Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy continued with part two of Bill Barr’s prologue from his recently published book One Damn Thing After Another.
Michael Patrick Leahy:
We’re continuing with our reading of the prologue of the new book published today by former Attorney General Bill Barr. It’s called One Damn Thing After Another. It’s just published. It’s memoirs of his time as an attorney general. The setting is he’s in the White House. It’s December of 2020. It’s a month after the election. He’s been called into the office of Donald Trump. So here we go.
My chief of staff, Will Levy, was with me. ‘You know,’ Will said with a weird look, ‘he just might fire you.’ ‘I know,’ Barr said. As the president likes to say, we’ll see. Over the preceding weeks, I have been increasingly concerned about claims by the president and the team of outside lawyers advising him that the election had been stolen through widespread voting fraud. I had no doubt there was some fraud in the 2020 presidential elections. There’s always some fraud in an election that large. But there may have been more than usual in 2020. But the Department had been looking into the claims of fraud made by the president’s team, and we had yet to see evidence of it on the scale necessary to change the outcome of the election. The data suggested to me that the Democrats had taken advantage of rule changes, especially extended voting periods and voting by mail to marshal the turnout they needed in their strongholds in key states. I – Bill Barr said – had been a vocal critic of these rule changes precisely because they would increase the opportunity for fraud and thus undercut public confidence in the election results. There was also no question that in some areas, state rules to guard against fraud for example, the requirement that voters file applications for mail-in ballots were not followed. This also increased the opportunity for fraud. Still, Bill Barr wrote, the opportunity for fraud isn’t evidence of fraud.
Okay, so far, so good. This is me interjecting. Here is where Bill Barr gets into trouble because he wasn’t looking for stuff that was right in front of his eyes, right in front of his nose. And I’ll talk about a few of those things in a minute.
This is why we need to have Bill Barr in-studio and talk to him about these things and really press him on it. Because he missed this in his book.
Under our system, Barr writes, the states have responsibility for running elections. Claims that the election rules are not being followed fall under the state’s jurisdiction, and the burden is on the complaining party to raise the matter with state officials in courts to have it addressed. This often requires pressing the state to conduct in-depth audits of relevant districts needed to resolve alleged irregularities.
The Justice Department does not have the authority or the tools to perform that function. Instead, its role is to investigate specific and credible allegations of voting fraud for the purpose of criminal prosecution. A complaint just saying the rules were not followed is not enough. There must be some indication of actual fraud.
Okay, Attorney General Barr, this is what I would ask you. Did you look into the $12 million that the Center for Election and Innovation Research – obtaining most of that money, 69 million all told, from Mark Zuckerberg, a private individual – have you looked into the $12 million the Center for Election and Innovation research gave to a shell 501(c)(3) organized by the Secretary of State there? And the $12 million was given, almost all of it, $11.8 million, was given to two Democratic consulting firms for the purpose of, ‘educating voters.’
In essence, in Michigan, this was for the purpose of getting out the Democrats’ vote. Did you subpoena their records? Did you look into what all that was? The answer is no. Actually, the reason the Department of Justice has a duty there, is because the money went to 501(c)(3)s. First, the Center for Election Innovation Research, which is governed by IRS rules, and the Department of Justice has a duty to investigate whether those rules have been violated.
And then the shell 501(c)(3) in Michigan that was set up sort of like Michigan Election Integrity and Adjudication, an election integrity company. That’s the name of that 501(c)(3). There were violations of Internal Revenue Service uses of those monies as a 501(c)(3)’s right there in Michigan, a battleground state.
You didn’t look into any of that. It was there to be found, at Breitbart News in October of 2020. This was a month before the election. I wrote an article about the $469,000,000 that Mark Zuckerberg gave to two entities, The Center for Technology and Civic Life, $400 million there, and then $69 million that went to the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
That latter one went directly to secretaries of state. The other 400 million went to all these counties around the country where the county election administration was overtaken by these 501(c)(3) nonprofits; in essence, arms of the Democratic party.
You sir, Attorney General Barr had the authority to investigate this. It was out there in public. I wrote about it one month before the election. You did zero, zip, nada about it. That information was brought to your attention and was in the public for a month before the election. You did nothing.
Let me continue. And by the way, what are the odds that Attorney General Bill Barr will come in-studio and face the fire? What do you think, Patrick? What are the odds? Close to zero? How close to zero would you say it is? Yeah, he’s giving me the zero sign.
But, hey, look, if he’s a man who can defend himself, and he certainly can, why won’t he step into the fire? Because these are major problems with his book and with his conduct as attorney general. Nonetheless, many of the things that he’s written about here are fascinating. Let’s continue with his book.
‘When I was looking at the voting patterns it also appeared to me that President Trump had underperformed among certain Republicans and independent voters in key suburban areas in the swing states.
Well, duh. (Laughs) Hello! Mr. Attorney General! Did you read anything I wrote at Breitbart News about the massive flow of funds into these suburban areas? Take a look at Gwinett County in Atlanta. Take a look at Cobb County in Atlanta.
Millions of dollars flowed directly from the Center for Technology and Civic Life, which got 400 million dollars from Mark Zuckerberg, and it was very clear this nonprofit funding, which can be governed by the Department of Justice, went to turn out Democrat voters.
This nonprofit took over the election administration in these counties, particularly in DeKalb County in Georgia. You didn’t look into any of that.
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “William Barr” by Office of Public Affairs CC BY 2.0.
