Barr to Trump: There's no indication of election fraud in Detroit

Washington — William Barr, President Donald Trump's former attorney general, told the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot that he advised Trump there was no evidence of election fraud in Detroit.

During pre-recorded testimony aired Monday, Barr said that after the 2020 election, Trump "didn't seem to be listening" to him and members of his Cabinet who repeatedly told him there was no validity to his claims that the election had been stolen from him, including in Detroit.

Unproven claims of fraud in Detroit, a Democratic stronghold, have underpinned some Republicans' push to overturn Joe Biden's 154,000-vote victory over Trump in Michigan in the 2020 presidential election.

On Dec. 1, 2020, Barr told the Associated Press there was no evidence of election fraud. Later that day, he was summoned to the White House for a meeting with Trump.

"The president was as mad as I've ever seen him," Barr testified to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Trump raised "the big vote dump, as he called it, in Detroit," Barr said. "He said ‘people saw boxes coming into the counting station at all hours of the morning' and so forth."

Barr said he explained to Trump that Detroit centralized its counting process at the TCF Center downtown convention hall rather than in each precinct. For the November 2020 general election, Michigan's largest city counted its absentee ballots at the convention center under the supervision of state Bureau of Election Director Chris Thomas. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, most ballots cast were absentee.

"They’re moved to counting stations," Barr said. "And so the normal process would involve boxes coming in at all different hours."

"I said, 'Did anyone point out to you ... that you did better in Detroit than you did last time? There’s no indication of fraud in Detroit," Barr said he told Trump.

Trump's percentage of votes went from 3% in 2016 to 5% four years later in the Democratic stronghold, and the Republican former president received almost 5,000 more votes than in 2016, according to the city's official results. 

"I told him the stuff that his people were shoveling out to the public were bulls---, that the claims of fraud were bulls---," Barr added. 

The next day, Trump gave a speech reiterating unfounded claims of "a vote dump" in Detroit and elsewhere. 

“My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud," Barr said. "And I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that.”

Barr resigned as attorney general on Dec. 14, shortly after the exchange. 

Trump repeatedly questioned Michigan's election results in the wake of the 2020 election, falsely claiming that Detroit was the epicenter of "a lot of fraud." Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani once suggested that his client would win Michigan's election without votes cast in Wayne County, where Detroit is located.

Not only did Trump perform better in Detroit in 2020 than he did four years earlier, but Biden received nearly 1,000 votes fewer than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The statewide certified election results in 2020 showed Biden beat Trump 51-48%, or by more than 154,000 votes. 

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-California, concluded the first portion of Monday's hearing by adding for the record the Michigan Senate Oversight Committee's 2021 report investigating claims of fraud in the state led by Sen. Ed McBroom, R-Vulcan. 

The report found "no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud" and recommended that Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel consider investigating individuals who pushed false claims "to raise money or publicity for their own ends."

Biden's margin of victory of 154,000 votes was more than 14 times the 10,704 votes Trump won Michigan by in 2016.

In Michigan alone, Biden's margin also was more than the margin by which Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin combined in 2016.

Michigan also has election procedures in place to prevent widespread fraud, including bipartisan boards of canvassers that examine and confirm results in each county.

Each record produced during the ballot counting process is scrutinized and compared in public during the canvassing process, and the state uses paper ballots that can be used as a backup if there is a question about the electronic tally. 

The Wayne County Board of Canvassers certified Detroit's election results after absentee ballot poll books at 70% of Detroit's 134 absentee counting boards were found to be out of balance without explanation.

There were similar or worse imbalances in Detroit in the August 2020 and November 2016 elections, and the same board with different canvassers certified the results. The office of then-Secretary of State Ruth Johnson, a Republican, found "no evidence of pervasive voter fraud" leading to those imbalances.

Michigan Elections Director Jonathan Brater said in an affidavit that there were 150 fewer ballots tabulated than there were names in poll books in Detroit.

"If ballots had been illegally counted, there would be substantially more, not slightly fewer, ballots tabulated than names in the poll books," he said.

rbeggin@detroitnews.com

Twitter: @rbeggin

Staff Writer Craig Mauger contributed.