday evening following Attorney General William Barr’s order to investigate alleged fraud in the presidential election, EFE reported.
“Having become familiar with the new rule and its ramifications (…) I must unfortunately resign from my position as director of the Electoral Crimes Division,” Pilger announced in an internal communication leaked to the US media.
Pilger also regretted that Barr’s order “repeals a 40-year rule of (federal) non-interference in electoral fraud investigations during the run-up to election certification.”
This resignation comes after Barr criticized the role of Pilger’s division on Monday and instructed all attorneys in the Justice Department to investigate alleged irregularities in past presidential elections before the results are final.
“I authorize investigations into substantive allegations of irregularities in voting or voting tabulation prior to certification of elections in their jurisdictions in some cases, as I have already done in specific cases,” Barr said in a note to his prosecutors.
“Such investigations and reviews can be conducted if there are clear and seemingly credible allegations of wrongdoing which, if true, could potentially affect the outcome of a federal election in a particular state,” he added.
The President’s Attorney General (Minister of Justice), Donald Trump, has also instructed his prosecutors to dismiss case complaints that, if true, would not affect the final outcome, as these can be resumed once the results are certificates.
In the note, Barr expressed concern about the Department’s existing protocols for that investigation, which specifically state that they should not be activated until the results are official.
Barr considered these protocols, which Pilger alluded to in his resignation and which aim at the states and not the federal government to decide elections, “passive and delayed”, and said that “they can give rise to situations where the bad electoral conduct cannot be realistically rectified ”.
With this order, Barr put federal prosecutors at the service of Trump’s strategy, which failed to acknowledge his defeat in last week’s election against President-elect Joe Biden, and denounces major election fraud without evidence.
The campaign of the outgoing president and the Republican Party have filed more than a dozen lawsuits – some already withdrawn – in various states denouncing alleged irregularities, but even if these cases were true, they do not seem enough to reverse the result.
To win the court election, Trump would have to flip the ballot in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nevada or Arizona – all states where Biden has already been declared the winner or is clearly leading the vote.
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